IMAGE: Vintage seed packet, from London’s lovely Garden Museum. According to Forgotten Fruits by Christopher Stocks, the Ailsa Craig is named after “an uncanny looking island of the Scottish coast,” which could, “with a little imagination, be said to bear a passing resemblance to a submerged onion of titanic size.” The island is “composed of a fine granite that provided the material for most of the world’s curling stones” and is now home to about 70,000 gannets.

The would-be vegetable tourist could do worse than start with Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits, a hugely enjoyable (re)introduction to the most important or interesting of Britain’s traditional and forgotten fruit and vegetable varieties. Tucked into the appendices is a map and gazetteer, “in the cause of stimulating local pride, as well as offering some intriguing destinations for a most enjoyable pilgrimage.”

IMAGE: A Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits)

The social, agricultural, and geographical history woven into just a brief introduction to Vaux’s Self-Folding lettuce or the Bedford Fillbasket brussels sprout is incredible.

Stocks’ suggested sites in Scotland, for example, would take the vegetable tourist from the Isle of Arran, where Donald Mackelvie bred the purple-skinned Arran Victory, to the Arbroath home of the Golden Wonder, a chance mutation discovered in a field of Maincrop by John Brown in 1906, and raw ingredient of the original ready-salted crisp.

Along the way, Stocks’ intrepid tourist would encounter William Sim, who abandoned potatoes in favour of emigration and carnations (his is still the best-selling carnation variety in America), as well as the Scottish Potato Bubble of 1900-04, fuelled in part by Archibald Findlay of Fife, a grocer’s son and breeder of optimistically named varieties such as Eldorado and Millionmaker.

IMAGE: A Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits)

IMAGE: Detail map, from the Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits). In Brixton, we find (58), (59), and (60), sites associated with the Prince Albert rhubarb, Victoria plum, and Victoria rhubarb. Brompton is home to (61), Kirke’s blue plum, while Lewisham’s claim to vegetable fame is (62), Hawkes’ Champagne rhubarb. Still south of the river, (63), James’s Longkeeping onion, is from Lower Marsh, Waterloo, while New Cross is the origin of (64), the Prince Albert pea.

Of course, the sceptic might be wondering what there actually is to see on the Scottish potato trail – and perhaps even speculating as to whether this kind of tourism might be more suited to the armchair adventurer. Speaking as one of the latter, I can confirm that Stocks’ series of gooseberry biographies and celery vignettes is perfectly suited for consumption as paperback non-fiction.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that vegetable writing is up there with wine label descriptions in the underappreciated micro-literature stakes, whether consumed in book form, or encountered on supermarket labels, seed packets, or the Heirloom Gazetteer™ iPhone app of the future.

IMAGE: A pride of potatoes. Photo from the Garden Museum‘s fascinating archive of gardening images.

Many of the stops on Stocks’ sightseeing itinerary have the potential to be somewhat underwhelming, given his descriptions. The original home of Cox’s Orange Pippin, which accounts for more than half of the dessert apples grown in the UK, is now underneath a “deeply uninspiring block of modern low-rise flats,” “sandwiched between Heathrow airport, the Queen Mother reservoir, and the M25.”

Meanwhile in Markinch, Scotland, the achievements of potato entrepreneur and pub landlord Archibald Findlay, father of the Up to Date and British Queen as well as the previously mentioned Eldorado and Millionmaker, have only recently been marked by a plaque outside the Chinese restaurant that replaced his Portland Bar.

Other varietals have been more fortunate. The Pershore Yellow Egg plum (“excellent for cooking and jam, if too dry to be pleasant eaten raw”) was first “discovered growing wild in Tiddesley Wood, just outside Pershore in Worcestershire, by a local man called George Crook.” Not only does Tiddesley Wood still survive, but the Yellow Egg still grows there, looked after by the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust.

IMAGE: A Pershore Yellow Egg growing in Tiddesley Wood, Worcestershire. Photo from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits).

Meanwhile, the original Bramley’s Seedling apple tree, which accounts for up to ninety percent of all cookers sold in Britain, is still growing in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. According to Christopher Stocks, “around 1900, it blew over in a storm and the present tree grew up from a toppled branch.” What’s more, on its 200th anniversary in 2009, this venerable grandfather of so many apple crumbles, dumplings, and pies was succesfully cloned by scientists at the University of Nottingham.

Clearly, the fates of significant fruit and vegetable heritage sites have varied. Stocks’ quotes H. V. Taylor, a fruit expert writing in 1948:

The breeders of the new plums seem to have less sentiment for plums than for apples, for whilst pilgrimages are made to see the original trees of Beauty of Bath, Ribston Pippin, Bramley’s Seedling, Newton Wonder, etc., no attempt was made to preserve the original trees of important plum varieties…

Today, as Stocks points out, the origins of the Beauty of Bath have become obscure, while the orchard behind the Hardinge Arms, where the Newton Wonder apple tree was first cultivated by another publican, William Taylor, was chopped down to build new houses in 2004.

The practice of vegetable tourism, then, is perhaps less about the chance to enjoy unspoilt countryside or pick-your-own heritage vegetables, as much as a crusade to revive traditional varietals and the stories attached to them.

It is also a question of which histories we value. After all, there are blue plaques all over London, marking the houses where celebrated writers, artists, and statesmen lived or worked – but there is no sign to mark the site of Joseph Kirke’s nursery, former home of Kirke’s Blue, now buried under the Victoria & Albert Museum. As Stocks concludes:

It would be a fairly safe (if possibly contentious) bet that Cox’s Orange Pippin, say, has given more pleasure to more people over the years than the works of William Wordsworth, and is probably known to more people too. But while Wordsworth’s homes in Grasmere, Ryadal, and Cockermouth have been preserved for posterity, the house and garden where Richard Cox lived were swept away long ago…

IMAGE: The original Bramley’s Seedling tree. Photo courtesy Joan Morgan.

