IMAGE: Contraband Room, United States Customs and Border Protection, JFK International Airport, Queens, New York. Part of an amazing series by photographer Taryn Simon, this photo shows all the food confiscated from passengers arriving at JFK over a 48 hour period. Among the seized items is a South Asian lime infected with citrus canker. The United States is currently under citrus canker quarantine, with all “interstate movement of citrus plants and plant parts other than fruit” prohibited.

I’m delighted to announce that Landscapes of Quarantine, an exhibition I co-curated with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, will be opening at New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture at 7 p.m. on March 10. Unfortunately, that means that we’re spending this week painting, installing, and picking up beer for the opening – apologies for the lack of posts in the meantime.

IMAGE: Landscapes of Quarantine (exhibition design by Glen Cummings of MTWTF), featuring the emerald ash borer (top left). Currently Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin and Minnesota are all under federal quarantine against the “green menace.”

As some of you may remember, Geoff and I ran a design studio on this topic last year, from October through December. The resulting work forms the core of the exhibition, and includes an illuminated quarantine fable, an investigation of urban spatial segregation, a tongue-in-check public health campaign (complete with flu-symptom bingo), and a short film inspired by photographer Richard Mosse’s quixotic journey into the Congo on the trail of the Ebola virus.

IMAGE: Detail from Front Studio’s Q-City: An Investigation.

IMAGE: Detail from Joe Alterio’s Pages 179 – 187.

Today, though, I’m taking a quick break from painting gallery walls to post a sneak preview of some of the ideas and work in the “Invasion Biology” section of the exhibition.

Although quarantine is usually thought of in terms of human or animal diseases, it is also a form of landscape preservation. A plant pandemic can cause major economic damage (phylloxera wiped out thirty percent of French vineyards in the 1870s) as well as millions of deaths: after Phytophthora infestans devastated the potato harvest in the 1840s, Ireland lost almost twenty-five percent of its population.

IMAGE: A selective history of plant pandemics, as illustrated in Wired magazine’s excellent article about Ug99, the rust fungus threatening the world’s wheat supply. More on that topic another day…

Monocultural farming intensifies the risk that an entire food group could be wiped out by disease. The Cavendish banana is the poster child for disease vulnerability: every single one of the roughly 100 billion bananas consumed annually is a genetic clone. Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fruit That Changed The World, warns that we have only five to ten years before our banana supply is cut off by a variant Panama fungus.

A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest.

Koeppel explains that by the 1960s, the disease had spread around the globe. Just in time, a new, resistant banana cultivar – the Cavendish – was developed. Growers spent “billions of dollars” to adjust their production and supply chain to suit the Cavendish’s different growing and ripening requirements.

IMAGE: Panama disease, or Fusarium oxysporum, courtesy Keith Weller, USDA.

Now, fifty years later, the fungus has mutated and the Cavendish is under threat. Strict banana quarantines are deployed in uninfected areas, to buy time before the disease inevitably strikes.

IMAGE: Banana quarantine sign in Northern Queensland, courtesy Brian J. McMorrow.

Though plants are generally stationary, pollen and spores can travel for miles on the wind. Many countries enforce strict isolation distances around fields of genetically modified crops, while suspect plants are confiscated at the border and kept behind glass until proven safe (or simply destroyed).

However, as the Australian banana quarantine sign above implies, the most dangerous plant disease vector is human trade and travel. For example, the emerald ash borer, which kills infested trees within five years, arrived in the United States hidden in the wood packaging used to ship auto parts, while the poisonous Oak Processionary Moth has recently been discovered in the U.K., brought in on trees imported from Dutch and Belgian nurseries. Human-induced climate change is also encouraging several plant pests to extend their range.

IMAGE: U.S. Quarantine Zones for citrus greening (a bacterial disease) and Asian citrus psyllid.

Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG explored the topic of plant quarantine at length in this interview with Sara Redstone, Plant Health and Quarantine Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, published back in November. For the exhibition, we’re also mapping current quarantine zones across the United States. The centrepiece of the “Invasion Biology” section of Landscapes of Quarantine, however, will be an amazing wall-sized infographic by architect and cartographer Thomas Pollman, a GIS expert at the New York City Office of Emergency Management.

