Nomencloneture

By Nicola | Published: August 30, 2010

IMAGE: Tyler Faber with “Doc,” receiving his grand champion 4-H market steer award from Iowa State Fair queen Lacy Stevensen. Photo by Steve Pope for the Iowa State Fair.

As today’s New York Times points out, it’s state fair season in America: a time for deep-fried salad, loosely bolted-together Ferris wheels, and — almost anachronistically in this age of Cargill and ConAgra — farm animals. But amidst the nostalgia-laden petting zoo and cattle auctions, the cutting-edge of industrial food technology has reared its controversial head.

In Iowa — a state whose agricultural enterprise is already front page news thanks to Mr. DeCoster’s egg-producing practices — the 2010 State Fair’s 4-H grand champion prize-winner was a 1320 lb steer called “Doc.” He was shown by Tyler Faber, who also won the same contest in 2008 with “Wade,” clocking in at 1310 lbs.

Apart from the 10 lbs difference between the two steers, however, there was very little else to tell them apart: “Doc” was cloned from “Wade” by Faber’s father, who runs Trans Ova Genetics of Sioux Center.

IMAGE: “Wade,” 2008 grand champion 4-H market steer, with Tyler Farber and family. Photo courtesy of the Iowa State Fair.

IMAGE: Tyler Farber is hugged by his sister Sara after one of his victories — the Des Moines Register caption is appropriately vague as to whether the steer in the photo is “Wade” or “Doc.” Photo by Mary Chind.

As reported in the Des Moines Register, “‘Doc’ is the first cloned animal to win a 4-H livestock blue ribbon at the fair,” but “the cloned animal was not illegal in the judging competition.” According to Mike Anderson, Iowa State University Extension specialist and 4-H livestock judging director, “We didn’t know at the time that Doc was a clone, but it’s not against the rules.”

Anderson added that “the issue might be discussed when 4-H officials meet with the State Fair Board in October,” but “rules against cloned steers in judging competitions would be difficult to enforce.”

The source of this difficulty is fascinating: because (rather obviously, if you think about it) there is no scientific test that can determine whether an animal is a clone or not, Faber’s disgruntled competitors would have no way to prove their own entries were not themselves clones. For all the judging panel can possibly know, they might all be clones.

IMAGE: “Dolly,” the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, on the cover of Time magazine. She died young in 2003.

Outside the world of state fair competitions, this ambiguity has had some interesting repercussions. In the U.S., where the sale of meat from clones has been legal since 2008 (albeit subject to a voluntary moratorium at the request of the U.S.D.A., to avoid scaring foreign trade partners), meat cannot be labeled with its clone/non-clone origins.

The F.D.A., which regulates such matters, holds that the “only grounds for labeling food are if there are any safety concerns or if there is a material difference in the composition of food.” As the Iowa State Fair blue-ribbon competition shows, there is no test that can determine whether an animal is a clone or not, and the F.D.A. has already ruled that meat from cloned animals is perfectly safe*, which means that, theoretically, a consumer who does not buy organic could have been unknowingly eating prime rib from the “same” cow every night for the past several years.

IMAGE: Farmer Steven Innes, who sold the offspring of a cloned bull for meat, causing uproar in the U.K., where such transactions are illegal. Photo by David Moir for Reuters.

This is not a completely far-fetched scenario. In a 2008 online discussion at the Washington Post, staff writer Rick Weiss notes that:

There is good evidence [...] that lots of those offspring [of clones] have entered the food stream in recent years. One cattleman I spoke to said thousands have probably done so.

Meanwhile, just a couple of weeks ago, when Canadian officials asked U.S.  Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack whether meat from clones might have entered the North American food chain, he replied:

I can’t say today that I can answer your question in an affirmative or negative way. I don’t know.

As a side note inspired by Iowa’s current egg woes: given the absence of labeling, let alone a clone DNA database, just imagine trying to recall all the meat from the offspring of a particular clone…

IMAGE: Image via Bovance, who also provide detailed instructions for the emergency procedures required to genetically preserve post-mortem cattle.

But food safety concerns and quasi-existential questions on the impossibility of distinguishing clones aside, the labeling question throws up another intriguing wrinkle. Weiss explains that the economic value in cloning lies in ramping up the production of high-end sperm: the investment in creating a clone of a particularly large and virile Hereford or an especially lusciously fat-marbled Kobe steer — or even an endangered heritage breed bull — pays off in an infinite reservoir of guaranteed high-quality reproductive matter that can be sold on to cattle farmers for artificial insemination.

Given this business model, Weiss notes, it makes sense that once the small matter of public unease is overcome, meat packers might actually want to label meat with its clone origins. The problem is that there is no accepted terminology to describe the offspring of clones, or “Meat from an animal conceived by artificial insemination in which sperm from a clone was squirted into a cow’s uterus,” as Weiss rather un-appetisingly puts it. What should these half-clone/half-non-clone animals be called? And what about their offspring in turn? Or their clones? Or, indeed, their offspring’s clones? Suggestions in the comments, please.

* At one point in the Washington Post online discussion, Rick Weiss explains the slightly terrifying working assumptions that lie behind the FDA’s safety ruling:

The FDA could not decide whether this [epigenetic] difference poses a health risk to consumers, mostly because they know very little about the NORMAL patterns of gene activity in conventional animals, and even less about the relevance of those patterns to food safety and nutrition. In the end, they decided that, lacking evidence that it poses a problem (and given that the ones [clones] with really disrupted gene regulation LOOK sick, and so would not pass muster at the slaughterhouse) they would just ignore it.

[NOTE: Thanks to always informative Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog for the link to the Iowa State Fair clone story.]

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Upgrade Excreta

By Nicola | Published: August 24, 2010

IMAGE: James Gilpin apparently offered visitors samples of his Family Whisky at the RCA Design Interactions exhibition (but Regine was too chicken to try it!). Image courtesy James Gilpin.

With apologies to those who might be reading this over their morning coffee or tea, today’s post collects three projects that follow the food chain all the way through the digestive system and out the other side.

Firstly, over at we make money not art, Regine has published a fantastically interesting post about Gilpin Family Whisky, including a short Q&A with its creator, design student James Gilpin. Using an initial donation from his diabetic grandmother, Gilpin has developed and refined a process to produce “high-end single malt whisky for export” from the sugar-rich urine of Britain’s elderly.

IMAGE: Gilpin Family Whisky, photo via James Gilpin.

In urine-derived glucose, Gilpin identified a resource that is growing rapidly (populations of both Type 2 diabetics and elderly people are on the rise) and yet is completely underutilised —indeed, sugary piss is currently regarded as a nuisance, causing “unusual scale build up” in the bowl, not to mention “rapid mould growths.”

Meanwhile, notes Gilpin, “the whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide.”

Gilpin’s breakthrough—the idea that sugar crystals extracted from old people’s pee could be fermented to produce alcohol—turns something that is generally regarded as a symptom of bodily failure into a positive enhancement.

In the light of Gilpin’s tongue-in-cheek vision of retrofitting every old people’s home with a DIY distillery in the garden, busily churning out high-value “biologically-enhanced whisky,” my own, normal blood sugar levels seem somewhat boring. This, of course, is exactly Gilpin’s point.

IMAGE: “Humble Pile,” by Nance Klehm.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, activist gardener Nance Klehm took a slightly more traditional approach to creating value from the by-products of consumption. Klehm managed to persuade several fellow city dwellers to join her “urban nutrient recovery project,” collecting their shit and piss in a sawdust toilet and putting it out for pick-up once full. By the end of 2008, Klehm writes, “1,000 gallons of human nutrient was collected.”

These kinds of guerrilla, sewage-system hacks are — unsurprisingly — frowned upon by neighbours and city officials alike. As a result,  Klehm kept her stockpile of human excrement hidden “in an undisclosed storage area in Chicago” throughout 2009, as it composted into “black gold.” Her project recently culminated in “The Great Give Back,” as participants received their portion of the rich new soil, ready to feed balcony-grown tomato plants and community gardens across the city.

IMAGE: The Great Give Back T-shirts, designed by Nance Klehm.

Finally, for the time-crunched and/or literal-minded, there is a short-cut method to transmute your excreta into something highly desirable. Ingest just a handful of designer Tobias Wong’s gorgeous pills filled with pure silver leaf, and, he promises, the metal will “pass straight through the body and end up in your stool — resulting in sparkly shit!”

IMAGE: “24hrs of pure silver leaf” by Tobias Wong.

[NOTE: Thanks to Shree Ram for the introduction to Nance Klehm's work, and to @serial_consign and @bldgblog for the link to Tobias Wong's online portfolio.]

