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.

These Washington Post descriptions of his workday spent immersed in “garbage, bacteria, excrement, dead animals—even the occasional murder victim” certainly stuck with me, so when the organizers of Postopolis! DF asked me to select five guest speakers with a unique and intriguing perspective on the geography of Mexico City, I set my heart on tracking down a sewer diver.

IMAGE: Stills from a short 2006 National Geographic video about Mexico City’s sewer divers. Carlos Barrios is lowered into the sewer in the cage.

After all, the infrastructure of waste disposal is the (frequently invisible) corollary of consumption, and who better to map its patterns and peculiarities than someone who spends all day submerged in the city’s various excreta? In addition, the sewage system is intimately tied to the city’s fascinating—and pressing—water issues: indeed, both are managed by one government agency, the Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de México.

The topic of water actually came up earlier during the week at Postopolis, when one of Jace Clayton’s invited speakers, architect and urban planner Jorge Legoretta, traced Mexico City’s hydrological history and predicted that it will suffer a serious flood in the next twenty to thirty years.

IMAGE: Jorge Legorreta compared the basin in which Mexico City sits to the traditional molcajete, a basaltic mortar used to make salsas and guacamole.

In his fascinating presentation, Legorreta explained that Mexico City lies in a basin ringed by volcanoes, into which forty-five different rivers drain (some glacier-fed and seasonal, others year-round). Indeed, the city’s Aztec precursor, Tenochtitlan, was actually built on an island surrounded by lakes and criss-crossed by canals. These lakes and waterways were promptly drained by the Spanish conquistadors in order to deprive the Aztecs, with their lightweight and manoeuvrable canoes, of any military advantage.

IMAGE: The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was a city of canals and artificial islands built on a lake.

To make matters worse, Mexico City is now pumping water up from its aquifer so fast that it is sinking an average of seven centimetres per year (up to forty-four centimetres per year in some parts of the city). As a result, many older parts of the city’s mixed wastewater and sewage system have lost their grade, making the task of draining the city during the rainy season’s intense thunderstorms even more challenging.

Until a recent renovation in 2008, the system’s principal canal—“the most important pipe in the country” according to Ramon Aguirre, Director of the Sistema de Aguas—had not been emptied and repaired in thirty-five years.

IMAGE: A team carrying out the first maintenance operations in more than thirty-five years during a 28-day shut down of the Emisor Canal in 2008. Photo via Water and Waste Water International.

To maintain this fragile, overburdened system, Mexico City relies on a team of two divers—the only sewage divers in the world. On Saturday, June 12, at Postopolis! DF, we were lucky to be joined by one of them: Julio Cou Cámara.

A cheerful and charming middle-aged man with a couple of missing teeth and an evident pride in his work, Julio described his twenty-seven year career diving blind beneath the streets of the city, clearing blockages and repairing infrastructure in order to prevent the kinds of catastrophic floods predicted by Legorreta. His presentation is transcribed below.

•••

Julio Cou Cámara: Good afternoon, my name is Julio and I’m a diver in the sewage here in Mexico City. What I do is a bit weird. Most people, when I tell them that I’m a diver, they think, “Oh wow, that’s beautiful—the ocean and the beach.”

But no, we are divers of the sewage.

I’m part of a team, and we work for the government in DF, in the Sistema de Aguas. We’re a water emergency team, so we participate in everything that has to do with flooding and repairing drainage systems. Under the city, under the streets where you walk, that’s where we dive.

What we mostly do is maintenance. We repair pumps, we take out debris—we take out bodies of animals, bodies of people, and all the rubbish. There’s so much rubbish in the drainage system, it’s very harmful to us and to the city.

IMAGE: Julio with his family at Postopolis! DF.

People are always wondering why there’s so much flooding in the city. I can tell you that the city floods because of all the rubbish that creates blockages in our drainage system. If we were maybe a bit more conscious about rubbish and we didn’t throw it on the street, we wouldn’t have this many flooding problems in the city. People complain—they say, “There’s almost a lake in the street.” Well, yeah—that lake is there because of your rubbish.

The drainage system is constantly being maintained—all year long, twenty-four hours a day, there are people working. They need a diver when they can’t stop the pumping plant, because if they stopped it, the city would be flooded. That’s when they ask for my help. We go there and we see what the problem is and we do the job.

We work blindly in the black water. It contains animal poo, human poo, hospital waste… any kind of pollution you can think of. All of that is in the sewage water. That’s where we work. Right now there are only two of us diving for Mexico City.

I brought some of my equipment. Many people think we scuba dive, but no: we use specific equipment. It’s technically quite different—we have different air hoses and compressors, and so on. Because we can’t see what we’re doing and it’s completely dark down there, we don’t have the same instruments. There are people on the surface with computers telling me where I’m going and what I’m doing.

IMAGE: Julio demonstrates his sewage diving equipment to the audience at Postopolis! DF

This is my helmet or mask. [lifts up helmet] It’s quite heavy. Inside, we have a microphone and headphones so that we can communicate with the surface. They give us instructions from above.

This is my drysuit. [lifts up drysuit] These Norwegian suits that we have, they’re one-piece suits that are hermetically sealed. I could it put on over what I’m wearing right now and dive, and my clothes wouldn’t get wet at all. I’d just put on my gloves and attach the air hose and then I’d be ready to start working.

IMAGE: Julio demonstrates his sewage diving equipment to the audience at Postopolis! DF

People often ask me what I see down there. Do I find money or jewellery?  No, you can’t really see any of those things. Montezuma’s treasure may be down there, but I will most likely never find it, because you can’t see anything—all you can do is feel blockages.

In terms of things we come across: we find lots of cigarette butts. I’ve had blockages caused by pieces of carpets, pieces of cars, or even body parts. Removing these kinds of things from the sewage is part of our work. People who work nearby or are walking past think, “Look at that crazy guy, he’s getting into the sewage.” But yeah, of course—that’s just what we do.

A normal day for me… well, what can I tell you? I go into the office, and if there are no emergencies then we work on maintaining the equipment. This equipment has to be in one hundred percent perfect condition—it mustn’t fail. My other colleague and I have our gear ready at all times. We work during the night as well as during the day. It’s not as though day or night makes a difference for us, because we can’t see anything down there anyway.

There are about fifteen pumping plants around the city and they vary in depth from eight to fifteen and even twenty metres. The deep sewage pipes in Mexico City are from fifty metres to two hundred metres below the surface. There are 650 kilometres of pipes. All of the city’s waste-water and sewage runs through these pipes, and most of it ends up going all the way to the state of Hidalgo.

Sewage leaves the loo in your house—that’s the primary source—and it goes to a secondary collection system in the street, and then it goes down to the deep sewage.

I’m not sure what else I can tell you. I’m fascinated by the job that I do. Even though not many people see it or know about it, I believe we do a very important job for all of us. Sometimes you can’t stop the pumping plant or you can’t dig up the street and get to the sewage pipes from the surface. That’s when we come in. It’s a very satisfying job. I like knowing that I am part of a system working to help keep the city safe.

IMAGE: Diver Luis Covarrubias pictured being lowered into Mexico City’s sewers in 2006. Photo by Edward A. Ornelas for Metro.

I guess the most important thing I can say is: don’t throw rubbish in the street. Not because I want to be out of a job, but because flooding is one of the biggest challenges that Mexico City has. Rubbish and our water problems go hand in hand.

Thank you so much for this invitation, and if you have any questions, I’ll be glad to answer them.

Edible Geography: When you’re in the sewers, do you notice a difference between different neighbourhoods and parts of the city based on the kinds of debris you encounter or the smells or sounds? I know you can’t see anything, but can you sense what is above you in other ways?

Julio: Actually, I can dive for ten or fifteen minutes to unblock a plant, and then come to the surface for a rest, and when I go down again, it’s changed completely. The water moves constantly and it carries a lot of rubbish, which could be anything—we never know what the water will bring next. But I would say that, more or less, I’m like a blind person that starts feeling and seeing with my other senses, so that I can identify if something is a tree trunk or a tyre or whatever. But many times, I can take something out, and then two minutes later there’s another obstruction. What I’m feeling always changes, depending on what the water brings.

IMAGE: Carlos Barrios being lowered into the sewers. On the right, in the blue T-shirt, is Julio Cou Cámara. Photo by Mary Jordan for The Washington Post.

Audience Member: What’s the speed of the water down there? I have to imagine that it’s a little redundant to ask you how dangerous your work is, but what are the specific dangers that you find down there? Could the flow just carry you away?

Julio: The water moves at about five or six kilometres per hour on average. It depends on where you are in the  system and on the slope of the pipe at that point. It can go really slow or really fast depending on the pumping system and how close you are to it.

The dangers that we face are not normal diving dangers—decompression and all that. The main danger that we face is getting cut somehow, because the rubbish is filled with glass, nails, syringes—all kinds of sharp things. If the suit was cut and we got an open wound, that’s an infection for sure.

Another danger that we have to deal with is when you’re taking the pieces out. We remove really large pieces—a half tonne or more, even three or four tonnes sometimes. We do that with cranes, but we have to be careful to move out of the way so that the piece doesn’t swing and hit us or fall on us.

