This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Have you ever tried nano water-buffalo ice cream? Liquid nitrogen and buffalo milk make the ice crystals rounded, giving your scoop an unexpectedly creamy flavour. Or maybe you'd like to sip on Earth xCola, a natural alternative to Coca-Cola, which contains Mycobacterium vaccae -- soil bacteria that may enhance one's mood.
Natalie Jeremijenko is a visual artist, engineer, neuroscientist and ecologist -- and food is the delicious thread that connects much of her work. "I believe in a tongue-first exploration of the world," she says. "Food is our most immediate daily relationship to our ecosystem, and there is something delectable and intriguing about it."
As the director of New York University's xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, she wants to re-frame environmental issues so that people can engage with them more intimately. In 2010 she founded the Cross Species Adventure Club, a group of food adventurers whose exploits include 15-course supper clubs and cooking workshops designing sustainable foods. The club is "cross-species" because its menus often offer nutrition for humans and other animals. One dinner consisted of foods edible for people and geese. Another had a cocktail called Lures -- fishing lures made of an algae derivative called gellan, which binds to mercury accidentally ingested by fish, allowing it to pass out of their bodies.
"For humans, we add gin, fluorescent tonic and rosemary, although we're not sure if the fish like that," says Jeremijenko.
Her next project is to set up pop-up pharmacies in the UK and New York. These will sell open-source colas containing natural mood lifters such as St John's wort, and Floss, a candy floss that replaces sugar with isomalt (used by diabetics) and high-protein bee-pollen to foster bacterial diversity in the gut. She's also designing a cocktail called Eelation for her first UK supper club -- a shot-glass filled with a mix of salt water and a live baby eel. "Eels are sentinels of ecosystem health and they're disappearing, so I want people to take a sip of their habitat and see them up close," she says. "After that intimacy, they will each release their pet eel into the wild. Maybe that'll help them understand." So, whose round is it now?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
