What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world? Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper’s “food computers” and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
Caleb Harper leads a group of engineers, architects, urban planners, economists and plant scientists in the exploration and development of high performance urban agricultural systems.
Let’s see what he said In his Talk- how is this apple food crisis? You’ve all eaten an apple in the last week, I’m sure. How old do you think it was from when it was picked? Two weeks? Two months? Eleven months — the average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States. And I don’t expect it to be much different in Europe or anywhere else in the world. We pick them, we put them in cold storage, we gas the cold storage –there’s actually documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple, and dying, because the atmosphere that they slow down the process of the apple with is also toxic to humans.
How is it that none of you knew this? Why didn’t I know this? Ninety percent of the quality of that apple — all of the antioxidants — are gone by the time we get it. It’s basically a little ball of sugar. How did we get so information poor and how can we do better?