Our air and our communication comes from a cable that is attached to the helmet, and if that cable got stuck or detached, or breaks, that would be really dangerous. Luckily, up until now, we haven’t had any problems with that.

Joseph Grima: If there were one piece of technology that could be invented to make your job easier, what would it be?

Julio: It’s a difficult question. We’ve tried a lot of different lamps, for example. We’d love to be able to see down there, but the water is so dirty and it’s got so many particles in it that the light reflects off everything and bounces on your eyes and you still can’t see. Eight hundred watts—one thousand watts even—and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face. Apart from something that could help me see down there, I can’t think of anything. Fancy things like a robot or a submarine wouldn’t really help with the kinds of things I do. And we’d still be in the same situation: we can’t see anything down there, so we have to feel it.

IMAGE: Stills from a short 2006 National Geographic video about Mexico City’s sewer divers. On the left, Carlos Barrios removes a dead dog from the sewer, on the right, Julio Cou Cámara fastens Barrios into his suit.

Edible Geography: In your free time or holidays, do you dive for fun in the ocean?

Julio: Yes. I like going to the beach and I love diving. I do go diving for fun, because it’s another world. The sea is one world, and the sewage is another world. In the sewage I can’t see anything and—sorry for the word—there’s shit everywhere, and in the sea I see fishes and it’s beautiful. I just like diving, so I like both.

Daniela Hernandez: What kind of protection do you receive because of the risks you take?

Julio: As sewage divers, we are paid a bit more than the usual government salary for the risk that we take. We also receive extra medical benefits. Sometimes we even have an ambulance with us, waiting at the surface in case anything happens.

Audience Member: Can you take me into the sewage system?

Julio: No, no, we can’t take anyone down into the sewage. It’s too dangerous. Maybe you’ve been hearing about what they’ve been finding now that they’ve been closing the pipes for repairs. When the rubbish rots, it’s toxic and very corrosive. The governor of the city came down to see the repair work but we had to put him in special equipment because there’s a lot of toxic gases down there.

IMAGE: Teams carrying out the first maintenance operations in more than thirty-five years during a 28-day shut down of the Emisor Canal in 2008. They are wearing respirators, goggles, suits, and gloves. Photo via Water and Waste Water International.

Audience Member: Sometimes I feel like my job is not that great and my office is not adequate to my needs—the internet connection is too slow or the coffee machine sucks—but still, what on earth motivates you every day to get up and work in the sewers?

Julio: Honestly, what motivates me is the pleasure I get in my work. I’ve been working for twenty-seven years in the sewage of Mexico City. I started to swim when I was eight years old; I was a swimming teacher and a diving teacher. My whole life I’ve loved being in water, swimming and diving.

When they offered me this job, I did think, what am I doing, agreeing to spend every day swimming in the city’s sewage? But it gives me such pleasure and personal satisfaction to do my job and know that I’m doing a lot of good for a lot of people without them knowing. My wife knows that when the news shows a hurricane or a big thunderstorm coming, I start getting antsy. She’ll say, “What, you want to go and work now, or what?” I think it’s the adrenaline. I just want to get down there and work.

IMAGE: Julio’s wife and son at Postopolis! DF.

Ethel Baraona Pohl: What sort of training do you have before you start doing this kind of work?

Julio: When I started working, I was already a sports diver. I already knew scuba equipment from diving in lakes or the ocean—but I never thought I was going to dive in sewage! The equipment was really interesting to me: it’s very specific equipment that I would never be able to get my hands on otherwise.

Otherwise, the other requirement for being a sewage diver is that you’re not disgusted by the water, because sometimes we arrive at the place and it really smells. For some people, that smell can be unbearable. We’re so used to it, we don’t even smell it anymore. When I come back up to the street from being down in the drains, people can smell me, but I can’t smell it at all.

So basically, as long as you’re not disgusted by the sewage and you like diving, you are qualified to do this job.

Audience Member: Nicola said that you are the only sewage diving team in the world. How do other cities deal with blockages? Why is Mexico City’s sewage system different?

Julio: That’s my understanding, too: we are the only ones in the world that dive in the sewage. I’m not sure, but I think perhaps there aren’t as many people living in some of these other cities—and also in other parts of the world they have a culture of throwing their rubbish in the bin. They don’t pollute the water so much. That respect for the water system doesn’t exist in Mexico City, so that’s why we need a sewage diving team.

Edible Geography: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve come across down in the sewers?

Julio: It’s all pretty weird. One time we took out half of a Volkswagen. How did it end up there? We don’t know. One time we took out a fifteen metre roll of carpet that was obstructing a whole pipe. Really, anything you can think of, we can find it in the sewage. It’s a dump yard. That’s the problem.

Audience Member: I know you get instructions from the surface, but what tools do you have to get your orientation down there and navigate back to the surface in the dark?

Julio: We know the plans of the system very well. We know how all the pipes and pumps and different parts work and how they’re made. If they tell me go to plant X because a pump is stuck, I know exactly how that pump is situated and how it works. So we go in with a pretty good idea of the layout.

IMAGE: Divers being lowered into the sewer in a cage. Photo by Roberto García Ortiz / La Jornada via

If we go in to do a search for a body, for example, and we’re not in the parts we know well, near the pumping plants, we really depend on the person on the other end of the cable. He’ll say, for example, that you’re going to get out of the basket that you’re lowered in on, and you’re going to walk right. He can see a little dot on his screen that tells him where I am, so he can say, no, no, you’ve gone too far, or whatever. We rely completely on the cord that links us to the surface.

Edible Geography: Do you often feel fear, or have there been particular moments when you thought something might go really wrong?

Julio: Fear is always there. I can’t tell you that I’m ever not afraid. When they tell me I’m going to dive I always get really nervous. Mentally, I go over everything I might need to do and imagine every problem that I might encounter.

IMAGE: Julio answering more audience questions after his presentation at Postopolis! DF.

We put a lot of trust in the people that are up there at the surface, operating the crane and the communications cable. They’re working to keep us safe. Still, we’re always afraid. I can come up and rest for a half hour and the fear is still there when I go back down.

Edible Geography: How often do you dive, on average? Are there particularly busy times, such as in the rainy season?

Julio: Normally we dive between three and four days per month. A dive can last for ten minutes or six hours. We come up and rest, and then we continue, so sometimes we’re out there for thirty-six hours straight, if it’s a bad blockage. In the rainy season, it’s much more intense. We could be diving everyday in the rainy season. We have to be ready at all times throughout the year, though.

[NOTE: Tracking down a sewer diver is not easy, particularly if you (like me) don’t speak Spanish. I owe a huge thanks to the awesome and persistent Daniela Hernandez, who ended up submitting memos, faxing forms, and repeatedly visiting the dusty, filing-cabinet and index-card-stuffed headquarters of the Sistema before eventually securing a permission slip from Chief Aguirre himself.

I’m also extremely grateful to Julio Cou Cámara and his family for giving up several hours on a Saturday (in the rainy season!) to present at Postopolis! DF, and to the heroic anonymous translator whose efforts meant Julio and I could communicate in real-time, despite not having a word in common.

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. For more about Postopolis! DF, including my fellow bloggers, their speakers, and the sponsors and organisers (to whom I am very grateful), visit www.postopolis.org.]

IMAGE: Walmart, Mexico City. Walmart sells more food each year than anyone else in Mexico. It is the country’s biggest private employer, with a range of supermarkets (the high-end Superama and discount Bodega), department stores (the wonderfully named Suburbia) and restaurants (VIPS, El Portón, and Ragazzi) to suit all budgets and tastes. Rachel Laudan took me to her local Walmart (a convenient five-minute walk away) and commented on the Walmart-induced improvement in Mexico’s customer service.

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.

Now—post-Postopolis!—I’m excited to begin belatedly reporting on a frenzied and fascinating week of presentations, excursions, and garañona. One of the highlights of my time in DF was the chance to meet Rachel Laudan, whose blog is on my regular reading list.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan holding Mexico’s favourite snack, the Twinkie-esque Gansito.

Rachel Laudan’s background is as a historian of science but, while teaching at the University of Hawaii, she became interested in the history, geography, and politics of food. Her subsequent book on the fusion cuisine of Hawaii, The Food of Paradise, won the prestigious Julia Child Award in 1997. Although she is originally from the UK, she has been living in Mexico for the past twenty-odd years—and luckily for me, she moved to Mexico City itself in February.

Despite being busy with the final draft of her forthcoming book (“a world history of food”) for the University of California Press, Rachel took me on a lovely guided wander round the varied foodscape of her neighbourhood. Beginning at Walmart and ending with a filling and economical meal at a comida corrida, via a traditional bakery, we explored the intersection of food, class, and economics in contemporary Mexico.

From the broccoli in our lunchtime tortitas (originally grown for export to America, it is now replacing the more traditional cauliflower) to the upper-class custom of a pre-marital stint in culinary school with one’s servant, Rachel traced the edible archaeology behind almost everything we saw.

IMAGE: Wedding cake model at a Mexican bakery; traditionally, upper-class girls would be sent to culinary school with their servants before they got married, so that they could learn how to supervise (and the servants could learn how to make fancier European dishes).

