The best of 2010: The top three food Seeds of the year

US, UK – Food should be about all the senses. In my top three Seeds you can smell the meat being prepared, touch the handmade pasta, and see and hear the nitrogen ice-cream being made.

Putting the butcher knife in the hand of the consumer, an online video the Pig & the Butcher shows people at home how to prepare their own cuts of meat. You can almost smell the meat when Vadim Akimenko, meat manager at Massachusetts grocer Savenor’s Market online, demonstrates how to separate a pig into different cuts.

In London this winter I got my hands dirty when I attended Italian food design collective Arabeschi di Latte free Pastificio Londra pasta workshop. It saw passers-by immersed in everything from selecting the flour – including chestnut and wholemeal – to choosing what wooden tools to use for pasta shapes such as ravioli or bigoli, whipping the eggs and kneading the dough. It tasted so good.

The experiential factor was high at the Chin Chin Laboratorists in London this summer. Instead of a freezer in which to keep the ice-cream, this parlour has a 180-litre tank of nitrogen, complete with pressure gauge. Co-founder Ahrash Akbari-Kalhur hoses the liquid nitrogen into a metal jug in front of customers and mixes it into an egg custard ice-cream mix. You could hear and see the ice cream being made there and then.

Every day from 20 December until the end of the year, the LS:N Global team is choosing its favourite stories from 2010. We will resume normal service on Tuesday 4 January 2011.