The idea is that by listing the farm on which your heirloom tomato was picked, chefs honour growers as the co-producer of flavour; meanwhile, by achieving protected designation of origin (PDO) status, traditional makers of pork pies and prosciutto preserve the geographic context of their product, as well as its artisanal technique and, often, its continued economic viability.

IMAGE: Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association (MMPPA) chairman Matthew O’Callaghan, via.

For consumers, however, these place names tend to form a more abstract cartography of implied inherent value. I confess to finding it reassuring that the lamb on offer at the restaurant up the street comes from Jamison Farm, even though I have no idea where that is, and I look for San Marzano DOP tomatoes despite the fact that (this is a little embarrassing) I couldn’t point to their carefully protected origin on a map.

IMAGE: The very delicious specials at Buttermilk Channel, with key ingredients precision-located.

Such haziness plays straight into the hands of less scrupulous food producers, who rely on the simultaneous geographical sensitivity and ignorance of consumers to borrow the halo effect of certain places, regions, and site typologies (think of the vast quantities of industrially processed foods that profess to be from some kind of “farm,” “glen,” or “dale,” for example). As it happens, the tomatoes most visibly associated with San Marzano in the United States are actually grown in California, not Italy (although they are the same varietal).

IMAGE: San Marzano brand tomatoes are not grown in San Marzano, Italy, but rather in California — a detail you could be excused for missing.

Indeed, the very concept of protected geographic origin is a tenuous one in the United States, which relies instead on trademarks that defend geo-specific brand names such as Boston Market (a national fast food chain based in Golden, Colorado) and Philadelphia Cream Cheese (manufactured by Kraft in Wisconsin) as well as Florido oranges and Idaho potatoes. The latter are at least grown in the places their names would imply, but, as the roughly thirteen billion Idaho potatoes and 139 million boxes of Florida oranges harvested annually set global market prices, they, as agricultural economist Bruce Babcock notes, “have as much in common with Roquefort cheese as Iowa corn has in common with Prosciutto di Parma. They are not differentiated products; they are the embodiment of a commodity.”

IMAGE: Oakham chicken and Lochmuir salmon, as pictured in Marks & Spencer’s online shop.

However, it is the branding geniuses at Marks & Spencer, suppliers of underwear and luxury ready-meals to the UK, who have taken the abstract, yet powerful, geography of food labeling to its logical, imaginary conclusion. While re-reading Sarah Murray’s excellent book, Moveable Feasts (of which more later), I came across this nugget:

Sometimes places that are entirely fictional are created to add to the appeal of a food. British chain Marks & Spencer recently introduced “Lochmuir salmon,” despite the fact that Lochmuir cannot be found on a map.

Marks & Spencer is refreshingly open on the subject of Lochmuir’s non-existence, with Andrew Mallinson, the company’s “fish expert,” explaining to The Scotsman newspaper that “it is a name chosen by a panel of consumers because it had the most Scottish resonance. It emphasises that the fish is Scottish.” Later in the same article, we read that:

The Scotsman understands Lochmuir salmon is in fact being farmed at five sites north of the Border by supplier Scottish Sea Farms after three years of research.

IMAGE: Lochmuir smoked salmon appetisers; apologies for the blurry shot.

Interestingly, Marks & Spencer had previously dabbled in the more common type of geo-label fiction, when it branded its chickens (sourced from farms across the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland) with the name of a historic market town in Rutland county: Oakham. Local butchers were not impressed (“They’ve just come in and nicked our name”), and the town’s Member of Parliament demanded (unsuccessfully) that the geographically challenged chicken be re-branded.

It seems as though it is easier to invent a fictional cartography than appropriate existing high-value place names.

IMAGE: Oakham chicken, via.

And, as our food supply becomes ever more globalised, I can’t help but imagine that more and more producers of “luxury” foods will seek to make their product even more desirable with reference to a hyper-specific, utterly imaginary atlas of aspirational origins. Chinese fois gras will come from the French-sounding Beauchâteau, Vietnamese mozzarella will be marketed under the faux-Italian name of San Legaro, and the role of geography in food description — originally intended as a means to reconnect consumers and producers — will end up further disguising the industrial commodity chain while creating an entirely alternate universe, made up of the places that we dream our food comes from.

My team of eleven brave Food Studies bloggers.

I’m extremely pleased to announce that I’m editing a new series called Food Studies for the online environmental magazine Grist. Thanks to the superhuman efforts of Grist’s new food editor, Twilight Greenaway, we launched today, and you can start following the series online here.

Those of you who keep up with Edible Geography will know that it is my firm belief that there is almost no limit to the subject matter that can be re-examined — and, most likely, made more interesting — through the lens of food. For Food Studies, I’ve asked eleven students from colleges and universities around the world, each of whom is thinking about food and agriculture from a very different perspective, to share their mental diet this autumn.

Cumulatively, I hope, their dispatches will make tangible the ways in which food is inherently multidisciplinary, with the capacity to shed new light on historic preservation, fiction, economics, urban design, public health, synthetic biology, geopolitics, and infinitely more besides. You can read more about my expectations for the series in my launch post over at Grist, as well as check out the roster of students for this semester.

Stay tuned to learn about the sensory dimensions of artisan cheese, the design of edible schoolyards, the history of canning, the future of hybrid wheat, and the economic importance of gastrodiplomacy alongside them over the coming months!

