Coming this summer: The BK Rib Sandwich, which looks an awful lot like McDonald’s wildly popular Boneless McRib. 

Taco Bell is testing a Waffle Taco. Because… why not? 

If you eat processed food and you’re not a vegan, a decent portion of your diet probably comes from factory-farmed eggs. Sure, you may stick to cage-free eggs when you’re cooking omelets, but 95% of eggs in the U.S. come from battery-caged facilities where birds are packed body to body in impossibly small spaces.

A San Francisco startup wants to change that. It makes a plant-based egg substitute so believable that it’s about to sign two deals with Fortune 500 food companies that want to use the stuff in sauces and dressings.

Inside the company producing the most realistic fake eggs you’ll ever taste

Inside the making of Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco

Since it launched in early 2012, Taco Bell has sold more than 450 million Doritos Locos Tacos.

But its creation started back in 2009 with a trip to Home Depot. To show executives how the companies could fuse the flavor of Doritos with taco shells, the dev teams “basically went out to Home Depot to buy a paint-spray gun, and then sprayed [Doritos] flavoring onto our existing yellow corn tacos,” recalls Taco Bell CEO Greg Creed.

“It was pretty funny watching people from behind glass spraying our tacos with a paint gun. But it was enough for us to know conceptually that we had a big idea.”

In order to create the DLT, the teams had to consider everything from seasoning mechanics to the taco’s structural integrity throughout 2010 and 2011. “Frito-Lay wanted what’s called a ‘teeth-rattling crunch,’ so they wanted it to snap and crunch more than the current Taco Bell shell snaps and crunches,” Creed says. “So we had to get that formula changed, then we had to find a way to deliver the flavoring, and then the seasoning. I mean, it was actually important that we left the orange dusting on your fingers because otherwise, we’re not delivering the genuine Doritos [experience].”

Keep reading…

Feeding The World’s Under-Nourished … With Crickets

An innovative new solution to hunger from a group of students at McGill University, in Montreal would produce and distribute edible insects on an industrial scale.

The idea is to distribute cricket-producing kits to the world’s slums as a way of improving diets, and giving people more income. Families would eat what they needed, while selling the rest for processing into flour, and other products.

Here’s the story.

How Is Food Porn Made?

Find out here.

Famous Foodies Imagine Dinner Plates From The Future

Food & Wine sent out white paper plates to some of the greatest food thinkers of our time—along with architects, artists, and designers and asked them to imagine the food of the future. 

Gardens vs. Factories, by Jono Pandolfi

Genetic modification gone too far (but vegetables are even easier to match).

Food of the Future for the 1% by Anthony Bourdain.

Pharm to Table by AvroKo.

Dirty Dishes by Gail Simmons. “We can no longer feign naivety at the connection of food and the environment.”

But laughs aside, the undertones here are often quite serious. Following an era of ultimate abundance and globalized food, we’re faced with a deteriorating climate, overfished oceans, and an industrial farming system that’s inflexibly configured for monoculture. In other words, we’d better stock up on edible 3-D printer cartridges, or start getting used to the texture of antenna.

See more entries and read the full story here. 

fastcodesign:

You Can’t Tell That This New, Cheap Egg Substitute Is Made From Plants

To keep a growing world population filled with nutrients, startups like Beyond Eggs are finding new ways of making protein that don’t involve the resource intensity of raising animals. Here comes the Protein Economy.

“…don’t imagine that just because we’re in trouble today means we’ll be in double-trouble tomorrow. Science will come to the rescue—and not in the shape of yet more antibiotics, and ever more industrial food-production processes. What these innovators are talking about are completely new ways of making food, and particularly protein: growing it in a laboratory or engineering it from plants, because it’s too harmful (and expensive) to produce the “natural way.”“

Sound disgusting? Maybe. But perhaps you haven’t seen the insides of a battery chicken shed recently, or imagined how much more antibiotics we’ll have to use as the world nears 9 billion. “Our food system is abysmally broken,” says Josh Tetrick, CEO of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek Foods, maker of the Beyond Eggs egg-substitute. “It’s not about the morality of eating animals or not. It’s about the conditions that a lot of these animals are raised in. These hens are kept inside a cage for two years, pumped full of feed and antibiotics, and it’s just cruel. We don’t all have to stop eating eggs. But we should ask if we want to participate in that.”

Tetrick’s team has deconstructed the egg, analyzed its 22 special functions, and replicated it with plant-stuffs like sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums from tree sap. By all accounts, the substitute tastes just like the real thing—even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s sold as a gray-green powder that you need to hydrate before use.

Tetrick, who eats only plant-based food himself, insists he’s not on an anti-meat crusade. He applauds that companies like Chipotle are turning to sustainable sources of meat.

The main idea is to replace the eggs currently used to make things like mayonnaise, ranch dressing, and factory-made muffins or cookies (i.e. not your Sunday fry-up). That’s about a third of the 79 billion eggs laid in the U.S. every year.

At the moment, Hampton has two major Fortune 500 customers—one of which plans to market that its products are egg-free, and another that wants to keep the fact quiet for now. “We’re just removing the eggs that we have an issue with. We don’t care if they want to just save money. That’s fine,” he says. Beyond Eggs is 18% cheaper than battery-produced eggs.

Tetrick sees a smaller retail business selling to vegans, and the cholesterol-conscious. Beyond Eggs will be available online in the next two weeks, and probably from major retailers after that.

Beyond that, he wants to feed people who are likely to go hungry without interventions in the protein supply system. “I think the reason people like Bill Gates are interested in this is that the world population is expanding to 9 billion, and people are going to need good cheap sources of protein. Some of the economics of meat production, particularly around feed, aren’t good.”

Here’s the full story.

Here’s more on this topic:

The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths Of All Antibiotics

The Case for Test-tube Steaks

Biz Stone Explains Why Twitter’s Co-Founders Are Betting Big On A Vegan Meat Startup

Dinner: Bill Gates Q&A with Vinad Khosla

Rotten is a series of photographs of all the moldy food that a photographer found in his fridge over the course of a year. He hoped that by documenting it, he’d let it happen less. Will the same thing happen when you look at it?

fastcodesign:

Did you eat a Pop Tart this morning? This is what it looks like under an electron microscope. Still hungry?

No one cares where their cell phone thinks they should eat dinner.

After discovering that gourmands don’t want algorithm-generated restaurant recommendations, CEO Gauri Manglik created a Twitter for food instead.

Ship First And Ask Questions Later: How Fondu Made Its Mobile App More Tasty

How are you doing at work today? If you answered: Super productive, then we’re guessing you ate breakfast this morning. Yes, yes, mom always said it was the most important meal of the day, but there has since been a lot of science to back up the old adage. Eating a good breakfast will make you a better, more efficient thinker during the day. And it’s not just about increasing your brainpower. Eating breakfast makes you healthier.

All that and more can be found in this clever, food-filled infographic about breakfast from OnlineSchools.com. If you didn’t eat breakfast today, perhaps a look at some statistics can convince you to try it tomorrow. Most importantly, nearly all Americans know that they should eat breakfast. But, still, most of us don’t care. (We can be a stubborn people, it’s true.) In fact, fewer than half of us consume the day’s most important meal.

More: People Who Eat Breakfast Are Smarter And Skinnier