Our mini-tour was then capped by Rachel’s presentation at Postopolis! DF, where she spoke to an eager audience of designers, architects, urbanists, and bloggers. I’m delighted to be able to publish the transcript of Rachel’s provocative explanation of the direct link between advances in grain processing technology and the emergence of a thriving middle class in Mexico City, below.

In due course, Domus, one of the event’s co-sponsors, will be releasing the edited video of her presentation (and all fifty others) online, so that you can fully appreciate Rachel’s maize-grinding demonstration!

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Rachel Laudan: All cities require fuel: oil, gas, electricity, and so on. What I want to talk about today is the energy that fuels the people in the cities—food. Without food energy, a city is nothing. A city is nothing without the people who work and play and enjoy or suffer through the city, and they require food.

IMAGE: Tortillas. Photo by Nick Gilman, author of a handy guide to Mexico City’s food, via Rachel Laudan.

I want to talk in four short bursts. The first is about what all cities need in the way of food. The second is the reason why Mexico City had a particularly hard time with food. The third describes a revolution in the food of Mexico City that has taken place in the twenty years since I first saw it. And the fourth is about the kind of trade-offs that had to be made to undergo that revolution in food.

So: what do cities need in terms of food? There’s only one way to feed a city, at least historically, and that’s to feed it with grains—rice, wheat, maize, barley, sorghum, etc.. You can go round the world, and there just aren’t cities that aren’t fed on grains, except for possibly in the high Andes. Basically, to maintain a city, you’ve got to get grains into it. Be it Bangkok, be it Guangzhou, be it London, or be it Rome—throughout history, grains and cities are two sides of the coin.

And what do you need in terms of grains? For most of history—really, until about 150 years ago—most people in most cities, except for the very wealthy, lived almost exclusively on grains. They got about ninety percent of their calories from grains.

That meant that for every single person in a city you had to have 2 lbs of grains a day, turned into something that people could eat.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan holds up a kilo of tortillas—the daily grain requirement for each city dweller.

[Holding up a standard supermarket package of tortillas.] This is a kilo of tortillas. That’s what one person in a city needed. It’s the same weight, more or less, whatever the grain is—you can go to the historical record, you can research in China, in India, in the Near East, and you will still be talking about 2 lbs of grain-based food for every person in the city every day.

So you can do some calculations. If you’ve got a city of a million, like ancient Rome,  you’ve got to get two million pounds of grain into the city every day. It’s the same for all the cities in the world— it’s 2 lbs of grain per person. That’s the power, that’s the energy that drives cities.

So let’s start with that for Mexico City. What are Mexico City’s grains? Pre-conquest, of course, it was just maize. Post-conquest, it’s maize and wheat. I want to talk primarily about maize, and we’ll move onto wheat later on.

Maize is not the greatest grain for the person who is preparing it. Because when I say that cities live off grain, I’m actually telling a lie. Cities don’t live off grain. Grain is not edible. Maize is not edible, wheat is not edible—if you eat a lot of wheat or a lot of maize, it will go straight through the system. Grains—maize, wheat, or rice, it doesn’t matter which—are only edible once they have been processed and cooked into boiled rice, bread, tortillas—whatever the end product is. That’s what you eat.

IMAGE: Women grinding maize: a processing technique that remained the same from antiquity until surprisingly recently. Image courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Yesterday, Nicola was saying that food blogs can be a bit girly. Let me tell you, there’s nothing girly about processing maize to make tortillas.

The Mexicans in the audience will know this, but if you don’t, here is what you have to do to turn maize into a tortilla. First of all you have to cook the maize with something alkaline. Today you can use cement, but in the past they used the salt from the dry lake bed around Mexico City. You have to take the grains off the maize, which is very time-consuming, and then you heat it, you cook it, and you rub the husks off.

Then, when you have got your wet-cooked maize, you have to grind it. For thousands of years, Mexican women ground maize like this. [kneels to demonstrate] I’ve spent some time grinding. You have a metate, and you start with your handful of maize and you put it here and you grind it down to end of the grindstone, and it’s not fine yet. You use your fingers to move it back up again, and you grind it all the way back down again. Then you move it back up again—and to get it fine enough to make tortillas you have to do this five times for each handful of maize.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan mimes wet-grinding maize at Postopolis! DF.

Depending on how good you are, it takes somewhere between fifty minutes and an hour to do enough maize for tortillas for one person. That means for a family of five someone is going to be spending four or five hours a day doing nothing but grind. [gets up] It’s very exhausting, grinding.

When I first got to Mexico, young women, particularly in the country, would say to each other, “Do you grind?” Imagine it! The girl who worked for me when I first came here, when she was twelve years old, her parents handed her the mano, the thing you grind with, and they said, “OK, girl, now it’s time you start grinding.” That meant, in sickness and in health, from Monday to Saturday—on Sunday, you ate stale tortillas—she ground for four or five hours a day.

When I was twelve years old, I had my first period. I though, “Oh my god, is this what I’m going to have to put up with for the rest of my life? Roll on menopause!” But imagine if I’d been a little Mexican girl, twelve years old, and I’d not only had my first period, but I’d also been handed the grindstone and I knew that from then on, for five hours a day, six days a week, I was going to grind…

It is a very, very time-consuming thing. It’s terrible for the individual: arthritis, bad knees, no time to spend with the children, and no opportunity to go to school. It’s also, obviously, not a great thing for the society if you’ve got one fifth of your adults doing nothing but grinding.

IMAGE: Masa on a traditional metate, photo via.

That kind of labour-intensive grinding was what they did in Ur, and in ancient cities of the Middle East and Egypt. By the time you get to Rome, roughly—by about the birth of Christ—in the Middle East and in Europe, they get a rotary grindstone, and instead of requiring one person per every five to spend all day grinding this two pounds of grain that everybody in the city needs, they get it down to one in thirty. Then they get watermills and it goes down to one in three hundred—and nowadays we don’t even think about it! There are big steel rollers up there in Minneapolis and they’re grinding grain for hundreds of thousands of people, using just a handful of workers.

Now why didn’t Mexico do that? Was it just backward? Why didn’t it move to other forms of grinding? The trouble is if you grind wet, you cannot use these other rotary grindstones. So even if the Mexicans had had them, they couldn’t have used them. When the Spaniards came here they brought rotary grindstones, but you just can’t grind wet maize with rotary grindstones. And if you want tortillas—which we now know have nutritional advantages, but they are also a flexible bread, and hence more appealing than the kind of porridge-y things or tamales that you would have otherwise—you have to grind wet.

IMAGE: Atole, a kind of sweetened corn porridge drink, which to me tastes like thin, lumpy rice-pudding. Photo via.

Therefore, in Mexico, right up until about twenty years ago, large numbers of Mexican women were spending five hours a day grinding. Just imagine Mexico City: every household had somebody grinding tortillas. The landscape of Mexico City up until fifty years ago, and in many ways even later, is one of bakeries that make wheat breads for the upper class or perhaps for breakfast or the evening meal, and then in every household, somewhere in a back room, somebody grinding maize to make tortillas for the main meal of the day.

IMAGE: Mexican pastries at Walmart’s in-store bakery.

That’s all changed. You can still find the odd person who grinds in Mexico City, but it doesn’t happen very much.

So, what’s the revolution that’s occurred? What’s happened to Mexico?

It took about a century. In the late nineteenth century, people began trying to find ways of mechanizing this business of grinding and cooking tortillas. Three things happened: first of all, they worked out how to make a mechanical mill that could grind wet. You still find these mills in many rural villages today—people cook their maize at home, and then they take it to the mill and grind it, and then they take it home and cook their tortillas. Those mills really came to Mexico City in the fifties and sixties—it had been invented earlier, but it needs electricity, and the early ones weren’t very good, and so on.

The second thing is that they invented a tortilla machine. If you live in Mexico, or even if you are a visitor here, and you go into any of the big grocery stores, you can see a tortilla machine back in the corner. It’s a kind of Heath-Robinson-esque contraption that cooks the tortillas.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria

And the third thing that happened, finally—this really took place in the seventies and eighties—is that the company now called Gruma (Grupa Maseca) discovered a way to take the wet, alkali-treated maize, grind it, dehydrate it, and put it into packets. You’ve seen those packets in the grocery stores, I’m sure.

IMAGE: Maseca, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

By the 1970s, five percent of the maize for tortillas in Mexico came from Maseca. By the 1990s, it was fifteen percent. Maseca now has plans—whether they’ll pull it off, I don’t know—to take over all the tortillerias in the country.

Another thing that happened, during this crucial fifty-year period between 1945-ish and the end of the twentieth century, was that bread changed in Mexico. Traditional bread in Mexico was bread by the small piece, made in the traditional oven: the bolillo, the semita, and the numerous small breads you still see in Mexican bakeries today.

IMAGE: A bolillo and a semita, photos courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Beginning in 1945, an immigrant from Catalonia, Lorenzo Servitje, bought two second-hand loaf-making machines from the United States—the kind that make sliced white bread. The Servitje family founded the Bimbo company, which is now, as you know, omnipresent in Mexico. Bimbo bread lasts a long time and became widely available, and Bimbo now the largest bakery in the world. It is the fifth biggest food company in the world.

