The search for Luttinger liquid behavior has spanned the last decades of the past century and still continues today. In this seminar, we will begin by briefly describing the experimental situation (including some recent STS data) of the Lithium purple bronze, believed by many to be a 'model' system for Luttinger liquid behavior. Later, we will disucuss how cold atoms could be used to deepen our undestanding of the physics of quasi-1D systems by "engineering" an interacting Fermi system in a two-dimensional optical lattice.