UPDATE: Following a successful launch, Food Studies is now firmly established and transferred to the capable editorial hands of Twilight Greenaway, the incoming Food editor at Grist. You can find and follow the series here; recent posts cover topics as diverse as zombie worms, post-Communist pork, and Catherine of Siena.

IMAGE: A half-dozen examples of Fox’s prolific and excellent output: Aeriality: On the World from Above, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles, The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin, Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada, and  Driving to Mars.

He has also, I discovered recently, spent some time moonlighting as a wine label writer.

Food writing and its various subgenres, from Japanese sushi manga to beer bottle fiction, are a source of endless fascination to me, shedding equal light on the way we think about both food and language. In the world of wine, descriptors are particularly loaded, as the vagaries of sensory perception meet the marketing language of value attribution.

In an understandable reaction to the flowery bouquet of anise, graphite, and persimmon often conjured up on the same label, a recent New York Times article by Eric Asimov suggested that wine descriptions should be limited to two words, sweet and savoury. Meanwhile, just last week, Slate ran a fantastic article by Coco Krumme that correlated words and cost, finding, for example, that expensive wines are described using singular flavour analogies such as “tobacco” or “chocolate,” whereas a cheap wine tends to get abstract terms such as “fruity” or “clean.” “Armed with this information,” Krumme writes:

We could, for example, create the most expensive-sounding review in the world: A velvety chocolate texture and enticingly layered, yet creamy, nose, this wine abounds with focused cassis and a silky ruby finish. Lush, elegant, and nuanced. Pair with pork and shellfish.

And then there is terroir. In their Food for Thinkers post, Smudge Studio quoted geologist Terry Wright saying that “A label without reference to soils types and roles is leaving one half of the story of the wine in the dust.” The idea that place affects the taste of food, so that in turn, wine or chocolate or coffee made from berries or beans from a unique geographical location can be interpreted as an expression of the land is, of course, an endless source of interest for a site called Edible Geography.

So you can imagine my delight when Bill, BLDGBLOG, and I had the chance to sit down and talk about all of these things recently. Our conversation is below, and in it, Bill describes his education as a wine label writer, the history of the blurb, the influence of minimalist poetry on the language of advertising, and much more.

•••

Edible Geography: How and why did you get into writing wine labels?

William L. Fox: Here’s the story: I’m in Portland, Oregon, and I’m working as an independent writer. I’m writing catalog essays for people, I’m working on books, and I’m going to the Antarctic. And I’m completely broke.

Then Robert Beckmann, a painter from Nevada, calls me. His high school buddy from Pennsylvania has moved to Oregon and started a winery. This guy, Dave Grooters, is an ex-software engineer — really smart and a wonderful guy. Winemaking is his new life, so he’s moved to Oregon.

So Dave Grooters hires his buddy Beckmann to paint the wine label for the first release, a high-end Pinot Noir called Roads End. The winemaker is a man named Ken Wright, who’s a god of pinot makers in North America.

IMAGE: Robert Beckmann’s painting on the label of Carlton Cellars’ Pinot Noir.

While they’re talking about the label, Dave says to Beckmann, “God, I wish I knew someone who knew how to write about wine.” Beckmann replies, “Well, you should talk to Bill Fox. He’s never written about wine, but he’s a writer. And he’s in Portland.”

Dave Grooters calls me, and I immediately call my friend David Abel, who’s a professional book editor and an all-around genius, and tell him, “David, I’ve got to drag you into this because I’m not going to do this by myself. We’ve got to do this together.” So the two of us go and meet with Dave Grooters and his wife Robin.

David and I are sitting in Dave and Robin’s living room, at their coffee table, across which is spread a phenomenal array of some of the world’s great pinots. Dave says to us, “I want you to taste these pinots. We’re going to walk through these so you understand the terroir from which each of these wines comes.”

From the start, there was nothing about blackberries and chocolate and all that nonsense. It was all about where the berries are grown, how the vines are treated, how the berries are picked, and so on. It was really about terroir: land, place, and our connection to it. Dave explained that the first release was going to be called Roads End, because that’s a particular beach he and Robin went to that for them represented Oregon and the aspiration they had for the wine.

In that first conversation, it was clear that we had to write about place and climate, and that our label would have nothing to do with all of these California affectations about how we describe taste in terms of other foods. We weren’t going to go there. We weren’t going to become this analogue wine. We wanted to be true to where the wine is produced and where the berries are grown.

That’s how I learned how to describe wine: writing the back labels of wine for Carlton Cellars. They have their own vineyard now, and it’s an exquisite site. It reminds me of Wallace Stevens’s “jar upon a hill” around which the landscape is ordered — there is a tree around which this vineyard is ordered.

Their wines show a sensitivity, in both the wine-making and, hopefully, also the writing, to the soil and the climate. We thought about it in terms of the clay to sand to volcanic mixtures and how that affects what the berries express, what direction the wind comes from, and the temperatures at certain times of the year — in particular, how close can you get to freezing to intensify the sugars at that crucial moment when the fruit is coming to a state of ripeness.

BLDGBLOG: So when it comes to describing the wine, it’s almost like you’re treating each wine like a Weather Channel report on the exact climate that exists on a certain hilltop during a certain month?

Fox: You could combine a Weather Channel report with a USGS geologist’s field report with a geomorphologist’s soil analysis, and you still wouldn’t quite have it.