And so now, what does the landscape of Mexico City look like in terms of grains? It’s a whole series of Walmarts with in-house tortillerias and bakeries and shelf after shelf of Bimbo.

IMAGE: Bimbo bread, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Bimbo is not as good as a bolillo. A machine-made tortilla is not anything like a homemade tortilla – it’s not even in the same universe.

Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.

Audience Member: What do you personally think about Gruma trying to take over the tortilla business?

Rachel Laudan: I think I’ve got the same mixed feelings that many Mexicans do. It would be nice if there were more masa harina companies, and it would be nice if Gruma couldn’t get a monopoly, but are we going to go back to grinding at home for five hours a day? No.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Am I terribly upset that there seems to be a near one hundred percent takeover of not-such-good tortillas? Well, one of the interesting things about this story is that we’re apt to assume trends go on forever—but think about two of the things I just mentioned in my talk. There wasn’t a Bimbo company in 1945 and there wasn’t a Walmart in 1945. So I think all kinds of things can and might happen.

One of the negative effects of having had tortillas subsidized for so long in Mexico—which has really aided the poor—is that nobody has wanted to invest huge amounts of money into developing better tortilla machines and flour mills and things. Now, maybe, we’re at a point where we’re developing a boutique market for good tortillas. And there are better tortilla machines coming out now—we’ve got ones that rotate and flip the tortillas like you do on the comal, so they’re much closer to the taste of the handmade ones. So I think there will be a movement for good tortillas.

IMAGE: A Bimbo employee stocking the shelves at Walmart. Rachel pointed out his suit and tie, and explained that the Bimbo company was founded along Fordist “welfare capitalist” principles, paying above the average and demanding, in return, hard work, loyalty and adherence to a conservative social code.

Edible Geography: Did the move away from grinding at home have spatial repercussions? Was there an empty room in people’s houses all of a sudden?

Rachel Laudan: In the city, I’m not so sure. In the country, there used to be two kitchens—the regular kitchen and the black kitchen. In fact, there still often are. The black kitchen is where you grind and where you cook tortillas and the regular kitchen is where you might have your other stove. But I’m sure people can find something to do with that extra space in the house, especially in the city. Now, of course, you’d probably put a great big refrigerator on the floor space that used to be occupied with your grindstone, because with a refrigerator, you don’t have to make your tortillas every day, because they last from one day to the next.

Audience Member: Can you talk about other gender divisions in the production of food?

Rachel Laudan: It’s a good question—I’d like to think more about it. Agriculture was always male, and bakeries were always male. I think a lot of street food is female.

Edible Geography: Just to range further a little further afield, into the global geography of culinary techniques, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts about something you blogged about recently: the Columbian exchange that did or did not happen in 1492.

Rachel Laudan: Well, we’ve all heard about the Columbian exchange. It’s a cliché at this point: Mexico’s gifts to the world and so on. In fact, there may have been an exchange of plants, but there was no exchange of cuisines.

What happened was that European techniques—wheat mills and bread-baking, for example—came to Mexico, but what Mexicans knew about how to process food did not go to the Old World. The process of adding alkali to maize and grinding it wet didn’t go. The Europeans ground maize like they ground wheat, and they got pellagra, and they went blind, and they died.

The technique of dehydrating chiles and grinding them and rehydrating them to make some of the healthiest sauces in the world has never moved out of Mexico. It hasn’t even got to the United States, for goodness’ sake—what most of the United States thinks is a salsa is some chopped-up tomato with a few chiles in it. I mean, that’s a sort-of salsa, but it’s nothing like the wonderful salsas you find in Mexican cuisine. So no, there wasn’t a Columbian exchange in food. But the question of why not needs a much longer answer than we have time for today.

[NOTE: A huge thanks to Rachel Laudan for agreeing to speak at Postopolis! DF, preparing and delivering such a fascinating talk, and allowing me to publish it online here—not to mention generously showing me round her corner of the metropolis earlier the same day. To find out why there was no Columbian exchange, as well as much more, you will want to read Rachel’s blog at www.rachellaudan.com and follow her on Twitter @rachellaudan.

More recaps and round-ups from my week in Mexico City are forthcoming; meanwhile, many thanks to the organizers, sponsors, and fellow bloggers who made Postopolis! DF such a fantastic, overwhelming, and fun event.]

IMAGE: Rainbow trout, via.

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.

Or, as Michael Pollan puts it, “We are all now being manipulated by corn.”

IMAGE: “The Interior of the U.S. Fish Commission’s Central Station in Washington D.C. The jars in the background are hatching jars for eggs. Fish and eggs from all over the world were collected and distributed from this room.” From the National Archives via Anders Halverson’s website.

If, like me, you are not an angler or an ecologist, the rainbow trout might not figure largely in your imagination. It should though: not only do state and federal agencies dump an incredible 25 million pounds of rainbow trout (about 100 million fish) into American rivers each year according to journalist Anders Halverson, but the rise of Oncorhynchus mykiss contains a bizarre and fascinating cache of insights into human motivations and misunderstandings.

In fact, as described in Halverson’s new book, An Entirely Synthetic Fish, the rainbow trout is—like corn—both biological instantiation and evolving allegory for our complex relationship with nature, our misguided interventions, and their unintended consequences.

In order to arrive at that conclusion Halverson explores a sequence of jaw-dropping, interlinked sub-stories, including the invention of artificial fish propagation, Congressional anxieties about American virility, aerial fish bombing, and migrating DNA, all of which have played a role in the rainbow trout’s journey towards world domination.

IMAGE: “Spawning Rainbow trout at a U.S. Fish Commission facility in Iowa.” From the National Archives, via Anders Halverson’s website.

IMAGE: “Steve Smith (Maintenance Mechanic) spawning rainbow trout. ca. 2005,” White Sulphur Springs National Fish Hatchery, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Fish culturists apparently sometimes refer to themselves as “fish squeezers.”

Halverson picks up the story in the nineteenth century, when rainbow trout were “native only to the Pacific Rim from Mexico to Kamchatka.” One technical innovation and two cultural imperatives later, however, and the rainbow trout were well on their way. The scientific breakthrough came in 1843, when “a poor French carpenter and sometime fisherman named Joseph Remy and his friend Antoine Géhin” wrote a letter to a local official describing their technique for artificially propagating fish.

IMAGE: Hatching fish, then and now.

Prior to that, fish had been farmed in ponds, but they reproduced naturally. The method Remy and Géhin described is, according to Halverson, “essentially the same that is used today.”

During spawning season, at the beginning of November, at the moment when the eggs are loose in the belly of the trout, I have, by passing my thumb along and lightly pressing the belly of the female, so that it does not result in any harm for her, forced out eggs that I placed in a pot full of water. Afterward, I took the male, and with a similar operation as for the female, I made the milk run onto the eggs until the water was white.

By 1852, the French government had realised the significance of this discovery and built the first ever piscifactoire at Huningue. Remy and Géhin “each received a pension and a tobacco shop” as reward, notes Halverson, and just one year later, artificial fish insemination came to the United States when “an Ohio doctor named Theodatus Garlick read about the efforts then under way in France and decided to try the technique with native eastern brook trout.”

IMAGE: “Exterior view of the establishment of fish farm Huningue. circa 1860. Engraving from the book Album of science famous scientist discoveries in 1899″ (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

At roughly the same time, a couple of other forces were at work, which together set the stage for the enthusiastic adoption of fish culture as a tool to breed and spread rainbow trout across the United States. Both were manifestations of a particular relationship with nature as well as responses to historical circumstance.

On the one hand, Halverson describes the acclimatisation movement, with its mission to transfer “useful” species throughout the globe. Grounded in a colonial and Christian mindset, in which nature existed as a resource to serve man and to be improved upon through his ingenuity, explorers from Christopher Columbus to Captain Cook had brought home tomatoes and left behind pigs.

By the nineteenth century, as explorers were replaced by settlers and the British and French invested heavily in the bureaucracy of empire, the first formal acclimatising group was founded: the Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, launched in Paris in 1854. Americans were not immune to this impulse as they moved west—Halverson observes that “as a philosophy, acclimatization fit well with American ideas of progress and manifest destiny,” and quotes a common sentiment at the time: “Let the best fish, like the best man, win.”

IMAGE: “Starling Wave,” by Danny Green, Nature Black and White award winner, Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2009, via. Halverson includes the infamous story of Eugene Schieffelin, a founding member of the New York chapter of the Acclimation Society of North America. His personal goal was to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the U.S., and he achieved some success with the release of starlings in Central Park in 1880 (their first nesting site was under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History). Since 1910, it has been illegal to import starlings, but the ban came too late—today there are an estimated 140 million starlings in the U.S., and they are now regarded as a major pest.

As it happened, many felt that the American West was “somewhat lacking” in fish fauna, and Halverson quotes Congressman Robert Roosevelt‘s bold declaration that:

There is no reason why the waters of the West should be less prolific than those of the East, provided the right species were introduced; and were trout, salmon, bass, shad, and sturgeon to take the place of catfish, pickerel, and suckers, the gain would be manifest.

