Author Archives: Nicola

The Art and Reward of Penguin Charming

IMAGE: “Penguin Interviews,” from Frederick Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1896-1899, via Peter Smith, Food & Think. Very good news: my former colleague at GOOD, Peter Smith, has joined the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog as a regular contributor. Among his early posts is this one, on a highly effective scurvy prevention technique pioneered [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

P. O. Bread Box

IMAGE: Damien Petit and his “Boîte A Pain,” photo by La Dépêche du Midi. Both natives and non-natives alike tend to agree that bread is central to French cuisine, history, and national identity. Indeed, Steven Kaplan, a Cornell University professor who has spent the past forty years studying French society through its bread, argues that, [...]
Posted in City of Mobile Services, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

How to Clone Mineral Water

Although the secret recipe for Coca-Cola is known to fewer people than the U.S. nuclear arsenal’s launch codes, there are other, more expensive fizzy drinks whose exact ingredient ratios are proudly revealed on every label. Helpfully, several websites have aggregated this information into searchable databases, so that you can easily find the total dissolved solids in [...]
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Sensory Maps

IMAGE: Smell Edinburgh by Kate McLean (view larger) Victoria Henshaw, whose own urban smell research formed the subject of my last post, recently introduced me to Edinburgh-based designer Kate McLean’s Sensory Maps series. Since moving to the city two years ago, McLean has spent hours exploring it on foot and noting down both her own [...]
Posted in Smellscapes | 3 Comments

Smell-designing Sheffield

IMAGE: Victoria Henshaw’s Sheffield smell walk, mapped. Regular Edible Geography readers will know that smellscapes are a recurring subplot of this blog — a diversion that I justify on the basis that roughly ninety percent of what we perceive as taste is actually smell. For the most part, the built environment consists of accidental and [...]
Posted in Smellscapes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Cake Bruise

Artist/pastry-chef Victoria Yee Howe is in the final days of a residency in the kitchen of Arabica Lounge in Seattle, where she has been creating avant-garde dessert specials two times a week, as well as planning a grand closing party of multisensory stimulation.* IMAGE: Six bruises, six cakes; art and photo by Victoria Yee-Howe. In [...]
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Spaces of Banana Control

When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says “Bananas!” IMAGE: All photos from our visit to the Banana Distributors of New York were taken by me, unless otherwise noted. Rosenblatt ships a million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of New York facility on Drake Street, in the Hunt’s Point section of [...]
Posted in Artificial Cryosphere, Day Out | 16 Comments

Pigeon Barriers and Rat Runs

My new favourite art prize is the Szpilman Award, which exists to promote “such works whose forms consist of ephemeral situations.” The idea of canonising art whose very nature is fleeting is compelling, in a quixotic kind of way. Meanwhile, the works themselves are understated and charming, yet illustrate the seemingly infinite potential to see [...]
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The Atlas of Aspirational Origins

Provenance is a tricky issue. Over the past few years, the names of agricultural regions, villages, and even specific farms have proliferated on urban menus and shelf labels, providing the aspirational consumer with a shorthand guarantee of authenticity, taste, and, often, local origin. The idea is that by listing the farm on which your heirloom [...]
Posted in Publishing Food | 13 Comments

Thrilling Wonder Food

As part of the rather exciting line-up for the transatlantic speculative design fiction-fest that is the third annual edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories, I am delighted to be moderating a panel on future food. IMAGE: Cricket Lick-Its enable you to fully appreciate the texture of edible insects; we will be sampling these on Saturday (photo [...]
Posted in Events | 2 Comments