The Bees of the InterContinental
The rooftop apiary at the InterContinental New York Barclay Hotel produces honey for the kitchen, while the bees pollinate plants up to five miles away. The system is elegant. But: we’ve decorated our food system with nature. We’ve given nature a GPS radius. The bees don’t know they’re part of the hotel’s ecosystem. The hotel counts their labor as inventory.
Employees at the Pasona Group office in Tokyo harvest vegetables grown inside their office space. Precision: humidity sensors, grow lights calibrated to wavelength, nutrient solutions metered by algorithm. Workers pick arugula between meetings. We’ve made food another metric on the dashboard. Another productivity variable. The line between farming and logging is now just a matter of what you’re harvesting.