Agrifood is not just fundraising, M&A and product launches. The past year was chock-full of off-beat stories, too, and they included everything from soup vandalism to $500,000 shots of sake brewed in space.
Here are a few of our favorites from 2024:
Soup hurled at painting to highlight food security
“Climate activists” kicked off the year by throwing soup at one of the world’s most famous paintings.
Members of Riposte Alimentaire (“food counterattack”), a so-called activist group known for high-profile stunts done in the name of sustainable food, chucked canned soup at the Mona Lisa painting at the Louvre Museum in Paris as a way of calling for the right to healthy, sustainable food.
The attacks happened around the same time France’s farmers were protesting en masse about rising prices and a lack of support.
The Mona Lisa was unharmed, thanks to the bullet-proof glass that’s encased it for several years now. This was not the first time protestors had hurled food at the famous painting, with one activist in 2022 smearing cake on the painting.
Cheetos bag disrupts entire cave ecosystem
Next time you’re tempted to litter (which is hopefully never), consider this incident where a tourist discarded a Cheetos bag at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the US.
This seemingly trivial event trigged a “world-changing” event where “salty morsels of processed corn made soft by thick humidity triggered the growth of mold on the cavern floor and on nearby cave formations,” wrote the Associated Press.
“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” the park wrote in a post on Facebook. “Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.”
Seeing as the National Forest Service has said it anticipates budget cuts and understaffing issues, this doesn’t bode well for 2025.
Organic dairy sells $350 coffees to raise funds
Mossgiel Organic Dairy in Scotland put a new spin on climate funding this year when it began selling flat whites (double espresso with steamed milk) for £272 ($344) a pop.
Said coffee drink came with 34 shares of the organic dairy farm, which was raising money to build a zero-waste dairy facility.
Ryan Carroll, a reporter for Scottish paper Daily Record, purchased one of these flat whites and summed up the concept thusly: “In reality, the £272 coffee is exactly the same as the one you receive if you order the £2.75 cup from the normal day-to-day menu,” he wrote. However, “with this purchase you’re investing in a sustainable future.”
Sake brewed in space could cost $500,000+ per pour
But speaking of expensive beverages, we may also soon be able to buy a bottle of sake for half a million dollars — but it won’t come with any shares or farm tours.
Asahi Shuzo, parent company of Japanese sake brand Dassai, said this year it will send ingredients to the International Space Station (ISS) to ferment a special brew.
A 100ml bottle would sell for 100 million yen, roughly $653,000. As CNN pointed out, the average sake pour is about 80ml, making this sake “one very expensive drink.”
Asahi Shuzo has said there is no guarantee that brewing sake in space will actually work.
Oishii’s Omakase berry is so popular it got its own body wash
Oishii, maker of the $50 strawberry, recently leapt from designer berries to body wash via a partnership with iota.
“Oishi Berry Body Wash” is based on the vertical farming startup’s Omakase strawberry it grows indoors, and apparently delivers the fruit’s Vitamin C and salicylic acid to “hydrate and exfoliate” one’s skin, according to Oishii.
Unfortunately, most of us won’t get the full hands-on experience, as the limited run body wash sold out almost immediately.
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