Behold the future! If the Japanese space agency JAXA is right, it’s full of slime and tentacles
Even Mother Nature might be going gluten-free, and if she does takoyaki octopus balls will get even freakier.
Low-lying islands sinking beneath the waves. Another ice age. The potential horrors of climate change are normally spoken of on a scale that’s hard to wrap your head around. But no more pasta, takoyaki octopus balls that are even weirder looking and lose some of their deliciousness on a cold day, and other consequences of a flour-less world? That’s something even we at SoraNews24 can grasp.
That’s probably the reasoning behind the Care for Earth project, whose most famous member is JAXA, the Japanese space agency. The project put on a special restaurant, called Ibuki, for one night only, with an exclusive guest list of just fifty diners. Journalist Kamiko Inuyama (@inuningen on Twitter) was lucky enough to be one of those invited to a preview before the opening and her photos show some of the courses that were on offer, and the prices.
▼ The restaurant’s crystal takoyaki
▼ Despite the unappealing translation of “octopus balls”, the Osakan speciality of takoyaki normally look all right, and taste amazing.
Without flour, takoyaki makers will have to resort to other ingredients, even if they’re not quite as opaque as we might ideally like. For the “Crystal Takoyaki”, chefs used jelly made with an octopus stock. According to Inuyama, the taste wasn’t bad but not a patch on the real deal. Since pasta is also off the menu, how about some bright blue spaghetti? At the future restaurant chefs made their pasta more nutritious, and bright blue, by combining the dish with spirulina. Sounds appetising, no? Until you discover that spirulina is but a nicer name for cyanobacteria biomass. Yummy.
▼ Is it soylent blue?
How about the old tried and tested, a steak? You can’t go too far wrong with a nice slab of beef. Ah, the future has other ideas again. Without extensive funding for cow snorkels, beef may be a rarity in the days to come if climate change continues to progress. Which doesn’t leave much to eat, so the future restaurant staff placed a small amount of beef and a large amount of sweet potato on a plate to simulate its scarcity.
▼ The restaurant calls the dish ‘Steak on the side’ because the pieces of meat are tiny.
We also think the restaurant helped Japan fill its space programme’s coffers, since a single crystal takoyaki cost 1,080 yen (US$10), and the mini-steak 5,000 yen.
While the restaurant was open for just one evening on February 25, there are plans for it to open again, although a date has yet to be fixed. Looking not only at the potential menu and astronomical prices at the restaurant at the end of the universe (or at least post-climate change) has given us the nudge we needed. Now we’ll be sure to be more environmentally conscious, or just eat more mouth-scalding takoyaki and juicy steak while we still can.
Source: Twitter/@inuningen via Hachimakiko
Top image: Care For Earth
Insert images: ©SoraNews, Care For Earth
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