Barcodes That Are Good Enough to Eat

Fast Company features the work of D-Barcode, a Japanese design firm that creates sophisticated designs out of ordinary barcodes for (mostly Japanese) packaged goods. A number of the ingenious designs have food themes, from a pizza to a pair of chopsticks picking up noodles.

An exclusive design can run as high as $4,000, but the company will license existing codes starting at $1,500 (plus an annual $200 fee).

Notable Fruit

Kudamemo sticky notes from Japan look good enough to eat, but they're just for jotting notes.

The fruit-shaped memo pads (available in apple or pear) are detailed down to the seeds printed at the core of each "slice" and stems made from real tree branches. Unfortunately, the price is astronomical: $40 per 150-sheet pad or a whopping $148 for a carton of six at Japan Trend Shop.

The Art of Food

A new book entitled Food for Thought: Thought for Food makes a bid for avant-garde cuisine as a form of contemporary art.

Future Food: Farmers Markets Go Mobile

The winner of Good magazine's "Redesign Your Farmers’ Market" contest envisions the future farmers market on four wheels.

In the Future, We'll Be Drinking Remote Controlled Rainwater

A finalist in the 2009 Electrolux Design Lab competition, the "Water Catcher" (by Penghao Shan of China's Zhejiang Sci-tech University) sends out flying tennis ball-size robots into your neighborhood to collect rainfall. Once full, the roving balls automatically return to a homing tray for filtration, whereupon they may then be summoned to you to fill your glass with water.

A video, below, demonstrates how the concept might work.

The Art of Tea

Southern California tea connoisseurs, take note: The Fowler Museum at UCLA will present Steeped in History: The Art of Tea (August 16 to November 29), an exhibition on the history and culture of tea and its depiction in the arts in Asia, Europe, and colonial America (at right is a Japanese tea chest dating from the early 20th century).

Lavazza Gets Lusty for Espresso

Photographer Annie Leibovitz has collaborated with Lavazza on a calendar and marketing campaign that features scantily clad women lusting for . . . coffee.

Leibovitz's photos present models in various sexy poses in Italian locales, mostly holding demitasse cups filled with espresso. There's a nude woman tossed with noodles (above), a frolic in the Trevi Fountain, and a truly bizarre recreation of Romulus and Remus suckling from a highly caffeinated model/wolf. See more images at lavazza2009.com.

Via CHOW.

Tales of Tea

This summer, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (91 Orchard Street, New York) will present "Tea Cart Stories," an interactive public art exhibition exploring tea as a locus of tradition, memory, and culture.

Artist Michele Brody will set up a tea cart parked at 108 Orchard Street (across from the Tenement Museum) and invite guests inside to share family stories and experiences dealing with tea. Brody will record and transcribe the stories on paper tea bags steeped in tea leaves which will then be displayed on a structure made of copper pipes installed on an early 20th century pushcart (you can see another incarnation of the project here). This display will then be installed in the windows of 97 Orchard Street through December 2009.
 
The tea cart will be open to the public for story-gathering from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on June 11 and 25 and July 9 and 23, pending weather conditions.

Image: Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Michael Jackson: King of Dried Fruit

From "The Collection of the King of Pop," the upcoming auction of Michael Jackson's property (April 22 through April 25): a custom figurine of a "California raisin" made in the likeness of singer.

Estimated value: $100 to $150.

Still Life Fruit Bowl

With Barnaby Barford and André Klauser's novel Still Life Fruit Bowl, you can create a piece of art that changes according to your fruit-buying patterns. The oak frame and earthenware bowl is available for pre-order for $100 at Areaware (though it also looks like something you might try making yourself).