So many vineyards are archaeological sites, for example — maybe they are post-agricultural of some other output, or maybe Native Americans burned the site as part of their landscape management. There are people who pretend that if apricots, for example, were once grown on a plot of land, they can still taste them in the wine. I think that’s possibly the silliest thing I’ve ever heard — but it is true that you can tell the difference between major soil regimes and how the soil has been treated.

IMAGE: Soil map of the Willamette Valley, via.

Edible Geography: Did you taste the soil?

Fox: No. I walked the land, but I don’t eat dirt. [laughs] That said, I have spent a fair amount of time with geologists in the field, and they love to taste rocks. It’s one way that they can tell how the world has acted upon materials. They can also tell a little bit about the composition by taste.

It’s like when I’m working with NASA on Devon Island and everyone is in pressure suits, wandering around trying to figure out how we would do geology on Mars. There are several complaints that geologists have about working in a pressure suit. The vision — and that’s where eighty percent of your information comes from every day — is actually not so bad in a suit, because the bubble’s pretty big. One problem is that you can’t touch anything — you can’t actually feel anything on your skin, because you have gloves in the way. That makes it hard to tell the texture of rocks, which would tell you how hydrology has acted on it. What’s worse for the geologists, though, is that you can’t taste the bloody thing. On Devon Island, for example, if you put rocks in your mouth, you’ll often taste hydrocarbons. When you’re in a suit, you can’t do that.

I will occasionally taste coarse materials — with small rocks in the Southwest, for example, I can sometimes use taste to figure out what’s going on in terms of stream action. But I wouldn’t have a clue where to start in terms of tasting dirt in the Willamette Valley. People who really know their wines don’t even have to taste the soil. They can walk onto a piece of property and smell it. Of course, wine growers always hire a scientist to come in and do the soil analyses, because you don’t spend a lot of money planting a vineyard without knowing everything about the soil and the drainage and so on.

IMAGE: The K1 robot exploring Battle Herc Ridge, near the Haughton Mars Project research station on Devon Island, in August 2010. Photo by Dr Trey Smith (NASA Ames), NASA/Mars Institute/Haughton-Mars Project.

Edible Geography: What effect do inputs — organic fertiliser versus non-organic, or pesticide sprays — have on the flavor?

Fox: Most people that I know who make high-end wines put as few chemicals as possible in the soil because it distorts everything. On the other hand, you can’t afford to be wiped out, you know? It’s a balance.

Edible Geography: I’ve come across something called the UC Davis Wine Aroma Wheel for describing wine. Is that something you drew on, or not at all?

Fox: UC Davis does great work and they’re amazing research scientists, but the school has a very particular and highly financialised relationship to the California wine industry. I’m talking about Oregon wines. Utterly different.

Edible Geography: And descriptors are one of the ways you would set them apart, as well?

Fox: Yes, absolutely. California wines are defined by flavour analogy; Oregon wines are framed in terms of the land.

IMAGE: UC Davis Wine Aroma Wheel by Ann Noble

Edible Geography: How long did you write wine labels for?

Fox: I only did it for a short time — about a year. It was one of the most intimate and inclusive and intelligent introductions I’ve ever had to a landscape. There was the geology and meteorology, but also the wine culture of the Willamette Valley — the entire terrain, not just the terroir, and how that translates into territory.

As a result, I’ve come to appreciate wines that are produced out of grapes grown upon hills, rather than in valleys. Duckhorn Cabernet, which is grown on Howell Mountain in Napa, is a great example. A Howell Mountain Cab isn’t that typically sweet California Cab where it’s almost got too much sunshine—it’s almost too benign a climate. Howell is just big enough of a mountain that the vines get stressed a bit more, and that gives the wine more complexity.

IMAGE: A USGS isostatic gravity map (measuring rock density) of the Willamette Valley.

Edible Geography: So you can taste the difference between grapes from a hill and grapes from a valley?

Fox: Absolutely. You can tell that the micro-climate is different. It can get very confusing, because there are ways of making the wine that will structure it differently, so you can change one thing into another. But in general, if it’s a pretty honest wine — in other words, if you’re not trying to change the character of the wine through the way in which you make it, but instead you’re trying to express the terroir — you sure can tell the difference. The valley has a less vivid taste in your mouth. It’s not going to have the highs and lows — the depth — that a wine produced from grapes on a hill has the potential to produce.

But it is entirely possible to fool people, to a certain extent. There are so many things that you can do in a vat that will change the nature of how things are tasted — where the wine comes alive on the tongue, for example, whether it be in the front or in the back, or almost in the throat, it’s so deep. I’m nowhere near clever enough to straighten out all that stuff.

But in a true blind tasting, what you taste and what you appreciate is founded on things that are so much more fey than that.

Edible Geography: Your personal infrastructure of analogies takes over.

Fox: Exactly. For true blind testing, you have to do a really large sampling of both people who know about wine and people who don’t. I find most blind testing competitions sort of silly, because they’re so unscientific. It’s just an extremely selective group of people with predetermined tastes and ways that they understand wine.

Look, what you ate the night before affects how you taste the wine the next day. What time of the month it is, if you’re a woman, will affect how you taste wine. How hungry you are, what perfume you’re wearing or laundry detergent you used — basically, everything else that is going on in your olfactory system will affect it.

If I bring a bottle of Roads End down to Reno, I have to let it sit for at least three months before the molecular structure settles down enough for it to taste like what it tasted like in Portland. A wine gets shaken up a bit just by driving down a road from Portland to Reno, and it’s not quite the same wine until it’s had the chance to settle down. So that’s a variable affecting taste: from how far away did the wines come, and how long did they sit before you tasted them?

