Zhrimp pipeline

Who would think that these pipes are making shrimps coming to near you?  ‘Cavi-art’ is a company from Northern Jutland that has been developed by my cousin Jens Moller and his wife Ida. They use dried seaweed to create new foods that taste and look like the natural products like caviar and, in this case, shrimps. The tubes are part of the machine and new process to create the shrimps. 
There is a basic rule of ecology: the biomass (weight of living material) of each level in an energy (trophic) chain reduces by around a tenth for every level in the trophic pyramid.  So roughly speaking, we can feed about 10 times more people per hectare of land (or in this case sea) by eating plants (seaweeds) than by eating the animals that naturally consume those plants.

Cavi-art is an amazingly innovative company that exports around the world.  Their substitute caviar tasted and looked so like natural caviar that expert chef’s and customers could not tell the difference – this got the caviar industry so concerned that they forced Jens and Ida to call it ‘Cavi-art’ rather than caviar. Perhaps, the substitute shrimps will have to be called something like “Zhrimps” for similar reasons. Branding is one way that the existing conventional food manufacturers try gatekeeping to slow penetration of new foods into a cutthroat international food industry.  The EU-legislation states that food producers and manufacturers:
·        must not mislead users, especially not the unprofessional end-users
·        have to explain what kind of product it is on the label, and
·        must tell the customers, especially the consumers how to use the product.
I’ve added a few extra photos, one of a barrel of Cavi-art, the black imitation caviar that started the innovation stream, and some banners that outline some of the environmental and sustainability benefits of this example of the new foods.
 
These new and more sustainable foods are a wonderful addition to Denmark’s amazing hospitality industry that is centred around their foods, washed down with lashings of drink.