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Spaces of Prohibition

By Nicola | Published: August 22, 2010

Historian Daniel Okrent’s recent book, Last Call, tells the story of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — otherwise known as Prohibition.

IMAGE: Constitutional Amendment XVIII, ratified January 16, 1919, via the National Archives and Records Administration. “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.”

Although Prohibition lasted an amazing thirteen years — and though it did result in a drop in alcohol consumption (today, Americans drink roughly 60 bottles of beer less per person per year than than their early twentieth-century forebears) — Okrent concludes that:

In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure. It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption.

But it was an utterly fascinating failure.

IMAGE: Detroit, the day before Prohibition. Photo from the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, via the New York Times.

The first third of the book describes the unlikely constellation of social movements that enabled a country with an enthusiastic history of alcohol consumption — even the Puritans sailed to Massachusetts in 1630 with ten thousand gallons of wine in the hold — to outlaw its manufacture and sale outright. United under the dry banner were such unlikely partners as anti-immigration forces resentful of German brewing and Jewish distilling interests, racist Southerners dealing in stereotypes of “drunken Negroes who push white ladies off the sidewalks,” taxation progressives, and female suffragettes.

IMAGE: Without female support, such as that of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Prohibition could never have been passed. Photo via.

The First World War provided further momentum, pushing Prohibition over the edge at what was probably the last moment it could have succeeded. As Okrent points out, America was fast becoming an urban nation, and its cities were wet. Prohibition campaigners were grimly aware that:

Continuing immigration, the prolific birthrate of the largest immigrant groups, and the accelerating flight from the farms to the cities meant that by 1920, the urban population was almost certain to be a majority. After the constitutionally mandated decennial census, congressional districts would be redrawn [...] “so as to absolutely insure for the liquor forces more than one-third” of the House.

IMAGE: Prohibition enforcement agents smashing barrels, via.

The rest of Okrent’s book describes the impact of Prohibition, in an extraordinary litany of unintended consequences:

In 1920, could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal syndicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas?

In the first place, the laws drawn up to enforce Prohibition (the Volstead Act) were necessarily riddled with exceptions: for sacramental wine; for industrial alcohol (a necessary ingredient in the production of hundreds of everyday items, from pencils to flavour extracts); and for “the naturally occurring fermentation that takes place in some recipes for sauerkraut (up to 0.8 percent alcohol) and German chocolate cake (0.62 percent).”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Prohibition, then, lies in the way these loopholes, combined with the immense fortune to be made from providing tax-free, unregulated alcohol to America’s thirsty drinkers, combined to create an entirely new geography of alcohol, reconfiguring homes, cities, agricultural landscapes, and even national borders.

IMAGE: Anti-Saloon League poster, via.

In fact, the dry campaign made its spatial ambitions clear from the start: the largest and most important pro-Prohibition group was called the Anti-Saloon League. According to Okrent, at the turn of the twentieth century, there were nearly 300,000 saloons in the United States: one for every 100 inhabitants in Leadville, South Dakota (“women, children, and abstainers included”), and an astonishing 4,065 below 14th Street in Manhattan alone. In addition to shuttering all of these ubiquitous bars, the Anti-Saloon League and its supporters promised that the “death of liquor” would also mean that “the slums will soon only be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs…”

IMAGE: Closing a saloon, via.

Chicago did close one of its jails, the first year after Prohibition took effect, while “diminished criminal behavior led Grand Rapids, Michigan, to abandon its work farm.” But the accidental spatial aftereffects of making the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal were much more radical. As the Anti-Saloon League promised, “a new nation” was indeed born from Prohibition: diverting the flow of booze underground reshaped the physical and cultural landscape of America in ways no one could have imagined.

For example, the “fruit juice clause,” originally inserted into the Volstead Act to allow otherwise dry-voting country dwellers to continue making hard cider, converted America into a nation of wine drinkers.

During the California Grape Rush of the 1920s, wheat fields and fruit orchards across the Napa Valley were ripped up and replanted with vines, with the state agriculture agency reporting that “the acreage in grapes was ‘increasing by leaps and bounds since the enactment of the Federal Prohibition Law.’” As Cesare Mondavi and Joseph Gallo launched their Californian empires, American wine consumption increased from 70 million gallons in 1917 to 150 million gallons in 1925.

IMAGE: Prescription forms for medicinal alcohol, via the Rose Melnick Medical Museum.

Charles Walgreen of Chicago took advantage of another loophole in the Volstead Act, which allowed “the legal distribution of alcoholic beverages for medicinal purposes.” Walgreens’ official history credits the company’s rapid expansion, from nine locations in 1916 to 525 by the end of a decade of Prohibition, to the invention of the milkshake. Okrent, however, casts doubt on this version of events, noting that “the cash flow from few enterprises gushed with quite the velocity that Prohibition brought to the drugstore business.”

In addition to the proliferation of California vineyards and chain drugstores encouraged by Prohibition’s legal exceptions, the activities of bootleggers and smugglers actually prompted an international redrawing of maritime borders.

IMAGE: “A motorboat makes contact with liquor smuggling British schooner KATHERINE off the New Jersey coast to smuggle the booty ashore.” 1923; photographer unknown; photo courtesy the U.S. Coast Guard.

From early on, boats dropped anchor just outside the three mile limit of U.S. territorial waters, and “hung poster-sized price lists over the gunwales no more self-consciously than if they’d been selling potatoes.” By 1923, Okrent writes, “from the Gulf of Maine to the tip of Florida, an enormous fleet of old freighters, tramp steamers, converted submarine chases, and ships of various other descriptions [...] lay at permanent anchor, [...] immobile for months at a time, functioning as floating warehouses.”

Off major ports, this floating Rum Row, or “inverse blockade,” as Okrent terms it, took on almost urban proportions:

In many places nightfall unveiled a constellation of ship’s lights so dense, recalled a captain who serviced vessels anchored off Highland Light on Cape Cod, “you would think it was a city out there.”

This is an incredible image: a floating ship-city, thousands of miles in length, bobbing up and down in place along the coast of America, and serviced by a fleet of much smaller, nimble rum runners that slipped to and from the mainland under cover of night.

IMAGE: “Captain Byron Laverne Reed, USCG, Commander of the New York Division and Captain of the Port of New York, takes a group of Prohibition officials on board the USCGC MANHATTAN to observe the Rum-Row fleet, coast of New Jersey, in November 1924.” Photographer unknown; photo courtesy the U.S. Coast Guard.

The State Department countered by attempting to extend the demarcation line between national and international waters an extra nine miles, or “an hour’s steaming distance from shore.” Despite initial reluctance on the part of the British and French, whose winemakers and distillers were making money hand over fist selling to smugglers, and who despised Prohibition as “Puritanism run mad,” the U.S. succeeded in enforcing these new maritime borders — a global geopolitical realignment enacted purely on the basis of alcohol control.

Ridding the American landscape of its thousands of saloons also resulted, perhaps predictably, in the domestication of drink. The ’20s were notable, according to critic Malcolm Cowley, for the “invention of the party,” as Americans started to invite each other round for cocktails and alcohol-fueled dinner parties. Okrent even credits Prohibition with the rise of the mixer, as drinkers sought to mask the harsh flavour of industrially-produced alcohol.

Quinine water, or tonic, originally developed in India as an antimalaria nostrum, became a standard masking agent for gin of dubious origin. Ginger ale replaced soda water as the standard mixer for whiskey because its flavor could smother the laboratory odors of fake rye.

IMAGE: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Several of these cocktails were enjoyed in a more temporary spatial innovation in the American landscape (albeit one that is undergoing a contemporary renaissance): the speakeasy. While describing the various permutations these “hooch joints” could take, depending on the neighbourhood, Okrent adds a fascinating aside: several culinary historians “attribute the American fondness for southern Italian cuisine to the exposure it received” in the grappa-serving parlours of Italian rooming houses, “from Boston to San Francisco.”

Other temporary distortions to the built environment inspired by Prohibition included a string of “boozoriums,” or bottling and storage warehouses along the Canada-U.S. border, as well as hundreds of home stills, which in Chicago formed a “network so large the entire Near West Side reeked of alcohol fumes,” while canny Denver distillers “placed animal carcasses near their distilleries, thus disguising the telltale scent of sour mash with the more potent aroma of rotting flesh.”

IMAGE: Police with confiscated still equipment. Photo via Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

When prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, Napa Valley, Walgreens, and the expanded definition of coastal waters survived as Prohibition’s legacy (along with NASCAR, female voting rights, and a national taste for Coca-Cola). But many of the speakeasies, illicit stills, and cross-border smuggling infrastructure vanished — leaving little but criminal syndicates, vast wealth, and, in the case of the row houses adjacent to the legendary “21″ Club in Manhattan, an “odor of alcohol that permeated the soil,” as reported by workers digging the foundations for a new public library branch in the 1950s.