IMAGE: Detail from Thomas Pollman’s Precious Isolation.

Pollman compares the climate-controlled environments of Plant Rescue Centers, in which illegally imported orchids confiscated at the U.S. border are kept alive in hermetically-sealed greenhouses, to the mobile infrastructure of perimeter defense and personal protection that accompanies the U.S. president on his overseas travels. His research breaks down the costs and labor involved in creating these protective bubbles, in order to defend both endangered orchids and U.S Presidents against the environmental hazards that threaten their survival.

Is the President in quarantine?

• • •

Landscapes of Quarantine will be on display until Saturday, April 17; there will be a series of quarantine-themed dinners in early April (more details and ticket sales for these will be announced in a few weeks); and there will be an evening of related programming on Thursday, April 9, hosted by Columbia University’s Studio-X.

Our opening reception kicks off at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9; it is free and open to the public (and there will be free beer, generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery). I hope to see some of you there!

IMAGE: The Foodprint NYC logo, designed by superstar illustrator and graphic designer Nikki Hiatt.

We’ll be at Studio-X (180 Varick St., Suite 1610 – map) from 12:30 p.m., so do arrive early to grab a seat. We’re recording the day’s conversations to make a podcast for download on Columbia University’s iTunesU channel; we’re also hoping to broadcast it live on Ustream if we can get our technological acts together.

The event will run from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and I couldn’t be more excited about the day’s schedule and the panelists who’ve agreed to share their insights with us. Their bios and more schedule details are available online at the Foodprint Project site.

I’ll be moderating the first panel, Zoning Diet, in which panelists Sean Basinski, Joel Berg, Nevin Cohen, and Stanley Fleishman will take us behind the scenes of New York City’s various food systems. We’ll be talking about everything from bodega supply chains and where street vendor carts park at night to the infrastructure of soup kitchens and Food NYC, the city’s new food policy blueprint.

During the second panel, Culinary Cartography, cultural anthropologist Makale Faber Cullen, sociomedical researcher Naa Oyo Kwate, urban design journalist and micro-distiller David Haskell, and Jonathan Bogarin, a teaching artist at the Center for Urban Pedagogy, will tell us what patterns they see when they look at New York City through the lens of food.

What sorts of things can you learn when you map New York City in terms of its fried chicken restaurants, community gardens, or cupcake shops?

After a short break, Foodprint Project co-founder Sarah Rich will lead a conversation about the ways in which the edible landscape of New York City reflects the city’s rich history of immigration, expansion, social change, technical innovation, and even food scandals. Panelists Rebecca Federman, William Grimes, Annie Hauck-Lawson, and David Sax will discuss everything from the evolution of menu descriptions to the gradual disappearance of food production from the city.

Finally, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG will bring the day to a close with a panel called Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios, featuring Edible Schoolyard architect Amale Andraos, Cross-Species Cookbook creator Natalie Jeremijenko, Marcelo Coelho, whose work includes the concept design for a 3D digital food printer, and Beverly Tepper, whose research into supertasters offers new insights into the prevention of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The result will be a speculative and wide-ranging conversation about food security, sensory design, and their hopes and fears for the future of food in New York City.

The event is free, there will be delicious drinks and cookies kindly provided by Izze and City Bakery, and panelists’ books for sale courtesy of WORD, an independent bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. If you’re in the city, come along and say hi – I’d love to meet you. And if not, check out the podcast and watch this space – the Foodprint Project will be coming to a city near you soon!

IMAGE: The Vigne Glacier in the Concordia region of Pakistan, via NASA.

This week, Edible Geography’s partner site, BLDGBLOG, is coordinating a nine-blog-strong online conversation tied to the Glacier/Island/Storm architecture studio at Columbia University this spring. In addition to looking forward to contributions from some of my favourite sources (a456, HTC Experiments, InfraNet Lab, mammoth, Serial Consign, