Category Archives: Uncategorized

As a coda to my previous post, I should note that before their adoption of apple ensachage and photographic tattoos, the nineteenth-century fruit growers of Montreuil had already adopted innovative peach growing techniques to produce the most coveted stone fruits in the world. IMAGE: Postcards from the era show Montreuil’s seemingly infinite solar courtyards, Vues [...]

In a 2011 talk titled “Taste the Apples of the Future,” Cornell University professor Susan Brown, one of only three commercial variety apple breeders in the United States, offered an enticing glimpse of yellow-red chimeras, pink-fleshed varieties, and the non-browning NY-674, whose resistance to discoloration was discovered by chance during an equipment failure.

IMAGE: Acoustic tribology diagram via NIZO. First, drink some black coffee. Next, rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should feel a little rough, like very fine sandpaper: the tiny bumps on your tongue, called papillae, are raised just enough to create friction against your palate. If you now add cream to [...]

IMAGE: Ministry of Defence Main Building, photograph by JoanneB via Wikipedia. Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more exciting subterranean realm of secret tunnels, bunkers, and — at least in the MoD’s case — a [...]

As a fun footnote to my last post: Last month, Popular Science offered an entirely speculative guide to eating dinosaur meat. IMAGE: Struthiomimus altus, an ornithomimid from the Late Cretaceous, as illustrated by Nobu Tamura. In consultation with David Varricchio, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University, journalist Erin Berger surveyed the megafauna of [...]

During the Edible Archaeology panel at Foodprint NYC, Bill Grimes, former restaurant critic and current obituary writer for The New York Times, briefly referred to “one of the great mysteries for all culinary historians — what did it taste like?” What did the vegetables that they sold at Washington Market back in 1880 and 1890 [...]

Foodprint Project, the roving event series I co-curate with Sarah Rich, is more than two years and four cities old, and, entirely thanks to our fantastic panelists and guest moderators, the conversations we’ve had in each city have been surprising, funny, provocative, insightful, and inspiring. IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One cover and inside cover. We’ve [...]

Dogs still occupy a variety of roles in the human food system, from sheep herding to barbecued delicacy. What is less well known is that before the advent of gas or electric ovens, dogs also provided a convenient power source for kitchen appliances. IMAGE: A doggy treadmill, yours for only $639, via Rachel Laudan. Inspired [...]

The BBC, reporting from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, summarises an interesting presentation on the significance of traditional Maori ovens, or hangi pits, in paleomagnetic research. IMAGE: Turner’s proof-of-concept hangi pit. Photo by Gillian Turner via the BBC. The story begins earlier this year, in June, when Dr. Gillian [...]

I could not be more excited to announce the next episode of Foodprint Project, the roving conversation series about food and the city that I co-curate with Sarah Rich. On December 9, 2012, we’ll be bringing Foodprint to LA, one of my favourite cities in the world, thanks to our generous hosts at the Los [...]