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Category Archives: Digest
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” [...]
Also posted in 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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The Amazing Allegorical Synthetic Fish
Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire popularised the ingenious idea that the biographies of plants provide us with a mirror in which we can see our own history, desires, and values. The triumph of corn, for example, tells us a wealth of stories, from the biological imperative behind our weakness for sweetness to the economic drivers that lead us to subsidise commodity crops so they sell for less than they cost to grow. The relationship is a feedback loop whereby corn has evolved to suit the needs of industrial agriculture, which supplies a food system that has been shaped by corn.
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Multifunctional Desserts
In a 1976 episode of Saturday Night Live, Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner starred in a short ad for New Shimmer: a miraculous new product that was “both floor wax and a dessert topping!” IMAGE: “New Shimmer” on Saturday Night Live, “for the greatest shine you ever tasted!” While a close look at [...]
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Ginger Biscuits and Deodorant Guns
IMAGE: A unintentional theme from the Headspace: Scent As Design conference – at least three different speakers used this random archival photo in their presentations. In his book The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr describes the case of Janet Rippard, “a former nurse living in rather a remote part of Scotland.” Rippard was suffering from [...]
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Digest | Feeding the Bronx
The Center for Urban Pedagogy has created an awesome new video that explores some of the economic and consumer forces that combine to create the South Bronx foodscape. It’s called Bodega Down Bronx, and you can watch it in full (a half hour well spent) over over at Design Observer, where it premiered earlier this [...]
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Digest | Of Civil Wars, Diaspora, and Culinary Nostalgia
When Fuschia Dunlop, a British cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine, was compiling material for her recent book on Hunanese food, she faced a difficult decision: to include, or not to include, a recipe for General Tso’s Chicken. IMAGE: General Tso’s Chicken as served in San Francisco, via Flickr user Rick Audet. For [...]
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Digest | London Yields, Harvested
London’s Building Center hosted a daylong seminar at the end of May called London Yields: Getting Urban Agriculture off the Ground. The speakers covered a lot of terrain—so, instead of a full recap of the event, the following list simply explores some of the broader ideas, responses, and questions about urban agriculture that stood out [...]
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Spaces of Prohibition