In fact, for most Americans, it actually became “harder, not easier, to get a drink” after Repeal, as states enacted their own patchwork of closing hours, blue laws, and zoning regulations to restrict access to alcohol. These laws encourage their own spatial responses today, as towns on the Jersey side of the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border or the Wyoming side of the Utah/Wyoming state line boast vast discount liquor warehouses, complete with ample parking.

IMAGE: Prohibition protesters. Photo via Getty Images.

Okrent concludes Last Call by suggesting that perhaps Prohibition’s most lasting legacy is as an example.

In the past, it has been used to argue for abortion rights and against school integration. Today, it is most frequently invoked to argue for the legalisation of marijuana. But it is also a fantastic, if extreme, example of the way food and beverage policy can reshape the physical and cultural environment — both intentionally and not.

In other words, while Daniel Okrent’s stories of Prohibition’s impact on the American landscape make wonderfully enjoyable bedtime reading, they might equally well serve as both inspiration and caution to today’s urban planners and health policy makers as they attempt to redesign the geography of food.

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Foodprint City & the Unseen Machine

By Nicola | Published: August 18, 2010

IMAGE: Map created by the NYC Regional Foodshed Initiative of the Urban Design Lab, a joint project of the Earth Institute and Columbia University GSAPP, via Urban Omnibus.

I’m pretty excited to have a feature published on Urban Omnibus today, in their fabulously named “Unseen Machine” series.

Back in February, a week before our first Foodprint Project event, Varick Shute of the Urban Omnibus asked Sarah Rich and I what we hoped we might learn from a multidisciplinary conversation about cities and food. Now that Foodprint NYC has been followed by Foodprint Toronto (with Foodprint LA on the way), Varick kindly invited me to report back on what exactly it is that we have learned, thus far.

As well as the parallels across cities, and the good ideas that each could stand to steal from the other, I tried to include a couple of the many surprises we’ve encountered thus far:

At Studio-X in New York, our jaws collectively dropped as the CEO of Jetro Cash & Carry, purveyor of bulk quantities of chips to New York’s bodegas, issued a passionate plea for radical junk food taxation (“We need to tax the hell out of deep-fried products in this city!”). And I was not the only person taken aback when Toronto’s Senior Health Advisor told us that she’d taken the city’s food purchasing budget of $2 million to the Ontario Food Terminal, determined to demand more locally-grown produce, only to realize she had far too little money to negotiate effectively with the vendors there.

IMAGE: Map and table showing Toronto’s global crop imports in terms of dependence and seasonality, created by University of Toronto students Drew Adams, Fadi Masoud, Denise Pinto, Karen May, and Jameson Skaife. Found via InfranetLab, where you can see a larger version, as well as read more about the students’ proposal.

For more, visit Urban Omnibus — and while you’re there, check out the other fantastic features in their series on the hidden workings of the city, from Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic rubbish tubes to gutter design.

Meanwhile, if you like what you have seen or read of the Foodprint Project, and you’d like to see more events in the future, as well as receive your very own copy of the Foodprint Papers, you have just seven days to help us meet our Kickstarter fundraising goal! A huge thank you to all those who have pledged their support already, as well as helped to spread the word.

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The People of Bushwick vs. Fizzy Drinks

By Nicola | Published: August 13, 2010

IMAGE: Deprived of a soda tax, New York City’s Department of Health has taken revenge with these ubiquitous, nausea-inducing ads, which show a fizzy drink turning into fat in the glass, complete with “those little blood vessels and things like that” (as described by Cathy Nonas, a dietitian with the DOHMH).

Having backed down once already, New York governor David Paterson recently made another last-ditch attempt to push a soda tax through the state legislature, alongside other revenue generators such as allowing wine sales in grocery stores and variable tuition fees at SUNY universities.

Although he was defeated (on all counts), his year-long campaign to tax sugary beverages (which included “-ades, punches and certain fruit nectars”) has sparked lively debate. The issues are fascinating and complex: depending on who you listen to, the proposed tax is regressive, damaging to New York businesses (customers would simply cross state lines to buy their Sprite in Jersey), and an utterly ineffective way to create the long-term environmental and behavioural changes that solving America’s obesity epidemic will require; or, a vital public health measure and valuable deficit-plug.

IMAGE: A Pepsi delivery lorry in Brooklyn. Photo by Earl Wilson for the New York Times.

Fortunately, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, whose excellent Bodega Down Bronx video formed the subject of an earlier Edible Geography post, has collaborated with the students of Bushwick’s Academy of Urban Planning to produce a primer (pdf) on the subject.

IMAGE: Cover of the Soda Census, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and high school students from the Academy of Urban Planning.

The booklet offers a handy how-to guide for soda-tax decision-making, starting with close readings of statements from the major players and a review of existing data, before moving onto the fun stuff: original, micro-local research.

Students conducted a Bushwick soda census (“What kind of soda do you drink?” and “How much do you spend on soda per week?”), and then analysed their data with the help of compelling visualisations.

IMAGE: Soda census form, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and high school students from the Academy of Urban Planning.

IMAGE: Why do you drink soda? Data visualisation by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and high school students from the Academy of Urban Planning. Jamel’s commentary: “I think that people love the taste of soda, and that’s why it’s the highest value. People don’t drink soda just to drink, they drink because of the features of the soda.”

Apart from the sheer charm of the visualisations and commentary (Ivan: “I’ve learned that picture graphs are more interesting than just numbers”), the project is both an awesome introduction to the power and perils of data (Walter: “The charts could be like this because we only asked people from Bushwick”) and a way into genuinely difficult questions about individual responsibility, public health, effective interventions, and root causes.

IMAGE: The average amount of soda we drink every day by age. Data visualisation by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and high school students from the Academy of Urban Planning. Alberto’s response: “This means that soda companies are targeting young people to buy their product. However, it’s not helping young people solve their health problems.”

IMAGE: Making charts at the Academy of Urban Planning.

The students then use their data to assemble arguments for and against the tax, making the entire pamphlet a shining example of transparency in decision-making. And on that note, there are two interesting pieces of data that the students of Bushwick did not include, but which make the situation a little more opaque: the $140 million subsidy the federal government currently gives to support high fructose corn syrup production, and the $37.5 million dollars spent by soda industry lobbyists last year.

IMAGE: From “How The Soda Tax Died,” by Andrew Price for GOOD.

Which means that perhaps the most telling conclusion in the Bushwick Soda Census is this comment from Larae:

Many people would be affected by the tax, but the people who would be affected the most are the politicians, because if they vote for the soda tax, they might lose votes.

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Food Truck Whack-A-Mole

By Nicola | Published: August 9, 2010

One-minute idling ordinances. Restricted streets and inherited parking spots. Minimum pavement width. Health-department inspections. A $500 “refreshment vehicle assistant” licensing fee…

IMAGE: New York City’s vending regulations book, photo by Candy Chang for Urban Omnibus.

At both Foodprint NYC and Foodprint Toronto, the subject of street food trucks has come up in the “Zoning Diet” panel: a perfect case-study of the way economic and regulatory forces play out at the street level to shape an urban, mobile food delivery system.

Indeed, based on the evidence in Toronto and New York, street food vending provides something of a cautionary tale, as cities try to use the design tools at their disposal — from parking tickets to permit caps — to optimise the economic, health, and street-life building potential of mobile food vending, but instead end-up handicapping vendors with, for example, 1,000 lb trucks (which can’t be stored on the street overnight, but which “the city had designed specifically so they couldn’t be towed”).

IMAGE: “Toronto a la cart vendor Issa Ashtarieh sells falafel and kebab at the corner of University Ave. and College St.” Photo by Lucas Oleniuk for the Toronto Star.

In Toronto, clumsy regulation seems to be strangling food cart initiatives at birth, while in New York, restrictions promote resistance. On the one hand, vendors are currently using petitions, hot pink fake parking tickets, and passionate courtroom depositions to challenge proposed new legislation that would revoke a vendor’s license if they receive three or more parking or idling citations within twelve months.

IMAGE: Food trucks run by disabled veterans in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photo by Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times. According to reporter Simon Akam, “A 19th-century state law allows disabled veterans to sell in some areas that are off limits to others,” however, some carts simply “rent-a-vet” to sit in front of the cart in order to take advantage of their location dispensation.

And on the other hand, New York’s nearly three-decade-old cap of 3000 food-cart licenses and the tempting economics of street vending combine to produce the food cart underground — a black-market in food-cart permits that, according to Sean Basinski, Foodprint NYC panelist and Director of the Street Vendor Project, “the health department knows exists, but they look the other way.”