There are some objective standards. You can really tell whether a wine has one, two, or three dimensions, to use a whiskey metaphor. You can tell when a wine is large and has rooms to walk into versus something that’s more like a closet — you taste it and it’s done.

You can also taste the amount of money that was spent to buy the care to make the wine. Actually, if you wanted to say what’s more apparent in taste than anything else, it’s probably money. You can taste the level of care that was taken in making the wine, and care costs money.

In a way, oddly enough, the terroir becomes financial, not necessarily geographical or geological. Of course, in reality, it’s always a mixture. The money will just enhance and take the best advantage of each terroir. But, if you’re willing to only take the very best berries as they’re moving along the belt, and only berries from vineyards that this year had a really good week at the end of a particular month, so they have a specific profile in terms of tannins and sugars, and so on — you can taste that level of care.

That said, you can be the most scientific and experienced vintner in the world and still blow it. Some guy next door who’s a tyro can make a better wine than you that year, just because of how things come together.

Edible Geography: How did your experience affect the way you read wine labels? Is there an element of competition for you, still?

Fox: I do still go to the store and read the back labels. I chortle sometimes, and other times I’m in awe. I’m the same way with books, as an author. That’s what a wine label is — a small book.

IMAGE: Although he was reluctant to name names, Fox later cited Duckhorn Vineyards as an example of a label he admires, noting that “The wines are so good that they can afford to make puns.”

BLDGBLOG: What are some of the best labels you’ve read? What do you look for in a label?

Fox: I’m not going to name names, but there are some I really admire. Of course, you can tell a lot from the front label. In the store, the really high-end wines are on the top shelf, and the really bottom-end are on the lowest shelf — in that respect, wine is just like toilet paper. The stuff everyone’s going to buy is in the middle, and you try to distinguish yourself in that range if you want to sell a lot of wine. So there are the catchy names and vivid labels, which are designed to appeal primarily to women because they do more of the shopping than men, and they sell better than labels that are dry or stern and forbidding, and don’t give you a lot of information on the front.

Edible Geography: Are there any words that are particularly meaningless on a wine label, the way “natural” on food packaging means nothing at all.

Fox: You’ve hit on a key issue. It’s interesting: olive oil is in a similar state of linguist confusion right now. I’ve spoken with guys in Australia who are making absolutely spectacular olive oils, and they were scratching their heads and cursing at what the Americans and the Europeans have done to the olive oil trade. These Australians are making really incredible olive oil, but they have no nomenclature by which they can explain and defend the virtue of what they do.

What we’ve done in the highest consuming nations, in a peculiar kind of way, is that we’ve valorised a certain kind of vocabulary that is shared in common with high-end wine, chocolate, olive oil, coffee — all things that you don’t have to have but you really want. These foodstuffs have adopted a particular vocabulary to make a hierarchy of value in their industries, and, of course, that is subject to corruption the minute enough consumers believe that A means something better than B.

I think wine started the process. Chocolate and coffee and so on are all are imitating wine. It’s a Pandora’s Box sort of situation — it’s actually quite interesting to watch how the vocabulary filters through into how all of these other luxuries are described. Wine labels are sort of a telling document in this process of how we establish and then co-opt hierarchies of value.

IMAGE: Google N-gram showing the frequency of usage of the word “terroir” in books published between 1980 and 2008 in American English.

Edible Geography: And yet French wine labels, from the most exclusive to your standard table wine, say nothing.

Fox: Exactly. You have to know something about the region, which is to say, either the geology and geomorphology and climate where the wine was produced, or you have to know the reputation of the wine-makers themselves or that a particular village is known for a particular balance. Which is to say, you have to know the terroir. French wine labels don’t even list the grape — it’s all about the terroir. And the terroir is not just a region — it’s a style that’s evolved to take advantage of the conditions in that region.

And Americans are a loquacious people.

BLDGBLOG: I wonder if you can find parallels to that in the different ways novels are packaged in Europe and the US. In France, novels never say anything on the back, whereas I want to know what it’s about before I buy it.

Fox: I think the British can actually take credit for that. There was a period after the Second World War where the British were beginning to mass import continental products — from cheese to literature — and the art of the blurb was invented.

Penguin was publishing French novels, for example, and they were trying to describe the sophisticated cultural pleasures of Europe to a relatively inexperienced population. Of course, England has spectacular novels and fantastic cheese. But in order to commodify products coming from Europe, in order to build up a market where there wasn’t one before, and in order to ratchet up national economies after the war, you get the deployment of the blurb.

Obviously, there had been advertising before World War II — but I’m willing to argue that the blurb came into its own as a literary form in Britain in the Fifties. Of course, no one can own the blurb — it’s a pretty large genre, and Americans have certainly embraced it. It actually works the same way for us — the Brits know more than we do, the French know more than the Brits, and so on.

There’s a whole history of blurbism that allows us to become more sophisticated and experienced as a culture. It’s all about how you sell stuff — you have to educate the consumer.

A back wine label is the ultimate in the blurbing business. If you think Stephen King’s blurbs have to be a paragon of precision, think about how compact the back label of a wine bottle is. You have so few words — eighty would be lengthy.

I started out as a minimalist poet, and that served me well. My friend David Abel is also a trained poet, and he used to run the best avant-garde bookstore in New York City — The Bridge. He edits down to the quantum level. He really can take a screwdriver to anything anybody ever wrote and simply get the fuel mixture very lean. The wine labels on those early Roads End vintages are, I think, quite clean.