Taste and biodiversity value aside, the origins of these heirloom fruit and vegetables are signposts to a lost geography – vanished market gardens that still send up the odd radish or strawberry, or stray plum varieties, presumed lost until rediscovered in the back gardens and parks of Devon villages.

As Stocks’ guide and gazetteer makes clear, forgotten fruit and vegetables can tell us as much, if not more, about all kinds of changes in British society, land use, and diet over time, than their successful cousins. The stories that lie behind the development, naming, and distribution of different fruit and vegetable varietals are a form of archaeobotanical evidence, testifying to the impact of the railways, the economics of fruit storage, or the efforts and achievements of individual plant hunters and breeders.

January’s perhaps not the best season, but why not visit an Orange Jelly turnip (Chester) or Telephone pea (Thorp Perrow, North Yorkshire) soon?

All images are from Consumables, a project by artist Boo Chapple, with photography by Bo Wong.

The other week, Pia Ednie-Brown, editor of the recently released book Plastic Green: Designing Bio-spatial Futures, sent in a copy of Consumables, a pamphlet by artist Boo Chapple that imagines a world in which mobile phones are edible.

Part-whimsy, part-critique, and part-home-chemistry-kit, Consumables is part of a larger project, Alchemy for a Global Economy, in which Chapple addresses what she calls “the emergent aesthetics of sustainability.”

Although Chapple has been experimenting with starch-based plastics in her mother’s kitchen, Consumables is not intended as a serious design proposal. Instead, Chapple’s project plays with the inherent absurdity of environmental solutions that rely upon continued, and unsustainable, levels of consumption.

After all, if phones were edible, writes Chapple, “you could buy a new one twice a week and know that you were contributing something to the world simply by wasting more.”

Leaving the element of critique – legitimate and clever as it is – aside, I like the project for two reasons:

1. The photography really makes the phones look tasty, and,

2. Chapple serves up some unforgettable imagery, including “organised gangs of shit poachers” who dominate a future trade in sewage panning and microcomponent recycling. Meanwhile, she speculates that for wealthy consumers, gastro-intestinal ring tones would become the new belly-button piercing:

After the first few large component incidents – someone with a GPS stuck in their small intestine, or a camera lodged in their colon – visceral mods would become quite the thing and getting an internal ring tone the new teenage right of passage.

In other words, by re-framing everyday objects in terms of food – now imagine edible paper towels, edible plastic bags, perhaps even edible SUVs! – Chapple makes the culture of consumption and the economics of waste freshly tangible.

Alison Bashford is Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, as well as Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her work has examined the political, cultural, and spatial implications of quarantine at a variety of different scales, from immigration law and geopolitics to the design of nineteenth-century hospitals.

She is the author of Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, and co-editor of both Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies and Medicine At The Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present.

We spoke to Bashford about the ways in which quarantine can both define and blur borders, the use of vaccination scars as health passports, and quarantine’s role in enforcing social hierarchy and racial prejudice.

•••

Edible Geography: To start with, how did you become interested in quarantine?

Alison Bashford: I got to quarantine through my early work on the concepts of purity and pollution. My first book, Purity and Pollution, was about how ideas about clean and dirty spaces and clean and dirty bodies, and the separation between them, came into being in the nineteenth century in the context of hospitals, and the discovery of germs, and so forth. After that first book, I started studying infectious disease management on a larger scale. I fairly quickly moved into looking at maps of early quarantine stations and the division of pure and polluted spaces there, as well as the various diseases that were managed that way.

My work is not always focused on Australia, but I quickly realised there was quite a particular Australian history to be sorted through here. Many diseases that have been endemic and epidemic in other parts of the world, such as cholera, never even arrived in Australia. In Australia, the quarantining of the entire continent came to be actually important in terms of keeping diseases out, but also symbolically incredibly important, as part of the project of producing White Australia. I gradually realised what a rich history there was in terms of thinking about the racialising of the new nation in 1901 as, essentially, a public health project.

After that, I became very interested in island spaces as well – places where people with various diseases were quarantined in a much more permanent way. Amusingly, I live right next to the quarantine station in Manly. I’d written about quarantine for a long time – long before I lived there – and it’s just been terrific, living on the place that I was writing about for so many years.

IMAGE: The North Head Quarantine Station, Manly, Australia. Photo by Edible Geography.

IMAGE: Spa treatment at Q-Station , Manly, Australia, via.

Edible Geography: It’s interesting what they’ve done to the quarantine station at Manly, in terms of turning it into a luxury hotel. The afterlife of quarantine stations is a fascinating topic in and of itself.

Bashford: Yes, absolutely. The developer gave me a good tour around it just before it opened. It was extraordinary listening to him talk about the concept of putting a day spa on the site of the old hospital buildings, which is were the most infected were kept.

BLDGBLOG: A great deal of your work examines the political nature of quarantine and the relationship between quarantine and the border. I was particularly struck by the fact that, in some cases, the biological border has preceded the national border, as in the case of the line between Egypt and Sudan.

Bashford: A lot of historians have written about borders, but I think what’s sometimes overlooked is that this temporary line, marked by quarantine practices that maintain a disease on one side of the border and not the other, is often the earliest sign of what later becomes a national, territorial border.

IMAGE: As Egypt and Sudan gained their independence from Britain, the border between the two countries was determined by drawing a straight line from the sea through Wadi Halfa, a quarantine station on the Nile (which is now an underwater archaeological site due to flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan Dam).

This is also the case with regional borders. The boundary between the nineteenth-century Orient (as the Near East used to be called) and Europe was the place where cholera was controlled. Various quarantine practices were set up every year in and around the Mecca pilgrimage, because there was constant European anxiety that this mass movement – in a place that is just adjacent to Europe – would introduce cholera into Europe itself. So that boundary, which was not an actual territorial border but, rather, an important part of how Europe defined itself in relation to its most adjacent neighbour, the Orient, was made meaningful through very specific, very grounded, practices of inspecting people, putting them in quarantine camps, and monitoring or restricting their movement.