IMAGE: Street Vendor Project Director Sean Basinski speaking at Foodprint NYC. Photo by Ho Kyung Lee, Columbia GSAPP.

The health department’s gaze may be averted, but the street food underground does receive some scrutiny: while going through a stack of old New Yorkers (a favourite pre-move packing procrastination technique), I came across Busted by Larissa MacFarquhar, a fantastic article from the February 1, 2010, issue, on New York City’s Department of Investigation, whose job is to track down “fraud and corruption among city employees and people who deal with them.”

In a lengthy subsection, MacFarquhar describes a sting set up by Chis Staackmann, the D.O.I.’s inspector general for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and Byron, one of his “main undercover men,” to gather evidence of a food-cart inspection scam:

Food-vending carts were required to undergo inspection at the city’s inspection station, in Maspeth, but many of the carts were too dilapidated to pass. There were operations in Queens that would supply a vender with a clean, new cart, put it through the inspection process, and then transfer the inspection decal from that cart to the vender’s old, broken one.

Incredibly, the D.O.I. knew for sure that this was happening because “they had begun tagging carts with invisible ink,” and were seeing the same carts come through the inspection station “over and over again.”

IMAGE: Cop writing up a ticket for a falafel truck in DUMBO. Photo via Brownstoner.

What they didn’t know is how the vendors were able to transfer the inspection decal despite the Department of Health’s precautions, which included extremely strong glue and a hologram of the world “VOID” that was supposed to appear if the sticker was removed.

Did they apply a heat torch from behind the metal panel? Did they coat the side of the cart with some kind of lubricant so that the decal never stuck on properly in the first place? Did they treat the metal with graphite? [...] Nobody could figure out how they did it.

The story unfolds with the enjoyably absurdist drama that only a bureaucratic procedural can offer — Chris and Byron are staked out in a Boston Market parking lot, and abandon their call signs after forgetting which one of them is “H1″ and which is “H2″ — the D.O.I. fails to gather any visual evidence against the suspected decal swappers at Steve’s Sheet Metal. And as a result, although Steve and his colleague Fernando plead guilty to misdemeanours, the mechanics of decal removal remain a mystery.

IMAGE: A spread from designer Candy Chang’s awesome Vendor Power! booklet, created as an educational/advocacy tool in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Street Vendor Project. Read more about it on BLDGBLOG.

As Larissa MacFarquhar tells it, this story’s anticlimactic ending is apt, given the frustrating nature of much of the D.O.I.’s work: “an endless game of Whack-a-Mole,” applying band-aids rather than “fixing the city.” But, as we have seen at Foodprint NYC and Foodprint Toronto, fixing the city is not so easily achieved, and opinions differ on how it should be done.

For example, the D.O.I.’s Chris Staackmann tells Larissa MacFarquhar that he is “going to recommend that food venders should have to take their own carts to inspection and get their I.D.-card photographs retaken every year. That would make it harder for someone to sell his permit illegally and then leave the country.” Meanwhile, Sean Basinski and the Street Vendor Project think that the city “should revoke permits from people who are no longer using them, and reissue them to current vendors who desperately need them,” as well as “simply issue more permits.”

And of course, there is always the the D.O.I.’s core business: the problem of human susceptibility to the economic temptations of black-market food vending, dodgy plumbing, welfare skimming, and construction short-cuts:

They couldn’t fix human nature. There was clearly some kind of neurological link between building buildings, fixing pipes, and bribery, and there was nothing they could do to change that.

“It is what it is, man,” says Byron at the end of MacFarquhar’s article, and it’s hard to disagree with him. But it also seems that street food is a fascinating place to start unpacking the ways regulations, enforcement, incentives, economic development, and consumer demand interact to shape cities and their food systems.

IMAGE: Discussing food trucks during the Zoning Diet panel at Foodprint Toronto. (L-R) Nicola Twilley, Pat Pessotto, Jessica Duffin Wolfe, Barbara Emanuel, and Lola Sheppard. Photo by Stacy Lewis.

[NOTE: Tracing the ways food and cities shape each other and the hidden economic, regulatory, and cultural forces that consciously or accidentally design urban food systems is at the heart of the Foodprint Project, an international event series that I co-curate with Sarah Rich. You can watch both Zoning Diet panels online (NYC and Toronto) for more of these kinds of discussions. And please consider supporting the Foodprint Project Kickstarter campaign, as we fundraise to cover expenses from Foodprint Toronto and put together future Foodprint Project events — it could be your city next!]

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In the Time of Full Mechanisation

By Nicola | Published: August 4, 2010

In 1948, Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion published Mechanization Takes Command, an epic investigation into the origins, evolution, and impact of mechanisation on human civilisation.

Subtitled “A Contribution To Anonymous History,” the book draws on patent drawings, promotional leaflets, and even business cards to piece together the incursion of machines into domestic, agricultural, and industrial space.

IMAGE: “Differentiation of the scythe: ‘For Every Type Of Grass Or Grain’. 1876. (Asher and Adams, Pictural Album of American Industry, Philadelphia, 1876)” Giedion shows the increasing refinement of hand tools — human-machine prostheses — proceeding alongside early attempts at replacing human labour with machines.

IMAGE: “Beginning of Mechanization: Threshing Machine. 1770s. (Pennsylvania Magazine, Philadelphia, 1775). This device typifies the early phases of mechanization in agriculture. It multiplies the number of flails and imitates by mechanical rotation the motion of the human arm. The threshing machine came into practical use in late eighteenth-century England, and was the first successful instrument of mechanized agriculture.”

Along the way, Giedion makes a passionate plea for the preservation of such ephemera, as his already enormous task was made nearly impossible in places due to “an amazing historical blindness” that “has prevented the preservation of important historical documents, of models, manufacturer’s records, catalogues, advertising leaflets, and so on.”

“Later periods,” he concludes, “will not understand these acts of destruction, this murder of history.”

IMAGE: “Continuous Production Line: U.S. Patent, 1836, ‘Machine for Harvesting, Threshing, Cleaning and Bagging Grain.’ Constructed in the wilderness of Michigan in 1836, this earliest combine, harvesting without human hands, manifests the same trend as Oliver Evans’ achievement in the milling production line, 1783. About a hundred years had to pass before the combine, which automatically reaps, threshes, and bags the grain, became available for the family-size farm.”

Nonetheless, Giedion manages to assemble an incredible wealth of archival detail to retrace the one-step-forward, two-steps-backward story of mechanisation and its impact on “our mode of life.” The book outlines the replacement of human labour and the introduction of continuous production and scientific management in terms of furniture, bathrooms, factories, art and — most interestingly for an Edible Geographer — in various aspects of food production, processing, distribution, and preparation.

Following a short but fascinating sketch of the “Springs of Mechanization” analysed in terms of attitudes to movement over time (from the representation of movement in the fourteenth century to its “capture” in the nineteenth century), and a thorough case-study of the process of mechanisation in bank locks, starring Linus Yale, Giedion embarks on the meat — quite literally — of the book. In an amazingly titled section, “Mechanization Encounters The Organic,” he covers “Reaping Mechanized,” “The Oven and the Endless Belt,” and “The Mechanization of Death,” to name just a handful of chapters.

IMAGE: “Bread and Gas: Dr. Dauglish’s Bread-Making Apparatus. Early 1860s. Bread making is reduced from ten hours to a few minutes. The first experiment in mechanizing bread manufacture on a large scale was by John Dauglish, a British physician, in 1856. Dauglish injected carbonic acid gas into the dough under pressure, reducing the nine-hour fermentation period to twenty minutes. Failing to generate the natural warmth of fermentation, this gave a homogenous mixture permeated with fine bubbles, but cold as a corpse. Serious disadvantages in baking ensued. (American Artisan and Patent Record, NY, Vol. III, 9 May 1866).”

“How did mechanization alter the structure of bread and the taste of the consumer?” Giedion asks. “What are mechanization’s limits in dealing with so complex an organism as the animal? And how does the elimination of a complicated craft — such as the butcher’s — proceed?”

Giedion singles out individuals such as Oliver Evans, inventor of the automated grist mill as well as the semi-mythical Oruktur Amphibilos, to illustrate a natural history of the assembly line:

Humanly and technically, the problem of the assembly line is solved when the worker no longer has to substitute for any movement of the machine, but simply assists production as a watcher and a tester. This was done, quite suddenly, toward the end of the eighteenth century in Oliver Evans’ mechanization of the grain-milling process.

IMAGE: “Oliver Evans: Archimedean Screws and Bucket Conveyor for Elevating and Transporting Grain, 1783.” Apologies for the particularly poor quality of this photo.