BLDGBLOG: Are there anthologies? The 150 Best Wine Labels Ever Written?

Fox: No, but I think it’s a book we should do! I think it’s a great idea.

BLDGBLOG: There’s an anecdote I remember about the minimalist poet Aram Saroyan. He also worked in advertising, and he’s the author of one of those catchphrases that most Americans will know, which is that “Raid kills bugs dead.”

Fox: It’s like James Dickey — he wrote “The pause that refreshes!” for Coca-Cola. Wallace Stevens, to go back to the “jar on the hill” I mentioned earlier, worked in advertising too. That kind of concision in American language: you find it in advertising, minimalist poetry, and the best wine labels.

Edible Geography: Do you know what the wine label writing industry looks like now?

Fox: I have no idea. But I do know that there’s a real self-consciousness among high-end winemakers about not being flowery — not trying to take your wine and hook it to a cake, you know? There’s a real notion of trying to be honest about here’s how and where we make the wine.

But the bottom line is that language is a great deceiver. You’ve just got to taste stuff yourself, whether it’s a cheese or a wine or a restaurant, to know if it’s any good.

BLDGBLOG: What’s the wine label editorial experience like? Did wine-makers come back to you and ask you to use or not use certain words?

Fox: Absolutely. Someone will say, for example, “I just don’t want our geology to be identified with that of the Willamette Valley. I want to make sure we’re distinct from that, because we’re not actually in the valley, and it makes a difference.” To make that distinction, at the level of language, means there are words you just can’t use.

When you look at a vineyard, it’s a really small piece of property. Compared to a wheat field, it’s tiny. Everyone’s trying to parse out the finest level of distinction that they can draw, so that the mind of the consumer has a hook to put their product on. It’s never not a sell. Even the most serious, honest, committed wine-maker is aware of the fact that if he or she cannot sell the wine, then they can’t continue to make wine or keep the land.

IMAGE: Chapter 1, The Case of the IPA, via Slashfood.

“It started with a summons from a wealthy brewer named Cornelius Fuggle (no relation)….”

So begins The Case of the IPA, a detective story in twelve parts, published serially on a beer brewed especially for the purpose. According to Buzzards Bay Brewing Company co-owner, Bill Russell, the idea came up “over beer,” in a conversation about the extra label space available on their new 22-ounce bottles.

Rather than fill it with flowery descriptions of the artisanal brewing process or the provenance of each ingredient, brewer Harry Smith asked cellar master Paull Goodchild, a keen amateur lyricist and humour writer, to come up with a label-sized story. Goodchild quickly banged out a “hard-boiled detective farce,” which in turn inspired Smith to brew up a “hoppy, aromatic IPA.”

IMAGE: Chapter 1, The Case of the IPA, via Wired UK.

Each case of twelve bottles contains the full story, although Russell notes that single bottles are also available, as “some people just want to drink the beer.”

In this particular case, based on a quick skim of the first chapter, I too might be inclined to stick with what’s inside the bottle. However, as a fan of both craft beer and serialised literature, the possibilities of bottle publishing are pretty exciting. The Ithaca Beer Company could embark on a multi-year project to publish all 12,110 lines of Homer’s Odyssey, in a homage to the classically named cities of upstate New York. Sam Smith’s might partner with the Booker Prize to reprint the first paragraph of each shortlisted novel on an appropriate ale, sparking an annual autumn of pub-based literary debate. Indeed, as physical bookshops continue to close, perhaps publishers could buy label space for their new releases, running teasers on oversized bottles of Sierra Nevada, complete with a RFID tag that prompts you to purchase the e-book and continue reading.

But April 1 also marks the birthday of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, grandfather of the gastronomic essay and author of The Physiology of Taste (1825), and for the past ten years, the International Edible Book Festival has been held on that date in his honour. The rules for participation are simple:

1. The event must be held on April 1st (or close to that date)

2. All edible books must be “bookish” through the integration of text, literary inspiration or, quite simply, the form.

3. Organizations or individual participants must register with the festival’s organization and see to it that the event is immortalized on the international festival website.

IMAGE: “The Story of 
The Jolly Rancher Company,” by Brenda J. Gallagher, via the endlessly browsable International Edible Book Festival archives.

This year, there are events scheduled as far afield as Adelaide, Venice, Dublin, and Normal, Illinois, with the United States in general showing the strongest representation.

The loose definition of “bookish” results in a variety of approaches, such as food-related puns on the book’s title or food-based constructions of key scenes or characters from a favourite novel. For example, among the edible books now on display at the University of Oregon Library are cataloguer and metadata technician Paul Harvey’s “Cannery Row” – a row of canned vegetables inspired by Steinbeck’s novella of the same name. Meanwhile, last year at the University of Puget Sound’s Edible Books Festival Libary Director Jane Carlin “won the award for Most Literary last year with her creation “Rabbit(s) Run,” inspired by John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. She lined up marshmallow rabbit “peeps” in single file upon rice cakes.”

IMAGE: “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” by Stephanie Hawkins, a 2009 entry into the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative Edible Books Contest, via the Buffalo News.