The third coincident factor, and perhaps the most intriguing, is a pervasive anxiety that if American men were not able to go fishing, the national culture and values—even democracy itself—would somehow be compromised. Halverson speculates on several possible causes for this sentiment, from increased urbanisation (by the end of the nineteenth century, 33% of Americans lived in cities, compared to only 7% at the beginning) to the closure of the frontier in the 1890s. Whatever the cause, the second half of the nineteenth century was filled with laments for the “soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth” with their “lack of nerve force” who were making America “a duller, as well as more effeminate” nation.

IMAGE: “Hatchery fish arrive in milk containers on a horse-drawn cart. Note the unfinished Washington Monument in the background.” The overlap between rainbow trout and national pride is clear in this photo from the National Archives, via Anders Halverson’s website.

The popular solution to this crisis of virility was to encourage outdoor activity, and in particular, hunting and fishing—”the sports of the field.” The problem was that, in the northeast at least, “human activities were rapidly diminishing the numbers of salmon, trout, and other fish in New England.” Since nothing could be permitted to stand in the way of progress, environmental regulations were not an option. Replenishing the streams with a steady supply of sturdier specimens was the only way Americans could continue to improve their characters by wrestling with nature even as their factories polluted the waterways. But which fish to farm?

The rainbow trout was the leading candidate. It had acclimated well, having proved that it “could also withstand much higher temperatures than the native trout of New York … a valuable trait in streams and ponds where excessive logging had turned once cool forest streams into sun-baked wastelands.” Rainbow trout were judged the equal of salmon and bass in taste, only slightly inferior in appearance, they hatched and raised well, and—most importantly—they were good fighters. As Halverson writes:

Because the character of the quarry was considered a direct reflection of the character of the pursuer, rainbows quickly became a favorite among sportsmen. “The man who has ever hooked a leaping fighting rainbow on light tackle in a canoe on the Soo Rapids will have all the thrills that should come to the honest fisherman,” opined one angler, “and if he wins, his manly chest is the proper place for the pinning of all the medals that are the reward of victory.”

IMAGE: “The U.S. Fish Commission raised fish for several years in ponds on what is now the National Mall in Washington D.C.” From the National Archives, via Anders Halverson’s website.

And so, in the interests of national security and progress, the U.S. Fish Commission was set up, and began assembling the infrastructure to propagate and distribute rainbow trout, from fish ponds on the National Mall to specially designed train cars.

For the next seventy-five years, dam-building policies and forestry economics conspired to serve the rainbow trout’s ends. Railway companies and agency officials collaborated in a supply and demand feedback loop, advertising where hatchery fish had been dumped so that weekend anglers could line up “shoulder to shoulder, yanking trout out of the water almost as fast as they could be poured from the truck.”

IMAGE: “From 1881 to 1947, the U.S. Fish Commission delivered fish to private as well as public applicants throughout the United States on specially designed train cars like this one. The cars had water tanks, aeration devices, cooling systems, and bunks for the attendants, among other things.” From the National Archives, via Anders Halverson’s website.

In one of the more surreal sections of the book, Halverson describes the origins of aerial fish-stocking missions, as surplus World War II planes and demobilised pilots were successfully redeployed in the 1950s to introduce the rainbow trout to previously fishless lakes, high in the California mountains. Even as you anticipate the disastrous ecological consequences, it’s hard not to be amazed by the gung-ho ingenuity of former crop duster and California Department of Fish and Game pilot Al Reese:

First, Reese tried freezing the fish in ice blocks and parachuting them in ice cream containers. Both of these techniques, though, proved dangerous and difficult. And so, one day, Reese and his assistants tried a simpler technique. They put fifty trout and some water into a five-gallon can and threw it out the window toward a hatchery pond about 350 feet below. They missed, and the can bounced along the rocks nearby instead. But when observers recovered the twisted metal debris, they found sixteen fish still swimming in the small amount of water that remained.

Ultimately, Reese and the team ditched the barrels altogether in favour of releasing fish that would hit the water “with a vertical speed of about thirty miles per hour,” in a scene described by observers as “a cloud of mist that suddenly appeared behind the plane, full of the barely distinguishable dark shapes of small fish.” Of course, sometimes the fish bombers missed, but nonetheless, aerial fish-stocking proved cheaper and more effective than other methods in such remote locations.

IMAGE: Aerial fish stocking, via.

IMAGE: Aerially stocked fish hit the water, via.

As you would expect, these experiments in the rational optimisation of one element within a complex ecosystem had unpredictable and frequently disastrous results. Some, such as the loss of amphibian life, were (until recently) perceived as unimportant if they were perceived at all, while others, including the mass poisoning of the Green River, in order to “rehabilitate” it by removing native fish and introducing rainbow trout, caused a scandal even at the time.

IMAGE: Rainbow trout restocking in California, via.

Meanwhile, raising a single species of fish in cramped conditions naturally served to increase pest and disease vulnerability. For example, Halverson reports that by 1987, a peculiar-sounding but nasty infection called whirling disease had contaminated hatcheries across Colorado, and by the mid-1990s, the disease had established itself in “thirteen of the state’s fifteen major river drainages,” with a predictable impact on fish numbers.

IMAGE: Fish with whirling disease, which causes them to swim in a corkscrew motion, via.

Perhaps the most interesting example of the inadequacy of human epistemological models combined with the law of unintended consequences comes towards the end the book, as Halverson describes the difficulty fisheries officials have in implementing any policy that requires the differentiation of native and non-native, now that the rainbow trout has interbred with other species promiscuously, spreading its “genetic pollution at a very rapid clip.”

IMAGE: A rainbow trout, via.

IMAGE: A westslope cutthroat trout, via. The westslope cuttthroat is a candidate for Endangered Species status.

IMAGE: The increasingly common “cutbow”—a hybrid rainbow trout and westslope cutthroat—via.

“Rainbow genes,” Halverson writes, “have become their own entity, disconnected from the fish in which they have began.” The result is a policy nightmare, with endangered species going “extinct due to such hybridization,” while experts consider whether “a fish can be considered a member of a species and a threat to the species at the same time.” Meanwhile, other scientists continue the re-engineering, adding an extra set of chromosomes to the rainbow trout “to make them grow faster and bigger,” and then feeding them creatine in an attempt to make them “harder fighting fish.”

IMAGE: An obese rainbow trout, the result of an extra set of chromosomes and some steroids, via.

To conclude his cautionary tale, Halverson reports that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Commission has now “distanced itself from the rainbow trout,” and that many states are now undertaking non-native “fish removal” programs (which are, of course, complicated by the hybridisation outlined above). On the other hand, he reports that fishing for hatchery rainbows is “one of the fastest growing sports around cities like Beijing.”

In any case, it’s almost impossible to do justice to such a complex and fantastically weird tale in a blog post, and I clearly can’t recommend An Entirely Synthetic Fish highly enough. It’s not simply a page-turning collection of fascinating stories, but an entirely new lens through which to understand 150 years of collaborative human/rainbow trout ecological, hydrological, cultural, and economic redesign—in which the rainbow trout seems to have had the upper hand throughout!

[Huge thanks to Geoff Manaugh for finding and giving me Halverson's book!]

IMAGE: “New Shimmer” on Saturday Night Live, “for the greatest shine you ever tasted!”

While a close look at Cool Whip’s ingredient list reveals that the space-age dessert topping could plausibly function as haemmorhoid cream and condom lube, New Shimmer’s combined cleansing and culinary properties were, of course, a purely satirical invention.

Until last Tuesday in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that is, when NYU chemist Kent Kirschenbaum and dessert pioneer Will Goldfarb of the Experimental Cuisine Collective presented two new research-driven desserts at the Secret Science Club. Kirschenbaum began by explaining the molecular structure of soap, in order to isolate the particular chemical characteristics that cause it to trap grease and dirt when mixed with water.

IMAGE: How soap works, via.

In order to create the foamy, mousse-like mouthfeel and cleansing powers of a real-life New Shimmer, Kirschenbaum explained that he and Goldfarb simply needed to find an edible molecule with similar properties. They landed on saponins, a class of natural surfactants usually extracted from plants with such give-away names as soapwort and the soapbark tree. As well as their traditional use as pre-industrial detergents, saponins already have a variety of food uses: soapwort can be used in halva to create a marshmallow-like texture, and quillaja saponin from the soapbark tree creates the foamy head on root beer.

IMAGE: Botanical illustration of the soapbark tree, via.

Their formulation (100g water with 4g quillaja beaten in) resembled shaving foam. Kirschenbaum ran a dab through his hair for a firm-hold mousse effect, while Goldfarb applied a generous dollop to the floor using a mop, where it seemed to have some dirt-removal powers.

Sadly, despite its “pillowy” mouthfeel, the foam smelled tannic and medicinal— “bitters mixed with wet newspapers,” reported Kirschenbaum. Using a mini iSi whipper, Goldfarb added simple syrup, which miraculously turned the floor cleaning foam into a delicious dessert topping—lighter and bouncier than whipped cream and less sticky than Marshmallow Fluff.

