A new GhostFood truck traveling the northeast in October will offer you the experience of eating some wonderful, albeit endangered, delicacies. That's right: the experience. You won't actually get to eat the food, but if the proprietors' trickery works, your brain—and your tastebuds—won't know the difference.
To replicate what it's like to eat a food without actually consuming a particular item, GhostFood will strap a 3D-printed headset to your face, which will feed the correct smell of whatever is it wants you to imagine eating to your nose. As for what you'll actually put in your mouth, GhostFood will offer you a textural analogue. So rather than eat cod eggs, you'll get a whiff of cod egg smell and something similarly chewy to munch on.
This isn't a crazy new fad—although, it kind of could be, huh?—it's an art project by Miriam Simun and Miriam Songster (no relation). The artists created the work to call attention to climate change. As Edible Geography points out, rising water temperature in the ocean is causing cod eggs to sink rather than float more often, which means that in the future, we're looking at fewer cod, if the species survives at all. And that's to say nothing of overfishing. The cutesy food truck idea might be our only way to experience some foods in the near future if something isn't done to combat the effects of increasing temperatures worldwide. Chocolate and peanut butter, the other two "tastes" being offered, are similarly at risk.
You can check out the GhostFood truck starting next week at DesignPhiladelphia 2013. The project will also be traveling to Newark and New York later in October. [Edible Geography]