IMAGE: Routes to Mecca, and pilgrims on the Hajj (via here and here).

Edible Geography: You’ve also examined the way these kind of disease borders can define cities as well.

Bashford: Yes – in Imperial Hygiene, I really explored this idea of boundaries at different scales. I structured that whole book spatially. I started with a chapter about smallpox, vaccination, and the border of the body and skin, and I looked at the way that a vaccine introduces disease into the body, in order to create immunity.

Then I moved outwards to the scale of the city. I took Sydney as a place that had certain diseased zones that were quite disordered, and analysed the way in which the establishment of the quarantine station on North Head – in Manly – was an attempt to create clean and dirty spaces within an urban environment.

Then I moved outwards again to think about the entire Australian continent – and outwards again to consider international hygiene and quarantine measures, and the way that the entire globe, due to immigration restriction acts over the twentieth century, became criss-crossed by all kinds of lines of quarantine.

Edible Geography: In that context, I was particularly interested in your paper tracing the origins of the World Health Organisation and public health as a globally regulated phenomenon back to the International Sanitary Conferences, which were themselves convened to implement quarantine.

Bashford: The question of how to manage infectious disease is foundational for the League of Nations Health Organisation, and then the World Health Organisation. In fact, even the large philanthropic organisations, like the Rockefeller’s International Health Board, were attempts to prevent infectious disease, both by quarantine and also by hygiene education. In nineteenth-century Europe, the International Sanitary Conventions and Conferences were, in the first instance, about cholera, and the concern about the annual pilgrimage.

What’s intrigued me for many years are the way immigration restriction lines dovetail as quarantine lines. In spatial terms, I’m fascinated by the way this division of pure and polluted spaces can be architectural at a very small and local level, but can also come to structure the globe as a whole.

Edible Geography: Can you give an example of an encounter with one of these quarantine lines today?

Bashford: Airports are places where the demarcations of  quarantine lines are very clear, and biological or biomedical terms like “Sterile Zone” still cling to the various clean and polluted zones. “Sterile Zone” doesn’t actually mean sterile zone – it indicates a zone into which only authorized people can go.

IMAGE: Thermal scanners in the airport arrivals hall, Bali, via.

Airports still make the link between quarantine and the regulation of movement very clear. Historically, quarantine laws were the main way in which people’s movement over national borders was regulated. Almost all of the immigration acts that proliferated around the globe in the nineteenth century (which we still live with, every time we hand over our passport) were about quarantine regulations. Every immigration restriction act across the world, even now, always has a “loathsome disease” clause in it.

Edible Geography: Can you talk a little more about the relationship between health passports, or pratique, and quarantine?

Bashford: What’s interesting is that all of these identity documents – passports, visas, health vaccine certificates, and so forth – only become attached to an individual relatively late in time. Through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and into the twentieth century, in some cases – these documents would refer to the vessel on which you arrived into a zone, rather than to you as an individual.

IMAGE: Italian Health Passport, via the Disinfected Mail Study Circle.

For a ship arriving in Sydney Harbour, for example, there would be a certificate of freedom from disease that pertained to the entire ship, and that would be determined by the route on which the ship had come. If the ship had come to Sydney from London via what was then Ceylon, and if there was known to be an epidemic of cholera or smallpox in Ceylon, then that entire ship would be understood to be diseased and it would be put in quarantine for a certain period of time. I’m very interested in the way that, in the maritime world, the passengers and ship became one body, which could then be categorised as infected or clean, irrespective of the health or otherwise of the individuals on board.

One thing that I’ve always wanted to do more work on is the actual bodily inspection of people to determine whether they’ve got a vaccine scar, from the smallpox vaccine. It’s something that I know was practiced, particularly during an epidemic. Historically, before you had a passport or even a piece of paper that authorized your movement from one zone into another, people were not infrequently checked for a vaccination scar. You could only move from what was understood to be an infected zone into a healthy zone if you had a vaccination scar. It became a kind of bodily passport.

IMAGE: Smallpox vaccination scar, via.

The other fascinating thing about quarantine is that it dreams of being non-porous, but in fact, quarantine lines are always leaky. Quarantine, like today’s passports and visas, is much more about letting some people through and keeping other people out, than enforcing a total border.

BLDGBLOG: I’m also interested in the phenomenon of proto-states testing the limits of their power through bio-political practices – that is, experimenting with how they can control and regulate individual people, and doing so in the arena of medicine. Medical power becomes a kind of stepping stone toward national sovereignty.

Bashford: Certainly, the display of a line around a country – and hence territorial sovereignty – can be put into practice very clearly through quarantine practices. That’s where we started our conversation. Immigration restrictions and quarantine practices go hand-in-hand as the two intertwined practices that determine a border as a border for modern kinds of territory. This takes place at an imaginary level.

But there is a flip side to all of this: the apparent imperative to maintain hygiene and keep out disease sets up the territorial boundaries of a nation, but it also gives that nation an almost humanitarian license to step over its own border and into the territory of another state. Patrick Zylberman and Alexandra Minna Stern wrote about this in my book, Medicine at the Border.

Alexandra Minna Stern, in particular, writing about U.S. quarantine and yellow fever, discussed the way that quarantine at Ellis Island was about inspecting migrants and excluding some people, and thus setting up a sovereignty for the United States. She then went on to show us how the very concern about yellow fever was also a way in which the United States government could offer assistance to, intervene in, and set up hygienic measures in all of the nations adjacent to the south, as a kind of a first way in. Unsurprisingly, this was followed pretty quickly, either by territorial acquisition of those places or by transnational agreements and other extensions of influence. After the Spanish-American War, in a whole lot of places like Cuba, and eventually Panama, Puerto Rico, and even Guam, the first U.S. inroads were around quarantine and infectious disease measures.

