Local River By Mathieu Lehanneur
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.11.08
Food doesn't get any more local than this. Designer Mathieu Lehanneur, known to TreeHuggers for his controversial Bell-Air , has now developed the ultimate kitchen appliance: Local River, a "refrigerator-aquarium" where you breed freshwater fish and vegetables at the same time. The veggies keep the water clean by removing nitrates and other minerals. It can be seen in New York from 25 April at Artists Space Gallery.
Notes from the artist:
LOCAL RIVER
Mathieu Lehanneur
With
Anthony van den Bossche, spin doctor.
Artists Space Gallery, New York
Curator : Alexandra Midal
25 April to 21 June 2008
Local River, home storage unit for fish and greens
"The Locavores appeared in San Francisco in 2005 and define themselves as ‘a group of culinary adventurers who eat foods produced in a radius of 100 miles (160 km) around their city’. By doing so they aim to reduce impact on the environment inherent to the transport of foodstuffs, while ensuring their traceability.
Local River anticipates the growing influence of this group (the word ‘locavore’ made its first appearance in an American dictionary in 2007) by proposing a home storage unit for live freshwater fish combined with a mini vegetable patch. This DIY fish-farm-cum-kitchen-garden is based on the principle of aquaponics coupled with the exchange and interdependence of two living organisms - plants and fish.
The plants extract nutrients from the nitrate-rich dejecta of the fish. In doing so they act as a natural filter that purifies the water and maintains a vital balance for the eco-system in which the fish live. The same technique is used on large-scale pioneer aquaponics/fish-farms, which raise tilapia (a food fish from the Far East) and lettuce planted in trays floating on the surface of ponds."
More at ::Dezeen
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this is really cool looking. i wonder, if it really, really works, would my husband stay home on the weekends instead of going to the lake with his brother to fish??? ;D
I would be really surprised to see that this is anything more than a gimmick. Things like this have appeared in the past. The tray appears to be transparent, exposing the roots to light. This will cause algae growth which is unhealthy for the roots. Keeping balance in a system like this is not easy and probably more trouble than its worth on such a small scale. Breeding fish is also not just something that happens. Where do the small fish live? How do you keep the big fish from eating the eggs and fry? etc etc...
Any locavores in San Jose? Drop me a line, I am working on solutions that are way more practical than this...
geoff@ubcomputer.com
Great! and in the garden put this!
:))
Thats alot of plastic and it is using some sort of electricity.....
make your own out of household stuff you will probably throw away and find a way for it to work without using any electricity
Don't the fish need some rocks or a little castle or something? It looks like they're in a big plastic cube.