What makes Evans’ prototype grist mill so interesting is that its innovation is simply to combine existing — indeed, ancient — technology into a continuous mechanised line of production. This was an idea that, according to Giedion, “had no analogy in its time,” and its unrecognisability actually formed the basis of a legal challenge to Evans’ 1790 patent.

After an initial blustering rejection — “you cannot make wooden millers” and, besides, “the whole contrivance was a set of rattle traps unworthy the attention of men of common sense” — millers adopted the automated mill and, naturally, sought to avoid paying Evans royalties. Thomas Jefferson himself deemed the device to be “nothing more than the old Persian Wheel of Egypt, and [...] the same thing as the screw of Archimedes,” which is correct, but utterly misses the point.

IMAGE: “Pork Packing in Cincinnati, Panoramic Painting, 1873. Reproduced from Harper’s Weekly.” Although moving the hogs on an overhead rail is the only automated element of the production line shown here, the packing houses have already begun to divide labour, so that “each man performs a single operation. ‘One splits the animal, the next takes out the entrails, the third removes heart, liver, etc., and the hose man washes it out.’”

Giedion goes on to trace a contemporaneous “assembly line attitude” — characterised by a desire for mass production and speed through the division of labour and the removal of friction — in non-mechanical assembly lines, such as “the manufacture of biscuits in a victualling office of the British Navy,” and “in the great Cincinnati slaughterhouses” of the thirties.

In other words, assembly line production gradually becomes a new imaginary, emerging across a variety of manufacturing processes to be met with a combination of fear and breathless amazement, followed by widespread adoption and further refinement.

Giedion cites this 1836 account of a pre-mechanical assembly-line at the British Navy biscuit bakery, Deptford, by Peter Barlow, in Manufacture and Machinery in Britain, which is worth re-quoting in full:

The dough, which consists of flour and water only, is worked by a large machine … It is handed over to a second workman, who slices them with a large knife for the bakers, of whom there are five. The first, or the moulder, forms the biscuit two at a time, the second, or marker, stamps and throws them to the splitter, who separates the two pieces and puts them under the hand of the chucker, the man that supplies the oven, whose work of throwing the bread on the peel must be so exact that he cannot look off for a moment. The fifth, or the depositor, receives the biscuits on the peel and arranges them in the oven.

The business is to deposit in the oven seventy biscuits in a minute and this is accomplished with the regularity of a clock, the clacking of the peel, operating like the motion of the pendulum.

IMAGE: “First Oven with Endless Belt, 1810. Admiral Isaac Coffin. Invented by a Bostonian who became a British admiral, this oven for baking sea biscuits supplied a link towards the continuous-production line.”

IMAGE: “Oven with Endless Chain. 1850. Section. Some mechanical bakeries appeared in the 1860s, after the tunnel oven’s construction had been ingeniously refined. Yet none was successful: the production line in bread making only became effective in the time of full mechanization, which perfected automatically controlled tunnel ovens heated by gas or electricity. By this time the earlier experiments were forgotten, and efforts had to start from scratch. (U.S. Patent 7778, 19 November 1850).”

Meanwhile, from the early 1800s, the introduction of railways in the United States provided a new paradigm for the mechanical imagination: the endless track. Giedion shows how Admiral Coffin’s 1810 Oven with Endless Belt (also deployed in the cutting-edge business of sea-biscuit manufacture) heralded a rash of track-based innovations in food production:

In the late ‘fifties, the more difficult process of bread baking became mechanized at various places in England and America; and in America, at this time, even fruit was dried in steam chambers with the help of a conveyor by a now forgotten method (Alden process); in the late ‘sixties overhead rails, in combination with various machines, are found in the great meat-packing houses of the Middle West.

IMAGE: “Mechanized Bakery, Mouchot Bros. 1847. The kneading machines are powered by dogs who work a treadmill outside. (C. H. Schmidt, Das deutsche Baeckerhandwerk).”

Kneading was also mechanised by the 1850s — but Giedion points out that for European bakeries, in particular, these innovations were ahead of their time: “the ordinary needs” of the baker’s customers “were not large enough for the advantageous use of machines.” By the time demand had advanced to meet mechanical production capacity, many early innovations had been forgotten and awaited re-invention.

Similarly, the limitations of preservation and distribution technologies often restricted the usefulness of advances in food production efficiency. Giedion thus notes that, “The time of full mechanization is identical with the time of the tin can.”

IMAGE: “Wilson’s Original Patent Corned Beef Can, 1875. (U.S. Patent 161,848, 6 April, 1875).”

IMAGE: “Making Cans for Use in Packing the Meat, Chicago, 1878 (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 12 October, 1878).”

Mechanization Takes Command, despite its triumphant title, is full of these asynchronous advances, technological dead-ends, and machines that worked less well than the humans they aimed to replace. On some levels, it is an archaeology of failures, redundancies, and missed opportunities.

Indeed, the most striking insight of this section of the book is the way in which the resistance of “the Organic” to mechanisation actually shaped modern production processes.

IMAGE: “Introduction of the Mechanical Reaper. British Patent, 1811. One of the many efforts to mechanize reaping, which failed because of too simple an approach. (The Edinburgh Encyclopedia)”

After tracing its conceptual forebears back to Oliver Evans’ grist mill, the British sea-biscuit factory, and “J.G. Bodmer’s layout of a Manchester machine tool factory,” Giedion explains that the pork packing industry saw “the birth of the modern assembly line,” in large part because the devices invented to mechanise slaughter “proved, with few exceptions, unfit for practical use.”

“Even when dead, the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine,” as Giedion puts it.

The machines invented in an attempt to tame the hog nonetheless provide some of the book’s most captivating illustrations — an array of devices that conjure up Rube Goldberg and medieval torture chambers simultaneously.

IMAGE: “Apparatus for Catching and Suspending Hogs. 1882. ‘The hog M acts as a decoy for the others, and much time and labor are thus saved.’ (U.S. Patent 252,112, 10 January, 1882).”

IMAGE: “Automatic Hog-Weighing Apparatus for Use in Packing Houses, Cincinnati, 1869. (U.S. Patent 92,083).”

IMAGE: “Hog-Cleaning Machine. 1864. The flexibility of steel and rubber are used to operate upon an organic body mechanically. ‘The capacity of this machine is from five to fifteen thousand per diem… The apparatus consisting, essentially, in the employment of substances of the requisite elasticity to yield to the irregularities of the body, while adhering thereto with the force necessary to remove the hair.’ (U.S. Patent 44,021, 30 August 1864).”

IMAGE: “Pig-Scraping Machine. c1900. ‘An endless chain drags the pig through a series of little knives, attached to adjustable springs… They will fit themselves to the form of the pig without very much trouble. Capacity, 8 pigs per minute.’ Mechanical scraping never became completely satisfactory. (Douglas’s Encyclopedia, London)”

Given the hog’s resistance, Giedion writes, “for the speeding of output there was but one solution: to eliminate loss of time between each operation and the next, and to reduce the energy expended by the worker on the manipulation of heavy carcasses.”

In other words, the inability to automate led to Fordist perfection in terms of assembly line efficiency:

In continuous flow, hanging from an endlessly moving chain at twenty-four inch intervals, they now move in procession past a row of standing workers each of whom performs a single operation. [...]

What was revolutionary and what could not have been invented in earlier periods, in other countries, or even in other industries, was the way [assembly line techniques] were used to speed into mass production an organic material which defies handling by purely mechanical means.

IMAGE: “Carcasses in Chicago Slaughter House (Courtesy Kaufman and Fabry).”

Reading Giedion’s description of the human assembly line of the 1850s slaughterhouse, while gazing in amazement at the impressive and slightly horrifying ingenuity of the mechanical tools developed to process food, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2005 film of industrial food production, Our Daily Bread.

IMAGE: Today’s pork packing assembly line, still from Our Daily Bread.

Geyrhalter’s film consists of long, dispassionate, commentary-free shots of food’s industrial sublime: chicks debeaked, olive trees shaken, hogs eviscerated, salmon vacuumed, pesticides sprayed, and cattle slaughtered, again, and again, and again. The grey noise of the machines provide the only audio accompaniment; still shots of the expressionless faces of the workers eating their industrially produced snacks in the break room form the only interlude.

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

“What makes it fascinating,” says Geyrhalter, “are the machines and the sense of what’s doable, the human spirit of invention and organization, even at close quarters with horror and insensitivity.”

IMAGE: Cattle are killed and flipped in today’s beef production line, still from Our Daily Bread.

IMAGE: “Greener’s Humane Cattle Killer (Douglas’s Encyclopedia, London).”

Similarly to Giedion’s patent drawings and etchings, the mechanical ingenuity of industrial food production as shown in Our Daily Bread is both spell-bindingly curious and utterly terrifying.