So while quarantine and infectious diseases function to set up territorial borders and national sovereignties, for powerful nations and nations with pretty good internal health structures the management of infectious disease in a place over the border is quite a common way to extend sovereignty into that territory.

Edible Geography: So quarantine contributes to both a spatial out-sourcing or in-sourcing of the border? Quarantine is also inherently a zone of transition, and a “neither-one-thing-nor-the-other” space between healthy and diseased, inside and out. Ultimately, it seems to both mark and disturb the clarity of the border.

Bashford: Exactly. One article that I wrote about quarantine and tuberculosis is called “Where is the border?” It came out of work I was doing with colleagues in the UK about the difference between the Australian history of quarantine and the British tradition.

In Australia, quarantine took place from the physical borders of the nation outwards – the border was pushed way back to the point of origin of any intending migrant. Most people came to Australia from England, and your certificates of health had to be secured before you even got on the ship. This is completely different to the British tradition, because the UK was not, until after World War II, a country of immigration. In fact, the UK had very, very weak, and sometimes completely absent, quarantine laws.

My UK colleagues told me that today, if you have tuberculosis and you arrive at Heathrow airport, you’re not asked to get back on the plane or to get back on the ship as you would be in Australia. Instead, your name and address is taken and you’re asked to see a doctor in your local area. You’re entirely brought within the borders of the country, and then quarantined or monitored.

IMAGE: Tuberculosis detected by X-ray, via.

These island nations have very different histories of where the border is located. Recent British governments have tried to bring in what they call the Australian model – a system where people get their health checks done at the point of departure. It seems to be much more problematic in the UK than it is for nations that have a long history of rigid quarantine rules.

BLDGBLOG: Finally, what examples come to mind in terms of places of quarantine that are particularly striking for spatial reasons?

Bashford: Molokai, Hawaii – that’s one of the original leper colonies dating back to 1865. It’s currently managed by the National Park Service, but there’s a community of people with Hansen’s Disease still living there. It’s a fascinating place. It’s an island within a very remote archipelago, and it’s also on a peninsula. It juts out sensationally underneath the world’s tallest sea cliff. The cliff separated the lepers from everybody else, even on the island, and the island itself was clearly chosen to be separate from the other islands in Hawaii. Natural geographies are being put to use here as a way to create a place of quarantine and isolation.

IMAGES: Molokai, via Atlas Obscura, and.

In addition, nineteenth-century maps of quarantine stations are fascinating for the way that they demarcate zones even within spaces of quarantine. Usually they are divided by race and class – in the nineteenth century, there is typically a specific building within the quarantine station for Chinese passengers, for example. To me, these intricate divisions of space within quarantine stations capture social divisions instantly, and almost too obviously.

IMAGE: Map of Lawlor Island Quarantine Station, showing 1st and 2nd Class accommodation, via.

However, the trenches, tanks, and shrapnel of World War I didn’t just wipe out an entire generation; they also redesigned the landscape of northern France. Formerly verdant arable land, studded with clumps of truffle-hosting beech, hazel, and oak trees, was replaced with a muddy moonscape. Thus deprived of its habitat, the truffle harvest shrank to a tiny fraction of its former size, and its value rose accordingly.

IMAGE: After the battle of Passchendaele.

While trying – unsuccessfully – to find the original source for this story, I realised that the abundant truffles in question would most likely have been the grey Tuber Uncinatum, or Burgundy truffle, whose ecological range includes northern France, rather than the more highly prized black Périgord variety, Tuber melanosporum, which prefers a Mediterranean climate. (The latter has seen its harvest size shrink dramatically too, but for different reasons.)

Nonetheless, the fact remains: truffles are a casualty of war.

IMAGE: (L) Tuber melanosporum; (R) Tuber Uncinatum (via Wikimedia).

Since landscape redesign is a constant military preoccupation, from Roman generals salting the fields of Carthage to U.S. soldiers spraying Agent Orange over Vietnam, one wonders how many foods have been removed from the menu by war? Entire flavour experiences, culinary traditions, and ways of life: the unremarked, monument-less victims of agro-ecological combat.

For our studio participants, we have been assembling a course pack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should make this material available to everyone so that even those people who are not in New York City, and not enrolled in the quarantine studio, can still follow along, offer commentary, and even be inspired to pursue projects of their own.

Thomas Mullen is the author of The Last Town on Earth, a novel set in a voluntarily quarantined village in the remote forests of the Pacific Northwest during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. From the book’s description:

The year is 1918. America is fighting a war on foreign soil that has divided the nation. Meanwhile, rumours of the spread of the deadliest epidemic ever are causing panic on the home front. The uninfected town of Commonwealth, Washington, votes to quarantine itself, and two young friends are asked to guard the town entrance and keep strangers out.

One day, a starving, cold—and seemingly ill—soldier comes out of the woods begging for sanctuary, and the two guards are confronted with an agonising moral dilemma.

The Last Town on Earth was named the Best Debut Novel of 2006 by U.S.A. Today – who describe it as “an absorbing depiction of a utopian town that attempts to keep the 1918 flu epidemic at bay” – and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Excellence in Historical Fiction.

We spoke to Mullen about his novel: the historical research that informed it, the moral implications of mass quarantine, and the inevitable impact of human fallibility on both political and medical utopianism.

• • •

Edible Geography: What sort of research went into writing the novel?

Thomas Mullen: The impetus for the book was an article that I read many years ago about an AIDS virologist who had studied the 1918 flu earlier in his career. It also mentioned, parenthetically, that there had been healthy towns in the Rocky Mountain states and in the Pacific Northwest that were so terrified by stories about how contagious the flu was, and how fatal it was, that they decided their best recourse for staying healthy was to block off all the roads leading into town and to post armed guards to prevent anyone from coming in. That just blew me away—it was amazing to read that this had happened—and I thought it would be a very dramatic first scene.