My favourite entries, though, are the ones that try to recreate the book form in food. Today’s Buffalo News reports on engineer Chuck Matteliano, who, together with his wife Cara, created a filo pastry book that won last year’s first prize at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative’s Edible Book contest:

“I’m an engineer by training, and my wife has her PhD in speech communication,” said Matteliano. “All her artsy fartsy speech communication friends were talking about their ideas. I said, ‘This is not an English problem, or an art problem. This is an engineering problem.”

He ran some trials with notoriously delicate phyllo, finally learning how to attach uncooked phyllo sheets to paper before passing them through an inkjet printer loaded with nontoxic ink. The Mattelianos printed pages from Homer’s Odyssey on phyllo, mounted them with more phyllo baked into a flaky, many-layered dessert, and there it was: “Booklava: An Edible Odyssey.”

“The printed phyllo turned yellow and started to crack, so it looked even more like an old book,” said Matteliano, whose creation won first place. “I don’t know that we’ll be able to top it this year.”

IMAGE: “Booklava,” by Chuck and Cara Matteliano, the winner at the 2009 Western New York Book Arts Collaborative Edible Books Contest, via the Buffalo News.

IMAGE: “Essay on the Essays of Francis Bacon,” by Shasti O’Leary Soudant and Lauren Newkirk Maynard, second-place winner at the 2009 Western New York Book Arts Collaborative Edible Books Contest, via the Buffalo News.

Close behind, in second place, was “Essay on the Essays of Francis Bacon,” by Shasti O’Leary Soudant and Lauren Newkirk Maynard:

They wove two pounds of bacon into mats, then baked them, weighed down by another tray so they’d finish flat.

“Shasti came up with the brilliant idea of taking her Dewalt drill and drilling holes through the bacon covers, and use some kind of food to stitch it together,” Maynard said. “I suggested scallions — you blanch them and they get soft, but stay bright green.”

With scallion hinges, whipped egg omelet for the “pages,” and alphabet-soup lettering, it was an edible work of art.

Chuck and Cara told the Buffalo News that they are planning to compete again this year, riffing on John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat by creating either a printed tortilla page or perhaps even a pop-up book using hard-shell tacos. Lauren and Shasti are taking the year off, but generously shared their hard-earned wisdom with would-be edible book creators: “Choose ingredients that aren’t terribly perishable, that can sit overnight and not fall, or melt, or get goopy.”

IMAGE: “Eating Words – Winston Churchill,” by Richard Kegler, 2009 (wafer board, chocolate, Twizzlers), via the WNY Book Arts Center Edible Books gallery.

IMAGE: “Taste with your tendrils (Braille),” by Courney Brent, 2009 (black licorice, candy dots), via the WNY Book Arts Center Edible Books gallery.

On a similar note, I’ve been enjoying Murketing‘s Rob Walker’s recent series of posts on “the idea of the book,” in which he curates various re-uses and alternate frameworks for books – as wall-paper, guns, jewellery, intellectual property contracts, or even title-poetry, spines selected and lined up as word art. Seeing so many deformations and reformations all together inevitably (for me, at least) leads to some interesting reflections on the book as a designed object, as well the varying methods for its consumption.

IMAGE: “Shark Journal” from the Sorted Books project by Nina Katchadourian, 2001 (C-prints), via Murketing.

IMAGE: “Petra,” by Guy  Laramée, 2007 (eroded Encyclopedia Britannica, pigments), via Murketing.

Walker also collects examples of “imaginary brands” – fictional products immortalised in films, television shows, and, of course, books. It would be pretty incredible to see the two subjects collide at the Edible Book Festival: Wonka Bars used to make edible copies of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, for example, or a seven-layer Harry Potter book-cake that incorporates Bertie Bott’s every flavour jelly beans. There’s still time to enter: let me know if you do!

Publishing Food is a very occasional series that collects intriguing examples from the overlap between food and publishing, broadly interpreted. For previous posts in the series, click here.

IMAGE: The Little Cookie Book, Ruth Adomeit (Woodstock, Vermont: The Lilliputter Press, 1960). 2 3/8 x 1 5/8″

On a recent excursion to The Morgan Library & Museum (to see their gorgeous William Blake exhibition), I spent some time in the gift shop leafing through a big book about miniature books. Based on a 2007 exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures contains such curiosities as “thumb bibles,” a truly tiny copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, and a two-by-three inch autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, inventor of the liquid-propellant rocket, which accompanied astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission and thus became the first book on the moon.

IMAGE: Handbook of Practical Cookery, Matilda Lees Dods (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1906). 2 1/4 x 1 7/8″

The exhibition also included several miniature cookbooks, including – in spite of the format’s evident impracticality – a Handbook of Practical Cookery (London, 1906), dedicated to “the worldwide sisterhood of housewives and their husbands.” Its American contemporary, The Chunky Book, is a more tempting series of five volumes on “sandwiches, salads, chafing dishes, candies, and cocktails.”

IMAGE: The Boston Bean Pot With Views (Roslindale, Massachusetts: John E. Maclachlan, 1929). The strip is 19″ long and 3/4″ high.

IMAGE: St. Louis Exposition in a Nutshell (Chicago: L. I.. Silverman, 1904). The strip measures 1 1/2″ by 1 1/8″ and was a memento of the 1904 World’s Fair.