The same enlightenment ethos of rational, inventive efficiency that inspired Réamur to design an “Artificial Mother” that would mechanise egg incubation reaches its apotheosis in Geyrhalter’s flourescent-lit, sterile chicken hatchery, while the mechanics of artificial insemination appear to have changed little in a century.

IMAGE: “Réaumur: Artificial Mother. c1750. ‘This plate exhibits the inside of a hot-room designed to bring up chicks in, and which may be as useful employed to hatch them. A, marks the cover of a stove whose body is cylindrical. By taking off that cover one puts wood into the stove when it is wanted.’ (A. F. de Réaumur, The Art of Hatching and Bringing Up Domestic Fowl at Any Time of the Year, London, 1750).”

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

IMAGE: “Mechanical Insemination. ‘In the time of full mechanization, especially in the 1930s, the Soviet Union experimented extensively. Six million cows and ewes were mechanically impregnated there in 1936. Without going so far in practice, the United States developed a great range of devices suited to the various species.’ (U.S. Department of Agriculture Circular 567, W. V. Lambert.)”

The story both Giedion and Geyrhalter tell, of the application of mechanical ingenuity to food production, is undoubtedly impressive and starkly beautiful. Both position themselves as impassive observers: Giedion prefaces his study by claiming to take “no stand either for or against mechanization as such,” while Geyrhalter declares that he “wanted to collect and make accessible images from this world in as objective a manner as possible.”

IMAGE: “Instrument for Extracting Hair from Skin. 1837. Imitation of the human hand. ‘One of the jaws is designed to supply the place and office of the thumb as used in extracting hairs with the common knife, and is therefore covered or cushioned on the inside with leather, india rubber or other material…’ (U.S. Patent 244, 30 June 1837).”

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

Yet neither Geyrhalter nor Giedion can help curating their investigation into a commentary. Giedion describes — and Geyrhalter shows — the impact of mechanisation on humanity:

In a Chicago packing house, hogs, hanging head downwards, moved uninterruptedly past a staunch Negro woman at the curve of the conveyor system. Her task was to stamp, with a rubber stamp, the carcasses examined by the inspectors. With a sweeping movement she smacked the rubber stamp on each skin.

Perhaps we start from false premises; but in an outside observer a strange feeling was aroused: a creature of the human race trained to do nothing else but, day after day, and eight hours each day, stamp thousand after thousand of carcasses in four places.

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

IMAGE: Still from Our Daily Bread.

“Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing slavery,” concludes Giedion. “But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves.”

Sixty years later, Geyrhalter’s documentary immerses us in the truth of Giedion’s assertion. The full mechanisation of food production, the goal of an earlier era’s entirely rational techno-optimism, is revealed in all its melancholy, depopulated, economically efficient, fluorescent-lit fascination and horror.

[NOTE: Thanks to Geoff Manaugh for showing me Sigfried Giedion's book and bringing me into the CCA to consult it. For a moment, it seemed as though the excellent New York Review Books was going to bring out a new edition: my fingers are crossed that might still happen!]

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Let The Countdown Begin: Foodprint Toronto

By Nicola | Published: July 29, 2010

IMAGE: Picture this former streetcar storage and maintenance facility filled with people who are curious, concerned, and/or enthusiastic about the relationship between food and cities… it’s Foodprint Toronto!

Just a quick reminder that Foodprint Toronto takes place this Saturday, between 12:30 and 5:00 p.m. EST, at Artscape Wychwood Barns (map) in Toronto. It’s the second in an international event series co-curated with Sarah Rich, as well as the reason for the sad (for me, anyway) lack of recent posts here on Edible Geography.

IMAGE: Water farming the American South-West, a design proposal by Mason White and Zoning Diet panelist Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office / Infranet Lab.

The full schedule, complete with panelists’ bios, is online here, and you can also get a sense of what the Foodprint Project is all about by watching footage of our first event in NYC, as well as by reading these interviews with Pruned, Azure, and Urban Omnibus (check out the Toronto Star on Friday for more coverage).

The day’s conversations should be a fantastic blend of insight, provocation, inspiration, and speculation, ranging from the evolution of restaurant design to the impact of climate change on Toronto’s foodscape. And, as in New York City, we’ve managed to find panelists who can approach these questions from a wide variety of perspectives, including the VP of Merchandising at Longo’s Grocery Chain, the co-author of the City’s new food strategy report, an urban fruit forager, and a First Nations fishing family.

IMAGE: Urban fruit foraging, photo courtesy of Toronto’s own Not Far From The Tree.

If you’re in Toronto, then I hope to see you there: no RSVP is necessary and it’s a $5 donation on the door for admission. Thanks to our lovely sponsors, in between panels we’ll be able to refuel you with a range of local, sustainable, and delicious treats, including foraged fruit from Not Far From The Tree, smoked fish from Akiwenzie’s Fish & More, organic snacks from the Ontario Natural Food Co-op, refreshing Steam Whistle pilsner, and cold-brewed White Squirrel Coffee.

If you’re not in Toronto… first of all, consider a spontaneous weekend mini-break: our sponsor (and my favourite airline in the North American skies), Virgin America, has just launched a new SFO-YYZ route, and our hosts at the Gladstone Hotel offer CSA-sourced deliciousness as well as artist-designed rooms.

And if that’s not possible, don’t worry: thanks to our generous volunteer videographer, Kevin Lisoy, we’re going to be able to stream the entire event live here. We’ll even take your questions on Twitter — just use #foodprintTO.

Finally, if you can, please help us keep the Foodprint Project on the road with a Kickstarter pledge — any amount is very welcome. We owe a huge thank you to everyone who has helped us make Foodprint Toronto happen, including Geoff Manaugh, Alexis Madrigal, Tim Maly, Mason White, Lola Sheppard, Dan and Stacy Lewis, John Knechtel, Michael Wolfson, Greg J. Smith, Leslie McBeth, Rebecca Federman, Andrew Blum, Jennifer Leonard, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, Laura Taylor, our generous sponsors, our inspiring panelists, and everyone who helped us spread the word!

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Eating the Street

By Nicola | Published: July 15, 2010

IMAGE: 2:30 p.m. in Mexico City…. time for a snack! All photos by Nicola Twilley, unless labelled otherwise.

Mexico City’s streets are dense with food vendors. Statistics are hard to come by, since the industry is largely unregulated, but in her 2007 Survey of Street Foods in Mexico City, anthropologist Janet Long quotes a survey by Reforma newspaper that found 560,000 street vendors in the city proper — an astonishing one vendor for every 8.5 chilangos.

Certainly, walking around the city it can seem as if almost everyone is eating mysterious and delicious-smelling foods on the street, from dawn to dusk. In his must-read portrait of Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, author David Lida writes that:

The sidewalk is a chilango’s pit stop, his permanent picnic. He likes to eat standing up, the aroma of sizzling meat mingling with those of exhaust fumes, putrefying garbage, dust, and sweat.

But for a Spanish-challenged gringo (such as myself), it can be hard to know where to start.

IMAGE: Wayne and Tally enjoy an El Vampiro juice each.

Fortunately, several Postopoleros (including my fellow bloggers Jace Clayton and Wayne Marshall) were lucky enough to be the guinea pigs for an amazing three-hour street food tour and tasting by a new outfit, Eat Mexico. Under the expert guidance of Mexico City native Jesica López Sol and American expat Lesley Téllez, we slowly ate our way around the triangle of streets named after rivers between James Sullivan and Paseo de la Reforma in the Cuauhtémoc section of the city.

IMAGE: The El Vampiro juice includes beets, carrots, and parsley (photo by Wayne).

We started out on fairly safe territory, although possibly too greedily, with a giant freshly-made juice each. Next on the menu were tacos al pastor, a delicious Mexican-ised pork and pineapple version of the traditional lamb gyros introduced by Lebanese immigrants in the 1930s. To quote David Lida again:

Mexico City has no indigenous cuisine, but if there is such a thing as a municipal dish, it would have to be tacos al pastor. A variation on Middle Eastern shawarma, it is made from pork, marinated with various spices, including garlic and a heavy dose of annatto, which gives it a shrill orange color. The slices of pork are mounted atop each other to form a huge orb, and impaled on a metal stick, which revolves around a vertical charcoal grill.

The exact ingredients in each taco stand’s marinade are a closely guarded secret, but various internet sources seem to suggest Coca-Cola is often involved, as well as the more standard vinegar, chiles, and orange juice.

IMAGE: “Con verduras,” i.e. served with onions and coriander (cilantro).

IMAGE: Pineapple juices drip down onto the pork as it cooks, tenderising and caramelising simultaneously.

