Scoby Do

Here: start your Monday with this extraordinarily odd song from David Byrne. Contemporary-experimental is how you might describe the vibe; it spends several minutes being disjointed, and the parts that don’t feel like an exoticist exploration call to mind the pings of a Rube Goldberg machine in a children’s museum. Around the 3:30 mark it starts getting melodic, only to go dark for the final 30 seconds. Message is totally unclear but it’s a good listen.

Normally when you hear ‘connected tupperware’ you’d think it’s the kind that stacks together for storage. This time, we have startups. One company named Ovie is making internet-connected tupperware with attachments to tell you if your food is going bad. Clip them to whatever container, go to the internet and register what it is you’re saving, and according to how long that food *should* last (rather than how long it is actually lasting),  the indicator on the lid (which is also inexplicably engraved with a standalone hashtag) will turn red, yellow, or green, according to your food’s supposed state of decomposition. What an easy system! But wait, it gets better. There’s a companion app that you can reference to see what you should eat first, cause why check the fridge when you could check your phone.

Love a good effort to reduce food waste, but let’s not also waste our time, k?

Elsewhere in the food packaging world, someone figured out that you can use scobys instead of plastic to store food. That’s scoby as in, ‘bacteria-blob kombucha starter’, which also acts a lot like skin: it’s malleable and it also blocks oxygen, which is the primary factor in food decomposition. Scoby packaging would replace thin plastic things like sandwich bags and those little produce sacks at the grocery store. And, bonus, it’s edible! Just don’t get it wet, or you will literally have kombucha on your hands. (Sort of. Roll with it.)

Amazon got you covered. Tech bros and hippies unite.