Author Archives: Nicola

Save the Date: Foodprint Toronto

IMAGE: Foodprint Toronto (logo designed by the awesomely talented Nikki Hiatt). The sharp-eyed among you — or at least the sharp-eyed among those of you who visit the site rather than reading through RSS — might have noticed the CN Tower has replaced the Empire State Building in the Foodprint logo. It’s true: Sarah Rich [...]
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The Tyburn Angling Society

A tip passed along from BLDGBLOG’s meeting with documentary filmmakers tracing lost rivers in cities all over the world led me to the Tyburn Angling Society, and its curious confluence of daylighting, urban foraging, and legislative archaeology. IMAGE: The crest of the Tyburn Angling Society, from Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation, available here as a [...]
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The Axis of Food

La Central de Abasto de la Ciudad de México is enormous. It sprawls across a 327 hectare site on the eastern edge of the D.F., dwarfing fellow wholesale food markets such as Hunt's Point (24 hectares), Tsukiji (23 hectares), or even the massive Rungis, outside Paris (232 hectares).
Posted in Day Out, Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Talking Nose

Artist Sissel Tolaas was one of the people I most wanted to speak at Postopolis! DF, having seen her discussing smell as design in New York earlier this year. Although she was not able to join us in person, she generously allowed me to screen her olfactory investigation of Mexico City, Talking Nose — which was also the first time the video and soundtrack had been seen and heard in the place where it was made.
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Julio the Sewer Diver

Long-time Pruned readers (which I encourage you all to become, if you are not already) might remember a short post from January 2007, which introduced Carlos Barrios, a former accountant turned official Mexico City sewer diver. These Washington Post descriptions of his workday spent immersed in “garbage, bacteria, excrement, dead animals—even the occasional murder victim” [...]
Posted in Digest, Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Fueling Mexico City: A Grain Revolution

Apologies for the prolonged silence here at Edible Geography. It is one of the ironies of Postopolis!—the blogger-curated “Ponzi scheme of ideas” (in the words of its co-founder Joseph Grima) whose most recent iteration took place last week in Mexico City—that there is not really enough time to post during the event itself.
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Postopolis! DF: Schedule Announced

IMAGE: Canned chiles in a Mexico City supermarket by Flickr user hmerinomx. With less than a week to go, the schedule for Postopolis! DF has been announced, and it’s going to be an amazing week. I’m especially excited to introduce the speakers I invited, who (if I do say so myself) make an eclectic, prestigious, [...]
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The Dust of Our Ancestors

A couple of weeks ago, Berlusconi mouthpiece Il Giornale ran an article alleging that Naples' pizza ovens are fuelled by "wood from coffins dug up in the local cemetery":
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Archaeo-alcohology

IMAGE: Dogfish Head’s Theobroma next to Patrick McGovern’s Uncorking the Past. With just a few hours left in this apartment, and much yet to be packed, it’s time to crack open the bottle of Dogfish Head’s Theobroma beer that has been lingering in the fridge, futilely awaiting an occasion when my taste buds and typing [...]
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Sixty-Six Percent Natural

IMAGE: Screen grab showing global agricultural land-use in 1700, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. At Bill Rankin’s fantastic Radical Cartography site you can see an animation that shows the intensification and spread of agricultural land-use around the world over the past three hundred years. IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1750 and [...]
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