Project Development
Flavours of Ethics
2016
// What if we could taste the ethics of food production? // Looking at the evolution of our chemical senses (taste and smell), we can acknowledge that a major reason for the development of those, was to distinct poisonous food from edible one. Today we do not apply those skills anymore - there have been added too many new layers through the evolution of nowaday‘s food industry. When we decide which food to consume, we look at the production process - if it‘s biologically grown, gene modified etc. Just our instincts are much too underdeveloped to sense those parameters.. This project proposes a way to analyze specific substances in food which show the ethical background of food production. Programmed bacteria, stored in capsules are used as biosensors combined with an edible carrier material for collecting food samples. As soon as the bacteria get in contact with the searched substance, they react to it and change the taste of the food sample. This method encourages us to use our own senses as analyzing tools and creates a new spectrum of tastes for layers we couldn‘t distinct by their taste before.