IMAGE: Salep dondurma as photographed by Eric Hansen for the New York Times.

Their second dessert was a recreation of a traditional Turkish stretchy ice cream called salep dondurma. Also known as fox testicle ice cream, salep dondurma is made using the tuberous roots of wild orchids and, according to a report on Salon, it’s both “slightly sweet with a nutty flavor similar to dried milk powder” and “capable of being used as a jump rope.”

Unfortunately, demand for the ice cream is such that the Salep-producing orchids are now an endangered species and their commercial export has been forbidden since 2003. A BBC report from that year quotes salep dondurma fanatics vowing to “just eat illegal ice cream,” while a concerned botanist reports on the scale of the damage: “for one kilogram of dried Salep, around 1,000 orchids are needed,” which means that a single family ice cream business can use up to twelve million flowers every year.

IMAGE: Salep is extracted from the tuberous roots of Orchis mascula, images via and via.

Scientist and author Harold McGee described his attempt to make a legal (i.e. orchid-less) version in a 2007 article for the New York Times. Using guar gum instead of Salep, he produced an ice cream described variously as “flaky,” “chewy,” and “challenging.” Undaunted, Kirschenbaum and his students at NYU smuggled a small amount of dried Salep out of Turkey in order to analyse its chemical properties and find a successful replacement. Earlier this year, they declared success with a recipe that used konjac, which contains the same water-absorbent glucomannan molecules as Salep, and mastic gum (the original chewing gum).

IMAGE: NPR’s Science Friday reports on Kirschenbaum’s stretchy ice cream experiments (click for video).

Intriguingly, as if it wasn’t enough just to create a combination floor wax/whipped topping and a bootleg stretchy ice cream, Kirschenbaum and Goldfarb kept stressing the use value of these multifunctional desserts. In addition to providing a sustainable alternative to the endangered orchids, their Powerpoint slide claimed a range of benefits for Konjac Dondurma, from its appetite-suppressing dietary fibre (thanks to the konjac) to its oral health properties (the mastic gum).

Meanwhile, the saponins in Kirschenbaum and Goldfarb’s floor wax/whipped topping have been shown to lower blood cholesterol levels. Saponin extracts from yucca are already widely used in pet foods for their ability to “bind to ammonia and other volatile compounds” and thus “reduce faecal odour,” announced a grinning Kirschenbaum. In other words, he added, “Our desserts can improve your life, unless your shit don’t stink.”

Of course, Kirschenbaum and Goldfarb’s tongues were firmly in cheek throughout, and products inspired by Saturday Night Live sketches should undoubtedly be accompanied with a pinch of salt. But the idea of of a multifunctional dessert was intriguing. After all, what is the point of dessert in the first place? Interestingly, the same question prefaced Bill Buford’s 2006 profile of Goldfarb for the New Yorker:

I didn’t know why dessert was invented or what function in the running of a human organism it was meant to perform. (I wasn’t even sure when it was invented. Raising livestock, vegetable farming, the harvesting of grains: these activities are ancient, older than history, and essential to the survival of the species. But when did humankind decide that it also needed crème brûlée?)

Out of curiosity, I looked up Wikipedia’s entry on dessert, which is short, entirely free of references, and “may require clean up to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.” It provides alternate words for the meal (“sweet,” “pudding,” or “afters”) and a description of a dessert spoon (“intermediate in size between a teaspoon and a tablespoon”), but the crowd-sourced encyclopedia definition makes no mention of function:

In Western culture, Dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food but sometimes of a strongly-flavored one, such as some cheeses. The word comes from the French language as dessert and this from Old French desservir, “to clear the table” and “to serve.”

Buford’s etymological research in the New Yorker goes somewhat further, adding that: “The French word appeared in print in 1539, and entered the English language slowly; its first usage was in a seventeenth-century medical text, in a telling and prophetic expression of protest: ‘Such eating, which the French call desert, is unnaturall.’”

IMAGE: The ur-dessert, chosen to illustrate Wikipedia‘s dessert entry.

Buford’s conclusion, after watching diners at Goldfarb’s now defunct NYC restaurant, Room 4 Dessert, is that dessert must serve a social purpose, rather than a biological one—”giving people a reason not to say good night.” But perhaps dessert also serves as a small reminder, at the end of a meal, that food and the way we eat it are a human invention—and thus always open to improvement.

In the context of dessert’s existential void, then, perhaps Kirschenbaum and Goldfarb’s combination breath freshener, aphrodisiac, and orchid protector is simply an inspired redesign.

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 cacosmia, an olfactory disorder that causes sufferers to find all smells – even those of flowers, fresly-baked bread, or their favourite fragrance – utterly disgusting. She first noticed the disease’s onset while eating ginger biscuits with a friend:

I remember saying to my friend indignantly, “They’ve changed the recipe for these ginger biscuits! They taste like black treacle.” But they hadn’t changed the recipe. What was changing was me.

For the next five years, Rippard was tormented by the disgusting smells that surrounded her. A walk along the beach seemed more like a stroll through a sewage treatment plant, and everybody – including herself – stank. Smell is responsible for as much as ninety percent of a food’s flavour, so Rippard could hardly bear to eat. She lived, explains Burr, “on a diet of wholemeal bread, all-bran cereal, and boiled bleached rice.”

IMAGE: Anatomical sketch of human smell and flavour receptors, via. Amazingly, no one actually knows how human olfaction works.

Rippard was about to undergo surgery to sever her olfactory nerves altogether when she met Luca Turin, the hero of Burr’s book and the leading proponent of the vibrational theory of smell. To make a long story short, he cured her, and her sense of smell returned to normal. Incredibly, though, Rippard’s dramatic shift in scent perception was accompanied by a subtle recalibration in her experience of space. Burr describes the moment thus:

On a Saturday evening, December 16, Mrs. Rippard was sitting on her sofa when she suddenly wondered if there was something different about the room she was in. She would have sworn the actual dimensions of the walls were changing ever so slightly, an alteration in the geometry of the space around her, the objects in it, and their relationship to one another. Then she realised, with a jolt, that she was smelling normally.

I heard Burr re-tell this story on Friday, at Headspace, a day-long conference at The New School’s egg-shaped Tischman Auditorium. The conference’s premise was that scent is an under-used, but potentially revolutionary, design tool, and Burr’s anecdote served to illustrate that smell does indeed shape spatial perception at least as powerfully as light or sound, producing both form and atmosphere.

IMAGE: Fragrances from CB I Hate Perfume include the Scent of New Fallen Snow, In The Library, as well as At The Beach 1966.

The day was structured around a series of “Accidental Perfumer” sessions put together by the conference organisers (MoMA‘s Paola Antonelli; Seed CEO Adam Bly; Jamer Hunt, Director of the Transdisciplinary Design MFA at Parsons; Véronique Ferval of International Flavors and Fragrances, Inc.; Laetitia Wolff; Jane Nisselson; and Burr himself). These scent design experiments paired professional perfumers with product, furniture, and food designers, as well as an architect, with mixed but fascinating results that included grass-flavoured yoghurt and an anti-gravity fragrance.

The most ambitious “Accidental Perfumer” experiment, however, was L’Eau Vert du Bronx du Sur, the co-creation of Majora Carter, urban design and environmental justice activist, and Pascal Gaurin, creator of Tom Ford Black Violet and Vera Wang for Men.

IMAGE: Map of the South Bronx Greenway, a project spearheaded by Majora Carter to create bike & pedestrian paths around the Hunts Point and Port Morris waterfronts.

Carter began by framing the current smell of the South Bronx in terms of its environmental and economic challenges: the area handles forty percent of New York City’s waste, for example, and an estimated 3000 diesel lorries drive through the Hunt’s Point peninsula every day. Meanwhile, Guarin confessed that in French slang, “C’est le Bronx” means “It’s a mess.” Never one to think small, Carter asked Gaurin to create a new smell for the neighbourhood: something green and fresh, like the smell of the air after a big rain storm; something that would give everyone who smelled it a momentary lift.

IMAGE: The FEAR of smell – the SMELL of fear, by artist Sissel Tolaas, who used micro-encapsulation technology to embed cold sweat from the armpits of eight frightened men into paint, which was then applied to an art gallery wall, where it could be experienced by scratching and sniffing.

Gaurin confessed that the brief was difficult: normally, a perfumer aims to create something with broad, cross-demographic appeal that works on the scale of a human body. Carter was asking him to create something that would have an impact on an entire urban community, but was micro-locally specific in terms of its target audience. Still, he mixed orange flower extract and cis-3-Hexenol and a whole laundry list of other chemicals to arrive something leafy, green, and uplifting enough to satisfy Carter.

Carter and Gaurin then played with the idea of micro-encapsulating their scent in the pavement, where it would be released through footfall as a subtle encouragement towards physical activity. When the technical challenges proved insurmountable, they decided to use the perfume to scent an entire building in the South Bronx, by releasing it through the ventilation system.

IMAGE: Ventilation section, via.