I was hooked by the moral dilemma of quarantine: what happens if, one day, you and your buddy are standing guard over your town and you’re presented with a lost traveler? He’s freezing, and he’s starving, and he’s begging for your aid. He needs food and shelter, or he might die. What do you do? Do you bring this person in? Do you try to be charitable, even if you know he might be carrying this awful virus that you don’t really understand? Again, it was 1918 and their understanding of the virus was certainly worse than ours is today. Or do you tell you the person: “Hey, I’m sorry, but I need to think of my friends and family and my town. I don’t know what you might be carrying, and you’re just going to have to die in the woods.”

That’s what made me want to write the book. I sat down and I read a few books about the 1918 flu—although I couldn’t find many. It had become this overshadowed chapter in history. That’s starting to change now; with the new concern about avian flu and H1N1, there’s been much more discussion of the 1918 epidemic. But, back when I started my research, it was hard to find much information.

I tried to find out about these towns that had done this—these sort of reverse-quarantines. That’s just a phrase that I invented; I don’t know if there’s a real phrase for it. Normally, quarantine is when something or someone is ill and they’re quarantined off so that they don’t spread their germs to the rest of us. But in this situation, the town that closes itself off is healthy. I called that reverse-quarantine.

I couldn’t really find anything out about these towns. In fact, when I was about three-quarters done with the rough draft, a historian named John Barry wrote what is now the definitive history of the 1918 flu, called The Great Influenza. I got that book and I read it—and it’s about 600 pages long, but he only gives about half a page to this phenomenon of Western towns that had closed themselves off. He says that it worked for some and it didn’t work for others—and that’s it.

IMAGE: Historical quarantine signage.

Edible Geography: Was reverse-quarantine a common phenomenon and just under-reported, or was it actually fairly rare?

Mullen: It doesn’t sound like it was very common. After all, if it only got about half-a-page in a 600-page book… It’s just something I could not find reference to very often.

They were probably small towns that were already fairly isolated, and therefore might not have left such a good paper trail for historians to write about. It must have been fairly unusual in the first place, because the flu spread very, very quickly, so usually it was too late. By the time you were thinking that maybe you should close the borders, people were already getting sick in your town—so you missed the opportunity.

Meanwhile, because our nation was at war, there was censorship of the press. Newspapers didn’t want to report bad news. People didn’t often know what was happening until it was too late. Instead, newspapers would have a little pick-me-up story about how some soldiers in a nearby army base had a bad case of the flu… but they’re feeling much better now. Meanwhile, people are looking out their windows and seeing hearses! If there had been a free press, and if the government had not been distracted by a war and had shared information about it sooner, it’s possible that more towns would have tried quarantine. But for most people, by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late.

I think the reason why the towns that did this were in the Rocky Mountains and in the Pacific Northwest was that they were inland and fairly isolated. The flu had started, most epidemiologists believe at this point, in army bases, and then it had traveled along the rail lines, from army base to army base; and from port to port—meaning cities like Philadelphia and Boston and New Orleans and San Francisco—and it gradually trickled inland. Some of the mountain states were the last to get infected – and they were the ones where, finally, the story was out. They were the ones who knew what was happening, so some of them were able to make this decision.

Ultimately, though, because I’m a novelist—I write fiction, and I can make things up—I decided, okay, maybe it’s better that I don’t know exactly what happened in these towns. Maybe that frees me up a bit. I did as much research as I could into how the epidemic worked, how the disease itself worked, and what the political environment was like at that time in America—what these characters were doing and what they were thinking about. But, as for what had actually befallen towns that tried this, I was sort of unconstrained by historical fact—which, I think, was a good thing.

BLDGBLOG: That raises the question of your own interest, as a novelist, in the idea of quarantine. What are the narrative possibilities of quarantine that drew you to it, as a plot device?

Mullen: As a novelist, you need there to be some stress, because that creates the tension between the characters. It leads them to act – sometimes in inappropriate or regrettable ways.

One of the things that I was really interested in doing with this book was studying the way in which people act differently from the way they would like to think they act, under stress. We have this idea of ourselves as good people, and we have these moral guidelines that we like to believe we follow, but when we feel threatened and we feel that our family is in danger, we tend to bend some of these rules. Whether that means shooting a stranger who’s trying to come into your town, or whether that means shutting out your neighbor because you think they might have a cold – things like that.

I was interested in looking at the stresses that these people would be under. First of all, externally, they feel they’re safe in their little town—but the world around them is dangerous, with everyone being ill. Also, in those political times, there were things happening that the utopians in my little mill town didn’t agree with; they’re very anti-war and anti-capitalist. They feel at odds with the world, and they’re closing themselves off from a world that they disagree with in many ways. But, then, when the disease does get into the town, then they’re at odds with each other: some are sick, some are healthy. Then there are new stresses that are introduced; they start running out of food, and out of things that they need to maintain their quarantine.

IMAGES: The town of Jerome, Arizona, during the 1918 flu outbreak; note the face masks. Courtesy of the Jerome Historical Society, via the Sharlot Hall Museum.

Edible Geography: Much of your book is focused on the moral dilemmas associated with implementing and enforcing quarantine. What drew you to that?

Mullen: That was something that I didn’t seek out to do, but, as I was writing the story, it came naturally. You have these utopian idealists and political activists who are anti-war and pro-union, and they’re early suffragists. Some of them support the quarantine because they want to stay healthy; they want to protect their families. But some of them, because their political beliefs are so strong, realize that, hey, I have these beliefs because I want to make the world a better place. I don’t want to just make my town a better place. And what are the moral implications of turning our back on a world that is suffering? Isn’t it our obligation to do something that would improve the world? Some people feel that the best way to make a better world is to focus on yourself, and on your own community, and to hope the world will emulate it. Others—more activist—think they need to get out there. I’m interested in that conflict.

