Food has always been a product of technology and culture, from fire and fermentation to factory farms and flavor labs. Currently, the world's meat, egg and dairy production is caught between the environmentally and ethically archaic form of industrialized animal agriculture, and a new one where these foods can be made from plants or grown in cell culture bioreactors.
Fundamentally, much of what we're developing today - bleeding plant-based burgers, hyperrealistic cheeses and eggs - is a form of skeumorphism. Much like early computer and phone applications, these products are designed to evoke feelings of comfort and familiarity by reproducing the look and feel of related physical objects in the real world.
But what happens when food development becomes the equivalent of "digitally native" software interface design? Echoes of the Past: Skeuomorphism and the Future of Food is an attempt to grapple with this shift. It's about breaking food out of its biological past and into something designed for the future - not just imitating what came before, but imagining what comes next.