Finally, in a process so surreal that, if I hadn’t seen the video footage, I’m not sure I would have believed it happened, Gaurin and Carter worked with the building’s janitor to release four or five different scents into the HVAC ducts, and get feedback from the residents.

The winning fragrance, L’Eau Vert du Bronx du Sur, was, according to Carter, “bright and light – the opposite of all the other smells in the neighbourhood,” while Gaurin described it as “the olfactory equivalent of a green roof.” On the other hand, Chandler Burr, as the discussion moderator, detested it, complaining that the orange flower made the scent smell like plastic and offering to come up to the Bronx with Carter and Gaurin in order to refine the fragrance before its further release.

IMAGE: Planting a green roof in the South Bronx, via.

The organisers had arranged to have Carter and Gaurin’s scent diffused through the auditorium during their conversation, which provided a visceral understanding of the problems entailed in scenting an entire building or district: many conference attendees muttered or tweeted that they felt sick or were getting a headache as the scent quickly became overwhelming in the stale air.

Still, the experiment drew attention to the idea that smell is a neglected aspect of urban design – a powerful tool for shaping spatial perception that is rarely factored into the planning and decision-making process.

The current smell of the South Bronx, as Majora Carter pointed out, is clearly a human artefact, from the zoning laws that permit waste handling stations to the freeways that encircle Hunt’s Point. The problem is that those urban planning decisions were made without consideration for the olfactory environment they were indirectly creating. In a way, then, the city agencies of 1970s New York were the real “Accidental Perfumers,” with Carter and Gaurin demonstrating, despite their project’s flaws, what a more intentional approach to urban smell design might look like.

IMAGE: Deodorant guns, via.

Meanwhile, in case L’Eau Vert du Bronx du Sur strikes you as a thought-provoking but ultimately entirely speculative and whimsical project, the very next day, The Guardian ran this headline: “Beijing to sweeten stench of rubbish crisis with giant deodorant guns.”

In the article, journalist Jonathan Watts reported that in response to complaints about the smell of Asuwei landfill site from local residents, Beijing officials are installing hundreds of “high-pressure scent guns, which can spray dozens of litres of fragrance per minute over a distance of up to 50m.” Incredibly, Watts adds that the deodorant guns are already in use at several other Chinese landfill sites, “as a temporary fix.” The rest of the article is well worth a read for an overview of China’s growing waste problem, but sadly offers no clues as to what sort of scent is used to mask the odour of the festering rubbish.

With New Delhi also currently installing a giant air freshener, Majora Carter and Pascal Gaurin’s South Bronx perfume suddenly seems to point the way towards the future of urban scent design research. The possibilities are endless – scent remediation, scent preservation, even scent augmentation – but the consequences are unknown – and, given our current state of olfactive illiteracy, are all but unimaginable.

IMAGE: Milton Gil, Manager of Elliot Your Place Superette. Still from Bodega Down Bronx.

With brief detours into fast food restaurants and a food co-op, the film mainly focuses on bodegas, the 24-hour convenience store/mini-marts that are on nearly every street corner in New York.

Among the many highlights is an interview with Stanley Fleishman, CEO of Jetro, a cash-and-carry wholesaler where bodega owners stock up on grocery items: his special promotion flyers could be directly responsible for fluctuations in the nutritional intake of South Bronx schoolchildren.

Interestingly, although Fleishman is not in favour of government-sponsored healthy eating policies and he professes to only respond to, rather than create, demand, he does explain that it is in Jetro’s interest to create more demand for fresh fruit and vegetables among bodega customers: the more perishable produce the bodega owner stocks, the more often they have to return to Jetro.

Fleishman also spends some time explaining the economic niche that bodegas fill: the big supermarkets, he says, want to make a sale of $70 to $80 per transaction, and that can’t happen when a customer is on foot or in a low-income neighbourhood – or both.

IMAGE: José Manuel Céspedes, Manager of Manny’s Mini Market. Still from Bodega Down Bronx.

The movie also visits Hunt’s Point Terminal Market, the largest fruit and vegetable market in the world by trade. According to Myra Gordon, the market’s CEO, every day enough produce passes through Hunt’s Point to feed 9% of the population of the United States. Not much of it makes its way to the bodegas, however: as several charmingly frank shop owners confirm, although the prices are actually lower at Terminal Market, Jetro’s free parking means they’d rather pick up supplies there.

IMAGE: Bodega owner. Still from Bodega Down Bronx.

The various bodega owners are another highlight: they cheerfully explain the investment required to open a bodega, as well as the specifics of their supply chain (“We buy the cigarettes from the Chinese”), and customer preferences (“People don’t eat a lot of fruit. They choose a sandwich more often.”)

Some products are delivered directly to the bodegas: Frank Falcon, a distributor for J&D snacks, is in charge of crisps, pretzels, pork scratchings, nuts, party mix, corn puffs, and the like. His products are so popular in the bodegas, he notes, because they’re priced at 99c or less, which means that kids – who make up a large proportion of the bodega consumer demographic – can afford them.

IMAGE: Franz Falcon, J&D Snacks. Still from Bodega Down Bronx.

The video was made as part of the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s awesome Urban Investigations program, which “asks basic questions about how the city works, and answers them over the course of a semester.” CUP staff collaborate with artists and high school students on each investigation: Bodega Down Bronx was created by CUP teaching artist and filmmaker Jonathan Bogarín and students from New Settlement’s Bronx Helpers, working with the CUP’s Valeria Mogilevich, Rosten Woo, and intern Sarah Nelson Wright.

IMAGE: General Tso’s Chicken as served in San Francisco, via Flickr user Rick Audet.

For readers unfamiliar with the dish, General Tso’s Chicken consists of battered, deep-fried bits of chicken, coated in a spicy sweet and sour sauce. It is also the pad thai of Chinese food in America: broadly popular, guaranteed to be on the menu, and the single-dish shorthand for an entire cuisine.

As Dunlop explained during a lunchtime lecture at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) last week, the case against including General Tso’s Chicken in the Hunanese canon is persuasive. For starters, in Hunan itself, it is impossible to find either the dish or anyone who knows what it is.

IMAGE: Chinese man encountering a fortune cookie for the first time, from Jennifer 8. Lee’s TED talk. As she demonstrates, baffled curiosity is quite a common Chinese response to the American version of Chinese cuisine.

There was another problem with including General Tso’s Chicken in a regional cookbook: it doesn’t taste anything like typical Hunanese food. Hunan (or Xiang) cuisine is one of the eight traditional schools of Chinese cookery, known for its distinctive dry heat, and sour, salty flavours. General Tso’s Chicken, on the other hand, not only uses larger chicken pieces than are typical in Hunan cuisine, but is also deep-fried (not a typical cooking technique in the region) and is far too sweet for Hunanese palates.

Nonetheless, and despite the weight of evidence against it, not including General Tso’s Chicken in one of the first English-language books solely focused on the cuisine of Hunan seemed, in Dunlop’s words, “a little perverse, given that it’s the only dish most people know from the region in the first place.”

IMAGE: One of Dunlop’s notebooks from her research in Hunan.

More interestingly, Dunlop went on to claim that in some syncretic way, General Tso’s Chicken actually tells a compelling story of place that can’t be found in the more traditional Hunanese hot pots, steamed fish heads, and smoked bean curd – although uncovering that story required a fair bit of detective work.

China’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (with its subsequent famine) were a “culinary disaster,” explained Dunlop, during which traditional dishes and cooking techniques went underground or were lost altogether. Restaurants were nationalised, the quality of produce nose-dived, apprentices were encouraged to denounce master chefs, and fine dining restaurants were expected to forget the grand Mandarin tradition and serve plain, hearty food for the masses.

Although Mao was himself from Hunan and traveled with a personal chef from the region, he preferred traditional peasant dishes that were ready in twenty minutes or less. Meanwhile, the elites of the Kuomintang, for whom eating well was one of the accomplishments expected of an educated man, retreated to Taiwan with their chefs in tow.

And Taiwan is where Dunlop eventually found the original General Tso’s Chicken, or at least its close relative, Viceroy’s Chicken.

The dish was a little less sweet than the American version (it used tomato paste rather than sugar – Dunlop’s version of the recipe is here) and it had been on the menu at Peng’s, a restaurant specialising in Hunanese cuisine, since the 1950s.

IMAGE: Peng Chang-kuei and Fuschia Dunlop in Taipei, in 2004.

The restaurant’s owner told Dunlop that the dish was created by his father, Peng Chang-kuei, who had originally learned to cook in Changsha, Hunan’s capital city, as an apprentice to the celebrated and classically-trained chef Cao Jingchen. When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, Peng accompanied them – along with talented chefs from all over China.

Peng soon began preparing traditional Hunanese dishes for government banquets, as well as at his own restaurant. In 1973, he then moved to New York City to open another eponymous restaurant, adjusting his fusion-inflected Hunanese to suit American palates. The restaurant was a critical success – incredibly, Henry Kissinger was a regular customer – and Peng’s version of Hunan cuisine was replicated across America, becoming the “official” version despite its two-step mutation.

IMAGE: One of Dunlop’s notebooks from her research in Hunan.