And, of course, that line is itself blurred—because they all support the quarantine initially. Even those who opposed it refused to leave. So, theoretically, everyone in the town in chapter one is cool with the idea. But, as time goes on, some people are thinking, god, I’m bored, I want to get out of here; or we learn that they’ve been secretly sneaking out to visit women or buy booze. So even the people who had initially agreed with it came to feel that it had been imposed on them. They change their minds—but it’s too late.

BLDGBLOG: In a way, you illustrate the fundamental impossibility of a total quarantine: there’s always something getting in or getting out, usually due to human weakness or error.

Mullen: I can’t remember if that’s something that I always intended—that I was going to have these people sneaking out—or if that was something that came up halfway. But it just seemed right to me. The whole dilemma of utopian politics, in general, is: can we really make the world a perfect place? I think there is enough human frailty and vice out there that something will always sabotage it.

Medically speaking, I know that quarantine can work, but, with something on the scale of a whole town, I can’t help but wonder: would it really work? It didn’t in the book because it was this slapdash affair; you’ve got randomly chosen people standing guard. But I think if it were to happen now, with a city or a state, you’d have National Guard or police or army officers standing guard, and I don’t think they would bend quite the way my characters would bend. But then you have the other problem—where it becomes a police state—and people aren’t allowed to come and go. It might work to keep the disease out, and people might thank them for that, but they might also feel like their rights were being violated. It gets really complicated.

IMAGE: A sick ward for those infected with the 1918 Spanish flu.

Edible Geography: Why do you think there has been such a historical silence about the epidemic?

Mullen: My partly cynical answer is that we Americans just don’t know our history very well!

I did a panel once with two other writers who both had novels set during World War I, and they were both British. They talked about how World War I is a big deal in the UK: how everybody knows about it; you see plaques everywhere listing the dead; and there were some towns where, in one night, the entire population of young men died, because they had this idea that men in the same town could enlist together and fight in the same regiment. This meant that you got to enlist with your friends, and you got to fight with your friends, which was great for morale—but what it also meant it that you died with your friends. There were literally towns where all the young men died on the same day, in one of those major battles.

It was a profound experience for so much of Europe, where they fought the war for years on their home soil. For America, on the other hand, we were only involved militarily for about year. We declared war earlier on, but it took a while just to get an army together, because we didn’t even have a standing army. And, of course, it wasn’t fought on our own soil. So the flu took place during the war, and the war itself is just not very well-taught or well-understood here.

But, also, in terms of why do people know about the war and not the flu, can it be that history textbooks can only handle one big subject at once? They’re writing about the war and they just didn’t think they needed to mention the flu? A disease doesn’t have the geopolitical themes that you get to play with when you’re teaching about a war or a politician or a movement; it was this horrible thing that just happened.

Also, I wonder how much of it was simply the fact that the people who lived through it just wanted to build a wall around those memories; they didn’t have our mindset, where we need to come to terms with our past and expose our scars in order to find closure. I think the survivors, to some degree, probably felt that it’s over – and it was horrible – but the last thing to do was to talk about it.

At this point, it’s enough generations away that there’s very little memory of it left – people only remember being told about it. Another horrible thing about the flu was that it killed so many adults and it left so many orphans. A lot of the survivors were very young children, who really don’t remember it for themselves.

But it was interesting to me that so many of the great literary lions in the early 20th century were people who lived through this when they were teenagers or young adults—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck—and none of them wrote about it. It now seems like of course you would write about this.

Somewhat disappointingly, this turned out to be a publicity stunt on the part of Friends of the Earth, complete with protesters wearing corn costumes and waving banners. Nonetheless, the story behind the stunt is fascinating.

IMAGE: Friends of the Earth protesting on behalf of non-GM corn (AFP/Dominique Faget).

The only GM crop currently authorised for commercial cultivation in the EU is Bt maize, which has been engineered to resist the corn borer pest.  According to this report issued by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the EU member country with the largest amount of Bt maize under cultivation is Spain:

In 1998, the first planting of Bt corn (transgenic event Bt-176 by Syngenta, Basel) in Spain reached 20,000 hectares. The cultivated area remained fairly stable up to 2003, when the EU approved another Bt corn (transgenic event MON-810 by Monsanto, St. Louis). By 2006, over 53,000 hectares of Bt corn were grown in Spain—15% of the country’s total corn hectarage.

IMAGE: Non GM corn and the corn borer pest (Wikimedia).

However, France (and several other EU countries, including Germany) have banned the cultivation of Bt corn MON-810, citing concerns “related to the long-distance dissemination of pollen, the disposition of the Bt toxin in the environment and its long-term effects on non-target organisms.” David Carpio Sanchez, “spokesperson” for the non-GMO corn, claimed that,

GM corn is grown in Spain without any precaution against contamination…. Faced with this threat to its survival, the corn is forced to flee the country. Better to become French than genetically modified!

Plants cannot (yet) legally claim asylum, but the idea that corn might seek to change its citizenship for fear of inter-species persecution is a perfect illustration of the logical absurdity built into the (very necessary) project of plant health management. The problem is that while national governments possess the legislative authority to regulate plant movement, plants and their pollinators tend to observe biological borders, rather than state sovereignty.

So, on the one hand, you have plant movement controlled through many of the same legal mechanisms that apply to humans: plant passports, plant repatriation, and plant quarantine. (In the UK, much of this legislation is managed by the fantastically named Natural England.)

Meanwhile, the plants themselves are merrily cross-pollinating, and extending or shifting their “natural” range across national borders in response to climatic or environmental conditions, frequently in direct contravention of the laws governing their movement by humans.

The use of legal devices to enforce biological barriers is, of course, at the heart of quarantine regulations. Perhaps one outcome of this autumn’s “Landscapes of Quarantine” design studio could be draft legislation to establish a protocol for international agricultural asylum?

