Category: Food

Abundance Fantasies: Giant Sushi Roll

September 12, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

Our desire for tallness is strong and deeply rooted. So deep it is difficult to imagine the change towards a general desire for shorter stature. However, the human species is not the sum of just one or two desires but of many. In the Abundance…

Abundance Fantasies: Exaggeration Cards

August 30, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

Exaggeration cards are picture postcards depicting enormously oversized fruits, vegetables and livestock. First appearing in Fresno in 1905 the cards quickly struck a chord throughout the western United States. These  “tall-tale postcards”  became especially prevalent in small town rural communities hoping to forge an identity…

Growth Antagonists: Delta Cells

August 13, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

The growth of the human body is a highly complex process with many growth agonists and -antagonists taking centre stage at different times. In Growth Antagonists we each time zoom in on one of the key players as we’re trying to understand the puzzle of…

Abundance Fantasies: Baby Burrito

July 15, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Mexican restaurant Gorditos prides itself in serving a burrito the size of a baby. It’s customers have taken up the habit of taking a photo with their new born next to the burrito and putting the image up on the ‘baby wall‘. More than a…

Abundance Fantasies: Cornucopia

June 6, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

In the Abundance fantasies we explore the origin and contemporary meaning of symbols, stories and tropes of abundance. People have an insatiable desire for more, but in reality we constantly have to cope with scarcity. Perhaps the activation of an abundance iconography will help further ignite…

Force-Feeding Milk

June 2, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

On the occasion of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s World Milk Day the Thai Ministry of Health’s director-general Jedsada Chokdamrongsuk revealed an ill conceived plan to boost Thai’s youth milk consumption from 14 to 60 litres per year. The reason for this? To  increase…

PARs in the Womb

May 28, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

The Incredible Shrinking Man is interested to know what consequences can be expected for human height if nutrition availability after birth doesn’t match predictions by the fetus on the basis of its prenatal environment. During pre-birth development fetuses prepare for the world outside by using the…

Micro-Livestock: Guinea Pig

May 21, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

The 1991 OFA report ‘Microlivestock: Little-known Small Animals with a Promising Economic Future’ introduces several alternative small animals for domestication and meat and dairy production. Small animals are easier to breed and keep, and are a quick way of supplementing a diet, especially in less…

The Raw Tom Outrage

January 20, 2013 By arne hendriks 1

Tom Watkins is a 15 year old kid from Amsterdam that’s being raised by his mother on a Raw food vegan diet. Raw foodies eat uncooked, unprocessed organic foods as a large percentage of the diet. The idea is that raw food is healthier than cooked food…

One Bean Coffee

December 30, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

According to the Water Footprint Network the fresh water involved in the production of a single cup of coffee (125ml) is 140 liters. One part of coffee consumes 1100 water parts. To make an average cup of coffee requires around 40 coffeebeans. To produce one…

Deflating the Food Bubble

October 15, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

The era of world food security is coming to an end simply because we can’t sustain the way food is produced. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Research Centre in Washington, says the demands for food are growing so fast that unless we deflate the…

Abundance Fantasies: Corn Cult

July 27, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

Mexican protesters against the high tortilla prices in 2007 rallied around an oversized corn. Their public display of the desire for an abundant food supply ressembles cargo cults in which the visualisation of desired abundance, or the context in which the abundance is believed to exist, is…

Global Human Biomass

June 22, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

A new REPORT published on BioMed Central rightfully warns us of the need to consider the ecological effects of increasing human weight. Obese and overweight people globally consume an extra amount of food that could feed 300 million people. From data collected in 2005 researchers calculated the…

TEDx Lecture on Shrinking

June 10, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

During TEDx Brainport Arne Hendriks gave a short talk on some of the reasons the human species should shrink, some of its possible consequences, and how it could be done. See it HERE.

D.I.Y. Shrink List.

April 7, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we are to believe this last report published by MIT Press, economic collapse is just around the corner. If that’s true it won’t hurt to prepare our children both mentally and physically for a world in which there will be a lot less of…

Raspberry Explosion

April 1, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

One of the most important reasons to shrink the human species is that we’ll shrink ourselves into a world of abundance. At 50 cm we’ll only need about 2% of the resources we need now. A simple grape will have the size of a mango. A…

Benito’s Rodents

February 20, 2012 By arne hendriks Off

During the Second World War Mussolini’s government urged Italians to keep guinea pigs to supplement their meager meat rations. Rodents are the world’s most widespread, adaptable, and prolific group of mammals. They reproduce well, grow fast, and can adapt to a wide variety of local…

Poultry/House

February 11, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

If we decide to shrink the human species our livestock may need to shrink with us. We’ll only consume about 2 to 10% of the food we consume today. The meat of one chicken could easily feed 100 people and one egg alone would be enough to…

High on Cheese

January 29, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

In the mid 19th century the Dutch were among the shortest people in Europe. 150 years later they are the tallest in the world. Perhaps not coincidentally this is precisely the period in which the Dutch consumption of cheese started its significant growth. Cheese contains…

Krill Adaptations

January 28, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Because environments vary with both predictable patterns and with unpredictable but recurring events, ecologists have long been interested in the ecological adaptations that organisms use to survive periods in which the environment may be exceptionally harsh. One of the most interesting adaptations observed in the…