The final twist to Dunlop’s tale involves the adoption of General Tso’s Chicken – this hybrid dish of civil war and exile – by a new generation of celebrity chefs from Hunan, some of whom were even trained by Peng during his brief visits to the gradually opening China of the 1980s.

Doubtless, these chefs were asked about General Tso’s Chicken when they visited America for book tours or cooking demonstrations. Dunlop speculates that they claimed it as an authentic regional speciality – papering over the cracks in China’s recent culinary history rather than risk losing face by admitting that Taiwan was the source of Hunan’s most famous dish.

Many well-known dishes have names or stories that explain their origins. One common story in China tells of the emperor or king in disguise, visiting his people anonymously. At the end of the day, he goes into a restaurant to order a meal – but there’s nothing left. Nonetheless, the unsuspecting chef manages to invent some kind of dish out of the few ingredients he has left in the kitchen, the emperor (or king) finds it delicious… and so on. Attaching this story to a new recipe makes it seem somehow familiar – part of a culinary tradition.

The story behind General Tso’s Chicken, as Dunlop tells it, is more complex and less comforting. Nonetheless, it embodies many aspects of China’s twentieth-century historical and culinary (r)evolution: the traditional master chef/apprentice system, the nostalgia of exile, the promiscuous mixing and adaptation of diaspora, and finally, the opening of China and its new generation of celebrity chefs, eager to show off their regional cuisine to the world but uncomfortable dealing directly with their country’s recent past.

IMAGE: Billboard outside the real General Tso’s ancestral hometown, from Jennifer 8. Lee’s TED talk.

Finally, in case you were wondering, there is indeed a real historical figure called General Tso, but he preceded his namesake dish by nearly a century. Chef Peng simply chose to name his chicken concoction after this successful and admired Hunanese military and political leader from the Qing dynasty, perhaps to heighten its nostalgic appeal to his fellow exiles.

Image from London Yields: Urban Agriculture

1. Becoming public policy
The event was introduced and moderated by David Barrie, a sustainable development consultant, who framed the day as a collective opportunity to brainstorm ways in which urban agriculture could be moved from mere “sustainable accessory” to become a standard practice of both everyday life and city design. Interestingly, Mark Brearley, Head of Design at Design for London (DfL) and the day’s first speaker, provided confirmation of Barrie’s diagnosis, confessing that food production was a recent add-on to many of their open space projects. Why? “Because people were asking us about it,” he said.

Brearley’s presentation was an overview of DfL’s hundreds of urban regeneration and infrastructure improvement projects; these are, in themselves, interesting but, in aggregate, somewhat exhausting. However, as an office of the London Development Agency, working on behalf of the Mayor of London, Brearley was able to provide a fascinating insight into some of the current institutional priorities that need to be satisfied before urban agriculture can become a standard part of London public policy. For example, DfL’s main interest in food production today is in terms of its “public engagement potential” and their primary stumbling block is how to measure the scalability of local initiatives. Any London-based urban agriculture projects hoping for a mayoral blessing, take note!

2. Food is a design tool
The second speaker was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Hungry City traces how food has shaped both the city and its productive hinterland throughout history, from the Sumerian city of Ur to today’s London via the markets and gates of ancient Rome. Steel provides a wide-ranging historical look of food production, importation, regulation, and culture, before putting forward her own intriguing and potentially revolutionary proposition: what would happen if we consciously used food as a design tool to create a “sitopic” city? Steel’s coinage here, sitopia—from “sitos” (food) and “topos” (place)—is derived from her realization that “food shares with utopia the quality of being cross-disciplinary… capable of transforming not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, [and] cities.” And because “food is necessary,” a sitopian city (unlike its utopian cousin) would remain tied to reality and of universal relevance.

The quotations above come from Steel’s book, however, rather than her lecture; twenty-five minutes was enough time to provide fascinating examples of food’s role in shaping cities and urban life, but, sadly, not enough to explain (let alone explore) further thoughts about food’s use as an urban planning tool. More to come soon, I hope, on this topic…

Ebenezer Howard’s original scheme for the Garden Cities of To-morrow shows a landscape reimagined in terms of food production and supply. As Carolyn Steel explains in her own book Hungry City, Howard’s plans relied on land reform that was never carried out, and the garden cities of today (Letchworth, Welwyn, etc.) are, as a result, little more than green dormitory suburbs.

3. Partnerships as infrastructure
Anna Terzi, who runs London Food Link’s small grants scheme for Sustain, was the day’s third speaker; she described one of their current projects, demonstrating how key insights from both Mark Brearley’s and Carolyn Steel’s talks might look in action.

Sustain (a nonprofit alliance for better food and farming) is currently poised to create borough-wide institutional change by partnering with Camden Council and Camden Primary Care Trust (part of the National Health Service). This alliance—with its intriguing implication that the National Health Service might be the one institution with the most to gain by promoting urban agriculture—speaks to the impact of creating new interest groups for locally grown food. By partnering with institutions responsible for dealing with established urban challenges—issues such as public health, economic growth, community engagement, waste, and environmental sustainability—groups like Sustain have the potential to take urban agriculture from decorative hobby to investment-worthy infrastructure.

The Camden partnership’s report (still in draft stage) aims to outline a relatively coherent and holistic food program for the borough—a plan that promises to use food to reshape at least this part of the city, in terms of promoting social enterprise, meeting infrastructure needs, and reducing health inequalities.

A lemon grown in Dulwich; photograph by Jonathan Gales (2008), © Bohn & Viljoen Architects.

4. Mapping and visualization tools
The last two presentations of the day agreed that successfully producing food in the city requires a detailed resource inventory combined with effective promotion efforts. Mikey Tomkins, a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton, described systematically mapping the rooftops, grass patches, vertical faces, and vacant lots of Elephant & Castle—whereupon he discovered that 30% of the area’s food needs could be met through the cultivation of found space alone.

Architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen, creators of the uninspiringly named CPUL (Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes), emphasized the need to think about spare inventory in terms of population and three dimensionality (their Urban Agriculture Curtain filled a display window one floor above us). Their research techniques included the accumulation of census data and questionnaires combined with GPS mapping and site visits in order to analyze a landscape’s food production capacity.

Both Tomkins and Bohn & Viljoen also showed several projects intended to help people read the city in terms of food, using tools as diverse as “edible maps” of London and visual analyses of urban agriculture in Havana, to installations and public events, such as the Continuous Picnic. This was a day-long event, part of the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, that included an “Inverted Market” (bring your own locally grown fruit and vegetables to be admired, judged, and then prepared), as well lessons in “Community Composting”; a giant public picnic then spread throughout Russell Square and Montague Place, with connecting corridors between.

Meanwhile, for his Edible Maps series, an example of which appears below, Tomkins targets a new type of urban resident: the “food-flâneur,” who, map in hand, “could start to picture… the grassed areas around housing, the corners of parks, or the many flat rooftops of this quarter of Croydon spring into life with psychogeographic food.”

Another example of urban agriculture as an opportunity for community activation was Croydon Roof Divercity, Tomkins’s collaboration with AOC (previously discussed, along with other AOC projects, on BLDGBLOG here).

From Mikey Tomkins’s series of Edible Maps, this guide represents the area around Surrey Street car park, site of Croydon Roof Divercity, in terms of inventory and potential yield.

5. Easy, cheap, and somewhat under control
Both Anna Terzi and Bohn & Viljoen recognized the difficulty of maintaining urban agriculture projects, once the initial novelty has worn off. Bohn & Viljoen are currently working on a twelve-step program to prevent relapse, while Sustain are offering ongoing practical and financial support to new food growing spaces in London through their Capital Growth initiative.

Throughout the morning, David Barrie repeatedly registered his concern that urban agriculture needed to be economically viable, not just an upscale $64 Tomato lifestyle choice. Several of the presenters added a layer of nuance to Barrie’s formulation, noting that cheap food has simply had its costs externalized and hidden (Carolyn Steel) and that organizations like the New Economics Foundation are developing the much-needed tools to measure urban-agriculture-created value, such as increased community engagement and environmental sustainability, which is currently perceived as intangible and qualitative (Katrin Bohn). Mikey Tomkins argued against an economics-based one-size-fits-all approach to urban agriculture, explaining that the scale of a food growing project determines its possible benefits. Thus differentiated, food gardening generates educational and quality of life outcomes and should be measured accordingly, while market gardening creates recycling benefits, and urban agriculture can be evaluated in terms of yield.

Finally, the elephant in the room was the degree of coordination and regulation needed to transform London into a food-producing landscape. In an environment where, as Carolyn Steel said, the supermarkets where Londoners buy more than 80% of their groceries refused to participate in consultations with the Mayor’s London Food Strategy, it seems unlikely that sustainable food production and distribution will become the norm without legislative intervention.

In her book, Steel quotes Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman who wrote: “You who control the transportation of food supplies are in charge, so to speak, of the city’s lifeline, of its very throat.” At the moment, Steel tells us, roughly 30 agrifood conglomerates—unelected, and with no responsibility other than to their shareholders—have almost unfettered control over London’s food supply. Until that changes, urban agriculture can’t help but remain “at the artwork stage”—an inspiring, attractive, and completely optional extra.