For a more practical exploration of the challenges involved in enforcing plant quarantine, look out for a forthcoming interview (to be posted here and on BLDGBLOG) with the Plant Health Protection Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

IMAGE: Mossman Sugar Mill. All mill photos by the author.

Last month, BLDGBLOG and I joined a small group (consisting mostly of wheat farmers on a busman’s holiday) to visit Mossman mill, which is just up the road from Cairns.

As it happens, we are apparently on the brink of a sugar crisis, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Americans might face an autumn without sugar (“Can you imagine an America with no sugar? demanded comedian Stephen Colbert in response. “Juice would contain nothing but 10% juice!”)

On this apocalypic note, then, below are a couple of highlights from our tour through Australia’s northernmost sugar mill.

IMAGE: Stage 1: Emptying billets of sugar cane into the shredder, which ruptures the cane’s cells to release the juice.

IMAGE: Each canetainer’s contents are processed separately until its sweetness level can be measured, so that the grower’s payment can be calculated correctly.

The milling process appears to begin once the canetainers are emptied into the shredder – but, in fact, the mill’s influence extends far beyond its gates, to impose a rigorous policy of sunshine equality across the entire growing region.

The rationale behind this ambitious program of solar rationing lies in the fact that the amount a farmer is paid for their sugar cane is determined by this simple equation: tonnage multiplied by sweetness. Tonnage can be increased by the usual agricultural means – fertiliser, irrigation, breeding more productive varietals, or simply sowing a larger acreage – but the most effective way to increase sweetness levels is simply to allow the cane crop more time in the sun.

The problem is that sugar cane is a highly perishable crop that needs to be processed within eighteen hours of harvest; harvest can only take place during the dry season; Mossman mill can only crush 350 tons per hour; and last year, the region produced 792,000 tons of raw cane.

As a result, nearly a fifth of the sugar cane crop has to be harvested as early as June – missing out on four whole months of sunshine. Unsurprisingly, few farmers volunteer to go first; hence the need for the mill to institute its own sunshine equalisation system. The HarvSched database combines cane type, age, and projected yield with mill capacity in order to generate a five-month-long harvesting schedule of scrupulous fairness and optimal productivity.

IMAGE: Sample HarvSched-generated solar equalisation plan.

Each farmer’s land is divided up into dozens of smaller chunks, each of which is then given its own unique harvest date. Following the HarvSched plan means that the mill receives a steady supply of sugar through the season, the farmers receive an equal dosage of sunshine relative to acreage, and the harvesting crews enjoy a regular and refreshing change of scene.

This idea of scientifically allocating sunshine seems parodically Soviet – both heroically rational and intrinsically absurd. It would make the perfect plot device for a Viktor Pelevin short story: an electromechanical engineer embarks on a quixotic mission to achieve total solar equality across the vast collectivised farms of the USSR, eventually replacing the unreliable original star with a monumental array of mono-frequency lamps and parabolic mirrors.

IMAGE: Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003), Tate Modern, via Infranet Lab.

Elsewhere at Mossman mill, scientists are at work altering the chemistry of sugar itself.

Last year, for example, food scientist Dr. Barry Kitchen managed to lower the GI, or glycaemic index, of sugar to 50. For those who aren’t South Beach Diet veterans, GI is a measure of how quickly carbohydrates release glucose into the bloodstream during digestion. High GI foods (70+ on a scale of 100) release glucose quickly, leading to blood sugar spikes, which aren’t good, especially for diabetics.

Ordinary sugar is actually only a medium GI food (65, the same as rice and sweet potatoes), but by adding more of the polyphenols, minerals, and organic acids found in molasses back into the sugar at the centrifuge stage, Dr. Kitchen managed to produce LoGicane, the world’s first low GI sugar.

IMAGES: Freshly-harvested cane being processed into cane syrup at Mossman mill.

The process was only perfected in time for the last three weeks of the 2008 crush, producing just 600 tons of this new version of sugar. That was enough to launch in the Australian market, and it’s been sufficiently popular that the Mossman mill was producing sacks of it during my visit – our sample looked and tasted like demerara.

As a next step, Dr. Kitchen and his team in the Horizon Science Shed at Mossman are also planning to use molasses to cure obesity. Incredibly, their website claims that:

Horizon Science has identified a range of phytochemicals in molasses capable of positively changing body composition. The range of molasses phytochemicals has never been previously identified because of the focus in sugar processing to produce pure white sucrose products.

When fed to animals on a high fat diet, our molasses extract has been shown to significantly reduce body fat and increase lean muscle mass.

In an alarmingly perfect inversion, it seems as though the part of sugar cane that we usually discard in processing actually reduces body fat and promotes lean muscle mass; the part we keep makes us fat and sick.

IMAGE: Sugar crystals are separated out from the molasses in which they are suspended through centrifugal force. Typically the mixture, called  massecuite, is run through the centrifuge three times – but that number can go up or down depending who the sugar is destined for. The Japanese prefer a little more molasses in their raw sugar (no doubt to bring the taste closer to their traditional wasanbon with its honey and butter overtones) compared to the South Koreans and Malaysians. Together, the three countries import the bulk of Australia’s raw sugar production each year.

IMAGE: Mossman mill

The slightly Heath Robinson, steam-era appearance of Mossman mill belies the intense innovation underway in sugar cane agriculture and processing. Indeed, the Australian government has committed to investing AUS $28 million in sugar industry research over the next seven years, citing sugarcane as “the ideal biofactory – one of nature’s most efficient converters of sunlight and water into biomass.”

Current projects range from “shoot architecture modification to boost cane and sugar yields” to genetic alterations designed “to give sugarcane the ability to express alternative, marketable products” – particularly biofuels and bioplastics (pdf).

IMAGE: QUT waterproof paper developed with sugar cane waste, with its inventors (L-R) Dr Les Edye, Dr Bill Doherty, and Dr Peter Twine, CRC CEO.