Lesley and Jesica were fantastic hosts, armed with a chopping board and knife in order to divide each burrito, quesadilla, tamal, and taco into sample sizes, as well as a wealth of information about the ingredients, preparation, and cultural background of each food type on our tour.

IMAGE: Jesica introduces our tamal.

The street food menu has its own temporal rhythm, just as a restaurant would serve different foods at different times of day. We were lucky to find any atole or tamales left at noon, as the corn-based thin porridge-y drink and the steamed, stuffed corn-dough snack are a traditional breakfast combo. Later in the evening, Jesica and Lesley told us, tamales make a comeback, alongside camotes (boiled sweet potatoes) and elotes (corn-on-the-cob, served sprinkled with chile powder and grated cheese).

Of course, the location of street food shifts over the course of the day too. Our tour took place in a business district between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., meaning that the streets were filled with local workers looking for something filling for a late almuerzo or early comida. In the early mornings, women selling atole frequently circulate around transport hubs to provide commuters with a light desayuno. Meanwhile, as Janet Long points out in her Survey, in the evenings, elote sellers cluster near movie theatres, and other food stands “may be set up in parks to cater to a different public than the one served during the day.”

IMAGE: Lesley prepares us for tacos de canasta.

IMAGE: Jesica even brought along a handy chopping board and knife.

Among the many foods we tried were some that I didn’t even know existed. My new favourite, the tlacoyo, is a long torpedo-shaped cornmeal pancake stuffed with beans and cheese, and in the case of the one we sampled, topped with nopales (cactus leaves) and more cheese. Later, I went back for a blue cornmeal tlacoyo, topped just with salsa. It was possibly even better.

IMAGE: Jesica purchases a tlacoyo, made to her exact specifications.

IMAGE: Tlacoya with nopales (photo by Wayne).

Tacos de canasta (or tacos sudados) are so-called because they are sold from a cloth-covered basket where they sit on top of each other, sweating. We tried one filled with cochinita pibil, a slow-cooked pork stew, and together the soft taco and tender meat formed a somewhat baby-food-like, yet delicious, mush.

IMAGE: Leslie distributes our cochinita pibil taco de canasta.

At the opposite end of the texture spectrum was our grand finale: taco de carnitas. As Angeleno food critic Jonathan Gold describes it, carnitas is basically any and all parts of the pig, “rendered and then seethed in their own lard until the surfaces caramelize, the interiors soften, and the mass reaches a sweet, succulent equilibrium.”

I must admit to being a little bit full by this point on the tour, and hence unsure whether I really needed even a small serving of pork fried in its own fat. However, Jesica invited us to sample chunks of pig skin, snout, lung, and nana, or uterus, with such charming enthusiasm, it seemed churlish to refuse.

IMAGE: Carnitas anatomy class: throat, snout (I think), skin, and uterus (the large fusilli-ish shape on the right) (photo by Wayne).

IMAGE: Tally tries the nana.

I have to confess, I did hesitate before trying the nana. For starters, it looked like a giant purplish fusilli, which defied my limited understanding of anatomy. However, as Gold correctly notes, ordering maciza (plain meat only) at a carnitas stand can’t help but feel like a character flaw:

There is nothing wrong with maciza — you may actually prefer maciza — but as when standing in line at a famous gelatería only to order vanilla, one is occasionally under the impression that there is something less than manly about the decision, that one has declined to consider the possibilities.

And of course, as it turns out, the nana really is delicious – rich and firm like a filet mignon, and not at all rubbery or iron-flavoured, which were my main fears. I felt as though I had finally earned my stripes as a genuine food blogger!

IMAGE: At the end of the tour, Lesley and Jesica treat themselves to a well-deserved taco de carnitas.

As Janet Long notes in her Survey, the food sold on the streets of D.F. is for the most part traditional Mexican cuisine: “the same basic diet based on maize, beans, squash, and chile peppers that they have been eating for well over 5,000 years.” Burgers and hot dogs are available, but seem much less popular.

According to Long, the practise of street food vending is itself traditional:

Long before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century, Aztec food vendors were setting up their stands near the Tlatelolco Market in the city, then known as Tenochtitlan, or along the canals that served as roads in the ancient city. They sold fully cooked dishes of insects, fish, and meat stews to the 60,000 people said to congregate at the great market every day.

They also sold a diversity of chile pepper sauces described by the Spaniards as “hot, very hot, very, very hot, and brilliantly hot.”

Today, each taco stands offers a similar range of salsas for those looking for what David Lida terms, “the exquisite sensation of enchilarse – to be overwhelmed by chile.” In my greedy haste, I kept eating my samples before remembering to add any salsa, although as these prepared sauces have been identified as the most likely hosts of bacterial contamination, perhaps that was not such a bad thing.

IMAGE: Big buckets of serve-yourself salsas for tacos (photo by Wayne).

Although Mexico City has always had a tradition of street food, as well as a climate that permits year-round outdoor life, Janet Long’s statistics show that the number of vendors has more-or-less tripled in the past decade. The reasons behind that expansion reveal a fascinating blend of socio-economic, political, and infrastructural forces that shape the D.F.’s landscape of mobile dining.

One factor behind the boom in street food vendors is the sprawling growth of the city itself, and its resulting nightmarish traffic. As Long explains, the city’s size and gridlock “force people to travel greater distances to their place of work or study, and make it impossible for them to return home for the mid-day meal, which is traditionally the most important meal of the day in Mexico.” Meanwhile, some recent urban arrivals “must resort to living in single rooms, without cooking facilities,” making them a captive market for taco stands and tamal vendors.

IMAGE: Tacos al pastor.

The rural-urban migration driving the city’s growth is itself a symptom of another major force contributing to the growth of a micro-entrepreneurial street vendor class. Long uses data from the Mexican Institute of Social Security to show that:

Of every ten jobs created in 2005, six were in the informal sector. [...] The formal sector of the economy cannot provide enough jobs to employ a majority of the population. [...] Unemployed workers are basically provided with two options: 1) attempt to cross the border into the United States and find work as an illegal worker or, 2) look for work in the informal sector.

In other words, street vending serves “as an escape valve to relieve the social and economic pressures created by unemployment.” With a bare minimum of capital investment, would-be workers can sell food to both support themselves and provide a source of cheap food for their fellow low-income chilangos.

IMAGE: Tacos de canasta “La Abuela” — I particularly enjoy how the Coca-Cola can and bottle are incorporated into the aesthetic.

This combination makes street food vendors politically untouchable, even though they operate for the most part illegally, without paying taxes, for permits, or even for city services — according to Long, “water can be obtained from public fountains and it is common for electricity to be obtained illegally through extensions that are attached to electric lines.”

David Lida concurs, writing that:

Since I arrived in 1990, street vendors have been a problem, and each successive mayor has announced plans to do away with them. [...] Still, tacitly, they have been tolerated. In a city where there isn’t enough work to go around, few politicians are willing to take measures that would separate people from their jobs.

So, although health regulations and vendor permit requirements exist, Mexico City’s government concludes — probably correctly — that they would be impossible to enforce, and therefore, they are universally ignored.

In other words, our tacos were an edible symptom of economic desperation, political impotence, and a city stretched beyond its infrastructural capacity.

IMAGE: A pick-up truck full of chicken parts.

Speaking of infrastructure, having just spent the morning at the Central de Abasto wholesale market, it was interesting to see the mountains of fresh produce, blocks of ice, and bags of chicken parts redistributed around the city to thousands of smaller scale vendors.

IMAGE: Blocks of ice sold wholesale at the Central de Abasto market.

IMAGE: Ice block re-sized to serve as a smoothie display stand.

IMAGE: Smaller cart-mounted ice block, complete with ice shaver to make raspados.

If supply is one aspect of the behind-the-scenes geography of street food vending, storage is another. At Foodprint NYC, for example, I was intrigued to hear panelist Sean Basinski explain that New York’s food trucks have to be taken to a Department of Health-approved garage every night, for storage and cleaning.

No such formal facilities seem to exist in Mexico City: according to Janet Long, food carts and stands are either “rolled to a safe spot at night,” or “partially dismantled at the end of the day and left on the street, where they are fairly safe, since nothing is left behind except the metal frame.”

IMAGE: Cleaning up a hamburguesa truck at the end of service.

Perhaps the most fascinating statistic in Janet Long’s Survey is that nearly half of the food sold at Mexico City’s street food stands has been prepared in a domestic kitchen. As she puts it, “There is no separation between the public kitchen and the domestic kitchen.”

The ubiquitous taco stands and baskets of tamales occupying their three-foot median along Mexico City’s traffic-clogged streets are thus a kind of distributed domesticity and an ad hoc network of unofficially-subsidised street cafeterias, as well as a tourist dining destination.