Where food really seems to come into its own in the miniature book world is as a cover. Apparently, “presenting a souvenir panorama in a nutshell was a 1930s fad [...] Clamshells were used for the same purpose, though with far less frequency.” Although it hardly seems to qualify as a book, the exhibition also included a miniature Boston bean pot from 1929, in which nestled a cylinder of city views. The attached postcard reads:

The South may know its grapefruit, the West may know its corn, the Maine folks know their ‘taters as sure as you were born. New York may know its onions and Connecticut its greens, but, you tell the world, Horatius, that Old Boston knows its BEANS.

More recently, in 1981, a collection of witty sayings about “the pitfalls and pleasures of the grape,” entitled Thoughts From The Cork, was published, appropriately enough, inside the split halves of a wine cork.

IMAGE: Thoughts from the Cork (Salisbury, Connecticut: Lime Rock Press, 1981). The cork is 1 5/8 x 1″

On an equally whimsical note, this synopsis of a lecture given by Dirt Café and Slow Food member Claire Hartten at the annual St. Bride Printing Library conference diverted my attention to the Dutch phenomenon of edible letters. According to Fontshop, a Dutch typography firm, the tradition dates back to the middle ages, when apprentice monks were taught the alphabet using pastry letters, which they were allowed to eat as a reward after each lesson learned.

IMAGE: Still life with Letter Pastries, Peter Binoit, ca. 1615, via.

These days, edible letters are a seasonal treat in The Netherlands (and apparently also in Iowa). Rather than an orange at the toe of their stockings, St. Nicholas (known as Sinterklaas) brings good Dutch children their first initial, in chocolate form. Pastry and even sausage letters are also still available during Sinterklaas season.

IMAGE: Dutch Chocolate Letter advertising (left) and packaging (right), via this treasure trove of Chocolate Letter images.

IMAGE: Many flavour variations on a chocolate letter S, but all in the Egyptienne font, via.

However, the would-be chocolate publisher faces some challenges in terms of letter availability and font choice. According to Fontshop, “most manufacturers don’t make the complete alphabet. Droste, for example, skips not only the I but also the U, X, Y and Z.”  Meanwhile, numbers, exclamation points, and question marks are only available wholesale.

IMAGE: Chocolate letter moulds, via. The letter I is unpopular with manufacturers as all chocolate letters have to weigh the same – those who do produce it often package two Is together. The letter M is the most popular – it is the first initial of moeder (mother) and mama. According to Droste, “Every year we keep track of how the different letters do. For example, two years ago we had too many Gs, so last year we adapted the production accordingly.”

From a design point of view, the letters are most commonly cast in Egyptienne, a slab serif font designed by Frutiger in 1956 – roughly the same time as mass-produced chocolate letters first became available. Fontshop reports that although confectionary manufacturer Verkade experimented with digital LCD lettershapes a few years ago, they weren’t popular and the company quickly switched production back to the traditional Egyptienne, explaining that: “Because of its segmented shape the digital letter broke at specific spots. People prefer the traditional letter: somehow you always manage to break off a bigger piece than you intended.”

IMAGE: An advertisement for van Houten Chocolate Letters, via

Finally, as if tiny cookery books and giant chocolate letters were not enough, we finish with the ultimate food publishing achievement: a 3D ink-jet printer that actually extrudes, combines, and cooks food. This is one of the design concepts proposed by two graduate students in MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, as part of their research project, Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy. From their own description:

Cornucopia‘s cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favourite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate combinations of food. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by Cornucopia‘s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head.

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Digital Fabricator, via Amit Zoran.

The Cornucopia Digital Fabricator is presented alongside a Virtuoso Mixer and a Robotic Chef, the latter of which boasts “an array of interchangeable manipulation devices, such as a drill bits, mineral and spices injection syringes, and a lower power laser diode,” and a mechanical arm that “can apply mechanical transformations, such as compressions, elongations, and torsion, as well as control the location of the food underneath the toolhead.”

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Virtuoso Mixer, via Amit Zoran.

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Robotic Chef, via Amit Zoran.

The culinary and design possibilities these tools would allow are mind-blowing: in the hands of Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, Marije Vogelzang, or James King, food could be transformed into something far beyond anything I am capable of imagining.

And if Cornucopia ever became a common household device, it would be the gastronomic equivalent of desktop computing or web 2.0: hundreds of thousands of people would suddenly have access to the tools to design their own new food forms and flavours, rather than being told what to eat by Kraft and how it should taste by Firmenech. Then there are the potential health benefits: the printer could control portion size, nutrient mix, and even pH balance.

IMAGE: James King’s Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow, a project that examines how we can best design in-vitro meat and other artificial foods of the future in order to remind ourselves what they are and where they came from.

Sadly, Cornucopia is at the concept design rather than off-the-shelf gadget stage in its development. Nonetheless, it is inspiring to imagine that the food publishing of the future could also include dinner among its expansive library of possible formats.

Publishing Food is a very occasional series that collects intriguing examples from the overlap between food and publishing, broadly interpreted. For previous posts in the series, click here. Thanks to Geoff for the Cornucopia: Digital Gastronomy link.

However, at the outer fringes of the food publishing industry are three projects whose ambitions far exceed the Food Network‘s “dump and stir” model.

First of all, hot off the press comes Food + Sex magazine. It’s destined to be shelved with Cabinet rather than Playboy, by all accounts, and describes its editorial strategy as the “combined effort of artists, writers, farmers and foodmakers exploring how desire shapes the food environment.”

While the preview spreads look to favour vaguely trippy artwork over text, and the thought of “human-incubated yogurt,” as Food + Sex headlines it, makes me feel a little sick, the magazine’s basic premise holds plenty of potential. A couple of essays on bee and worm sex – both essential for food production – seem to promise a Botany of Desire-style insect- and plant’s-eye view of agriculture.