We were touring a century-old factory for reducing cane into sugar – but the sugarcane itself is the factory of the future.

IMAGE: Pigs on a farm, via

Still, at least one pig (#05049, to be precise) has found its champion, in the form of Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma. Her project, PIG 05049, investigates the incredible afterlife of the animal of the same name. While Pig 05049 was alive, its future was clear-cut: it was slaughtered a few years ago. But Pig 05049′s fate, post-death, is surprising, enlightening, and filled with marvelous variety.

Meindertsma has researched the fate of every last porcine molecule, collecting and documenting a total of 187 different products that include some part of Pig 05049. Her collection – one of each item, packaged like cuts of meat in individual polystyrene trays – is currently on display at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal. Meindertsma then photographed each item to create a gorgeous book, also called PIG 05049, which has all but sold out its second print run already.

IMAGES: PIG 05049, on display at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal.

As the exhibition and book demontrate, Pig 05049′s earthly remains went on to become beer, medicine, cardiac valves, train brake discs, and bubblegum, as well as the more predictable pork tenderloin, ham, and bacon.

Pig 05049′s snout became a deep fried dog treat, while its bristles yielded the amino acid L-cysteine, used to soften industrially produced bread. Gathered together, Pig 05049′s end products weigh 103.7 kilograms, of which only 54 kilos are meat.

“The most surprising thing is the ammunition,” says Christien Meindertsma, in this video about the project. “There is one bullet in the book, which is made by a very large ammunition producer in the United States. They use part of the pig for distributing the gunpowder into the bullet.”

IMAGES: PIG 05049 in book form. The yellow thing on the book’s spine is a replica pig ear tag.

PIG 05049 recently won a prestigious INDEX: Award, which honors “design projects that improve life internationally.” Meindertsma is not interested in simply provoking disgust at the idea that fortified yogurts use calcium from pig bones or that haemoglobin from pig’s blood is used to manufacture cigarette filters.

Instead, PIG 05049‘s goals are much simpler, and much more interesting: to make the connection between natural resources and consumer products visible again – and in so doing, enable us to consider whether we are putting those precious and limited resources to their best use. After all, as Meindertsma says on the INDEX: Awards webpage:

There are very many steps between the raw material and the end product in modern commercial production. And because there are so many steps in between, the knowledge gets lost. For instance, the pig farmers also don’t know all the end-products that are made from their pigs because they just don’t know where it goes.

In taking good care of the Earth, basically, the first step is knowing where our things come from.

According to brewing suppliers Seven Bridges Cooperative, “Saaz hops have long been revered as the very mild, spicy, earthy aroma hop associated with European Lagers. This is the hop you will want for your finest European style Pilsners, and it will shine in wheat beers and Belgian style ales.” The delicate bitterness of Czech pilsners is a result of the alpha acid levels in Saaz hops; the best quality hops contain approximately 5% alpha acids, to produce a pale brew with a soft hop aroma but low bitterness.

IMAGE: A nice cold glass of pilsner lager, or five (via Beersmith).

After examining Czech weather patterns, crop yield, and hop quality records dating back to 1954, climatologist Martin Mozny and his colleagues at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute found that “the concentration of alpha acids in Saaz hops has fallen by 0.06 per cent a year since 1954.” The study blames increased air temperature caused by climate change, and warms that “models of hop yields and quality under future global warming scenarios predict bigger decreases” in the future.

In short, climate change doesn’t just change the climate; it also changes the taste of Pilsner Urquell.

The collective failure to act decisively to halt climate change has been blamed, at least in part, on a general inability to visualise the disastrous consequences of our carbon emissions. As just one example, take US Representative Michael Burgess, R-TX, who declared, “I don’t really know what a ton of carbon dioxide looks like,” before voting against the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (as reported by Mother Jones).

IMAGE: From Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project.

Clearly, then, projects that make the impact of climate change visible (such as Chris Bodle’s awesome Watermarks installation, Angela Palmer’s forthcoming ghost rainforest in Trafalgar Square, or many of the projects featured at the RSA’s fascinating Arts and Ecology program blog) are much needed.

But what if you could make climate change edible, not just visible? Could you create a Climate Change Tasting Menu?

As a sort of amuse-bouche, the Climate Change Tasting Menu could offer local foods and drink that actually taste worse because of climate change – such as traditional Eastern European pilsners. The starter would feature new products that have only recently been cultivated locally, thanks to climate change – Devon olive oil perhaps, accompanied by a nice glass of Kent rosé. The main course might be controversial: test-tube grown imitation meats and vegetables that recreate the flavour and mouthfeel of species that are already lost or threatened with extinction by climate change. Finally, dessert would take the form of a fruit lottery, as harvests become erratic in response to climate change-induced extreme weather events.

IMAGE: The fruit lottery.

After all, our dietary choices have a huge impact on climate change. Perhaps the experience of actually tasting that impact could provide the impetus to change our food culture for the better?

IMAGE: “Endothelium“, by Philip Beesley

Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff speculates on the agricultural possibilities of “Endothelium“, an organic, automated geotextile designed by architect Philip Beesley, in which “low-power miniature lights” pulse and “enriched seed-patches” foster microbial growth:

I’d genuinely like to see what Beesley might do if he was hired by, say, a NASA R&D program dedicated to terraforming other planets. Could you fly a modular, self-unfolding Philip Beesley sculpture into the depths of radiative space, land it on a planet somewhere, and watch as revolting pools of bacteriological mucus begin to coagulate and form new fungi?

Beesley’s whiskered vibrators begin to shiver with signs of piezoelectric life, as small crystals surrounded by radio transmitters and genetically engineerined space-seed-patches imperceptibly tremble, evolving into mutation-prone “organic batteries” unprotected beneath starlight. Give it a thousand years, and vast infected forests, the width of continents, take hold.

You’ve colonized a distant planet through architecture and yeast.

Read more over at BLDGBLOG.