[NOTE: This post is part of a series of reports from my time in Mexico City as part of Postopolis! DF, which was presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture from June 8 to June 12, 2010.

I owe an enormous thanks to Jace Clayton for inviting me along, and to Lesley Téllez and Jesica López Sol of Eat Mexico for the tour: be sure to check out their site and follow them on Twitter @eatmexico. Lesley reports that they are currently researching a pulque/mezcal tour and a seasonal chiles en nogada tasting: both sound well worth checking out.]

Posted in Day Out, Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Nomadic Milk

By Nicola | Published: July 11, 2010

Dutch artist Esther Polak spent frustrating years in art school trying to depict pastoral landscapes: dragging an easel out into the meadows near where she grew up; experimenting with oil paints, pastels, and photography. The results, as she tells it (at the ElectroSmog International Festival for Sustainable Immobility in March) were unsatisfactory.

IMAGE: Dutch dairyscapes, (left) Jacob van Ruisdael, View over Harlem, (right) Vermeer, The Milkmaid.

Part of the problem, she explains, is that “most of this part of The Netherlands looks like a green meadow — but, actually, you’re looking at a landscape of milk production.”

Then one day, some friends took Polak out on a boat that was equipped with GPS. She decided to experiment with the technology, equipping volunteers with PDAs back in 2002, before ubiquitous mobile computing, in order to produce user-portraits of Amsterdam. With a sense of the technology’s potential, she then returned to her original obsession: figuring out how to depict the landscape in a way that also revealed the industrial and agricultural processes that gave it shape.

IMAGE: NomadicMILK installation.

NomadicMILK, Polak’s most recent work, is currently on display as part of an exhibition called Whose Map Is It?, at the Institute for International Visual Arts in London. In it, she “tracks the daily routes of two milk related economies in Nigeria”: the routes of the Fulani, “nomadic herdsmen who move with their cattle in annual migrations in search of water, fodder and markets”; and the distribution networks of PEAK milk, a Dutch company whose condensed milk cans and milk powder sachets are “available on every street corner in Nigeria.”

IMAGE: Peak Milk products on shelves in Nigeria (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Mr. Idiris and his family (photo from Polak’s blog).

Between January and December 2009, Polak spent months in Nigeria, recruiting a herdsman, Mr. Idiris, as well his most cooperative cow, Purdy, and his sister-in-law, Binta, who travels to local markets to sell nonno, a yogurt drink made from the milk Mr. Idiris collects.

IMAGE: Binta, Mr. Idiris’s nonno-producing and vending sister-in-law (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Purdy, the chosen cow (photo from Polak’s blog).

She also signed up Audu, a truck driver who transports imported milk solids from Lagos harbour to the Peak milk factory, and Usman, whose lorry carries Peak milk from the factory to a distribution centre in Abuja, and then to shops and supermarkets in the Kubwa suburb of the city.

IMAGE: Milk products arrive at Lagos harbour (much of the supply is shipped from The Netherlands) (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Polak with a Peak milk truck (photo from Polak’s blog).

Each participant — including the cow — wore a GPS transponder as they went about their journeys, which recorded Mr. Idiris’s migration between the dry season and wet season pasturage, as well the shorter daily paths of one day’s herding or a Peak milk delivery round.

IMAGE: From Polak’s sketchbook.

Cumulatively, these traces map the path of two different dairy economies through the Nigerian landscape, as a result of the individual mobility of each actor in milk’s journey.

They intersect just once, when Usman’s delivery route supplies Peak milk to a shop directly opposite the spot where Binta typically ends her distribution round, selling the nonno that she makes from the milk Mr. Idiris’ cows produce.

IMAGE: Mr. Idiris’ herding movements plotted on the same sheet as Usman’s route bringing Peak milk from the harbour at Lagos to the distribution centre in Abuja (from Polak’s final monoprint series, for sale here).

There is something quite amazing about layering the logic of nomadic herding routes, based on inherited traditions, annual and daily climatic variations, and the mobility of indigenous livestock, onto the same landscape as the more recently developed patterns of international shipping, truck transportation, and supermarket inventory control. As Polak notes, “No matter how different their lifestyles might seem, the two groups can be considered colleagues in a shared workplace.”

IMAGE: Binta’s walk to market overlaid onto Audu and Usman’s separate truck drives from the harbour to the Peak milk factory, and Usman’s distribution round in Kubwa, Abuja (from Polak’s final monoprint series, for sale here).

Rather than simply presenting these maps, however, Polak’s project revolves around the way each person involved in this greater milk journey understands their own movement within it.

To that end, she spliced together a toy robot on wheels and a plastic bottle filled with locally-gathered white sand, in order to create an ingenious Heath Robinson-eque device that redraws each journey exactly as it happened, albeit at a much reduced scale and a speeded-up timeframe.

IMAGE: The sand-drawing robot, from Polak’s sketchbook.

IMAGE: Narrating their routes, from Polak’s sketchbook.

After Polak received the GPS unit back from each participant, she invited them to their narrate their route as the robot slowly translated the data into uneven lines of sand on the ground. Her final installation combined those narratives, in the form of video-recordings, displayed alongside robot-created prints of the tracks:

The robot is used to draw the sand tracks over pieces of canvas, in exactly the same way as it was done during the workshops in Nigeria. After the sand drawings are finished, graffiti spray-paint is used to color the background. A couple of hours of drying makes it possible to remove the sand with a soft piece of cloth. This reveals a razor-sharp white image of the tracks where every grain of sand stands out as a white and uniquely placed pixel.

IMAGE: Binta’s route, solo (from Polak’s final monoprint series, for sale here).

IMAGE: Robot with plastic bottle of sand (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Polak with the sand-drawing robot (photo from Polak’s blog).

Despite my unending enthusiasm for maps, the video-narratives (excerpts of which are available online) are actually perhaps the most arresting part of Polak’s project.

For each participant, the process of seeing their journey unfold, in miniature, on the ground in front of them seems to trigger an initial bemused amazement, followed by a flood of anecdote. Mr. Idiris starts gesticulating wildly at one point, showing Polak and her translator where he had to go round in circles for hours looking for a lost cow. Binta, his sister-in-law, explains why she chose to go to the fruit market in Kubwa to sell her nonno, rather than the one in Dutse.

IMAGE: Mr. Idiris describes his rainy season route (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Mr. Idiris explains how he lost a cow and had to spend days searching for it (photo from Polak’s blog).

Usman watches the robot perform his route with some truck driver friends — all university graduates. Initially somewhat baffled, they quickly start comparing notes about how they pass the time on the road, and which rest stops to avoid for fear of being robbed. At one point, the robot stops moving, and Polak wonders if it is broken — but then Usman remembers that he was stuck in a traffic jam for several hours, due to a fire in an overturned oil tanker.

IMAGE: Usman and Polak discuss his route (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Lagos traffic on the Peak milk route (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Car accident on the Peak route (photo from Polak’s blog).

Similarly, when Mr. Idiris describes his migration to the wet season pasturage, he explains that he initially headed north to Kaduna, even though he had heard something about a religious crisis there on the radio. Half way there, he met some other Fulani people who explained the danger was real, which caused an abrupt change in course.

IMAGE: Mr. Idiris explains a decision to migrate his herd to a new location, in order to avoid a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak (photo from Polak’s blog).

The robot tracks are thus both personal and systemic, capturing fluctuating ground conditions and individual decision-making processes, as well as the underlying mobilities of the two dairy economies.

IMAGE: Binta watches as her route is recreated (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: At the Peak milk depot, Usman and friends discuss their journeys (photo from Polak’s blog).

IMAGE: Usman and Mr. Idiris and family watch video footage of themselves narrating their routes (photo from Polak’s blog).

Bizarrely, Polak’s mapped juxtaposition of the traditional nomadic mobility of the Fulani with Peak’s globalised mobility has the effect of making the two economies seem more connected than their very different physical reality — cows and traditional dress versus shipping tankers and traffic — would otherwise suggest.

During their video-narratives, Usman starts talking about the health benefits of nonno, especially the nonno of your home village, while Binta tells Polak that she likes the rich and creamy flavour of Peak milk. A project that seemed as though it was all about contrasting two competing dairy economies — traditional versus industrial — actually ends up communicating the intensely personal spatial experiences embedded in each drop of milk, however it was produced.

[NOTE: Thanks to Dechen Pemba of the excellent blog High Peaks Pure Earth (one of the only places on the internet to read Tibetan commentary from within China, in translation) for the tip. Esther Polak's earlier work, tracing milk produced in Latvia as it journeys across the E.U., is also worth checking out.]

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