Tag: Food

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Would you like a side of VR with your dinner?

They say we eat first with our eyes, so it was only a matter of time until a restaurant told its patrons to strap on virtual reality headsets and enjoy some retinal feasting. That scenario is not a joke—well, at least not entirely. “Sublimotion, along with award-winning chef Paco Roncero, recently hosted their second virtual reality event using this technology at the Hard Rock Hotel Ibiza,” Samsung reports. “The concept earned Sublimotion the Best Innovation in F&B award at the Worldwide Hospitality Awards in 2014.” No mention of how the food tasted can be found in Samsung’s statement, though “sensory…
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma finally has a videogame incarnation

In the interest of full disclosure, let me start by confessing to my carnivorous ways. I enjoy eating meat, and lots of it please and thank you. Braised, roasted, grilled, cured, tartare, barbequed, sous-vide—you name it, I’ll eat. I cannot present you with a compelling ethical argument in defense of this diet. Sure, I can make an impassioned speech about treating animals humanely whilst they live, but I’m in favour of killing them for my gustatory pleasure so such a statement would probably carry little weight. All I can really say is that if the cleaver were in the other…
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This videogame is basically The Brave Little Toaster but with a lot more horror

If there is a hell for electric toasters—or humans, for that matter— it is obviously an artisanal toast bar, the kind of place where artisanal butter comes with sea salt on the side lest you find yourself unable to control the salinity of your bread topping. Andrew Wang’s Lullaby for an Electric Toaster suggests that there is a fate almost as excruciating for toasters: running around a darkened kitchen filled with demonic bananas. Although Wang created his game for the Let’s Cook Jam, it’s unlikely to help you work up an appetite. You play as an electric toaster—the traditional stainless…
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This crab-shaped controller will make you hungry for more anthropomorphic handsets

You’ve got crabs, videogame lover—a crab simulator and crab-shaped controller, that is. The controller was created by John Choi, a student in Carnegie Mellon University’s Interactive Art and Computational Design Program. It consists of an orange body with four articulated crab legs. Unlike the real creature, Choi’s crab does not have claws and can therefore be manipulated without risking the user’s health. Those claws do, however, exist in Choi’s crab simulator, a game in which the crab’s legs are manipulated by adjusting its doppelganger of a controller.  Choi’s crab is an anthropomorphic handset. Since it resembles the character it is…
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A pair of Dutch artists have created 8-bit food

There’s obsessive portion control as a dietary practice, and then there’s millimeter-perfect portion control as an aesthetic statement. “Cubes,” the latest project by Dutch artists Lenert and Sander, falls into the latter category.  The artists responded to a commission for a food spread in de Volkskrant by cutting 98 pieces of food into 2.5cm cubes. Though these cubes are precisely cut, they have little to do with traditional culinary knifework. Lenert and Sander have not produced an oversized brunoise of Wagyu beef, purple potato, and endive. Rather, the pair has turned foodstuffs into a sort of geometric artwork wherein each…
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Never forget the surreal delight of Chuck E. Cheese with these old photographs

It was around 7 p.m. on a Sunday night when a mob of raucous adults turned violent at the local Chuck E. Cheese in Parma, Ohio. A woman attending a birthday party there complained that the photo booth wasn’t working. When the manager told her she would have to wait, one of the men from the party followed him into the kitchen where he then allegedly threatened to kill him. A brawl ensued as other employees and party-goers joined in. This is the kind of story that’s come to define how people think of the once flourishing family arcade chain.…