The Penis Mushroom in all its glory. Photo by John W. Allen.

Their article on the frankly incredible psychedelic Penis Mushroom (apparently a reprint of this 2008 piece in Vice) involves Amazonian spores, UV experiments, and an unsolved murder, and is well worth a read. Food + Sex is on tour this month: if you’re in NYC, the Bay Area, or North Carolina’s Triangle, check them out.

Another interesting new food publication is artist Aleksandra Mir‘s How Not To Cook. Her project, a commission from Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery, is a sort of oral history of kitchen catastrophes:

Based on Aleksandra’s personal history of cooking disasters, the project invites 1000 people from all around the world to give their advice of how NOT to cook. With this volume, any reader will be more than well equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in their kitchen.

Cover art for Aleksandra Mir’s The How Not To Cookbook.

You can download a sample pdf here: it is a lovely mixture of the head-noddingly familiar and the head-shakingly idiotic, with a tears-of-laughter-inducing tone of mournful, hard-earned wisdom. Some of my favourites:

A cucumber is a poor substitute when making zucchini bread, no matter how similar they appear.

Do not waste your time going through the whole process of mixing, kneading and baking bread when you do not know what lukewarm is really supposed to mean. When the water is too hot, you will kill your yeast and end up using your hard-as-rock boule as a doorstop.

If you happen upon a large amount of fruit-and-nut-studded cheese, and you do not like it, do not try to make a cheesecake out of it by running it through a food processor with some milk and then baking it. You still will not like it.

If you want to feed your date by cooking tomatoes mixed with eggs take into account that after adding butter and oil do not also add a jar of peanut butter. She will not feel like having sex after eating this.

I could actually just cut-and-paste the whole thing, I enjoyed it so much. Together, these tips transcend their status as funny stories to form an alternative landscape of cooking – a direct and refreshing contrast to the glossily perfect, celebrity-chef food we consume so eagerly in books, magazines, and on TV. As the book’s blurb suggests: “By making our guilty failures public we may even be creating an original and subversive form of art, rather than simply aspiring to obvious and repetitive results.”

Image from the Japanese version of Oishinbo.

Finally, this article in the June issue of Monocle introduced me to the amazing world of Japanese food manga. “Number one on the charts,” apparently, “is Oishinbo which follows the exploits of a foodie journalist and has sold over 100 million copies since it first appeared in 1983.”

As of January 2009, Oishinbo is also available in English, in a best-of format that collects past issues under thematic headings such as The Joy of Rice and Izakaya – Pub Food.

The cover of the first issue of the English translation of Oishinbo, via Viz Media.

Oishinbo‘s premise is quite intriguing: Yamaoka Shiro, who has a highly refined palate and an estranged father, Kaibara Yuzan, is commissioned by Tozai News to create “The Ultimate Menu,” “a model meal embodying the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine,” as part of the newspaper’s 100th anniversary celebrations.

Image from the English translation of Oishinbo, via Viz Media.

Twenty-five years and 126 volumes later, the task is still not complete, but Kaibara has accepted an offer from a rival newspaper to create a competing Ultimate Menu, Yamaoko has married and had children, and readers have been instructed on such vital and complex topics as whether mackarel can ever make truly good sashimi, or how to correctly season sea bream:

The salinity of the water varies a lot in different parts of the inland sea. This is especially the case in the Akashi Strait, which is recessed like a pocket. So I came to the conclusion that the best way to season the fish would be to match the salt level of the seawater that the fish lived in.

The very idea that there could be a perfect expression of Japanese cuisine, and that it would require an epic, lifetime quest to achieve it, says something interesting about the national culture and relationship with food (and is the subject of this subscriber-only article in Gastronomica).

Other top-selling Japanese culinary manga include Cooking Papa, about a salaryman with better kitchen skills than his wife, and the awesome-sounding Professor Genmai’s Bento Box, in which a professor of agriculture lectures his students on farming, fermentation, and constipation.

The latest trend, however, is a wine manga called Kami no Shizuku, or Drops of God, which apparently has a huge influence on the still relatively small Japanese wine-market. According to Shin and Yuko Kibayashi, the manga’s creators, “If we mention a wine, it sells out. We have to be careful when we include wines we like personally.”

Kami no Shizuko cover art, via the Daily Mail.

They are also revolutionising the language of wine description through their hero, Shizuku Kanzaki, who has a completely uneducated palate at first, and likens a 2001 Château Mont-Pérat to the band Queen. After all, as Shin and Yuko say in their interview with Monocle, “Who understands if you say a wine tastes like a ‘wet ash tray’?”

According to the Daily Mail, some South Korean parents even “slip a copy into their children’s suitcase before they leave for university, in the hope it will inspire them to develop sophisticated palates.” The manga has spun off a Japanese Nintendo DS game called Sommelier, and is a huge hit in France, where a younger generation is, according to the publishers, intimidated by fine wine and appreciates learning alongside the clueless hero.

“Of course, grand cultural statements were never the purpose of cookbook writing,” says the anonymous author of  “Successful Cookbook Writing” (one of many “Cookbook Writing: Secrets to Success” websites, which are in themselves a fascinating sub-genre). Maybe not – but, as the examples above show, the cultural subtexts that cookbooks, and food writing in general, contain, are an anthropological goldmine.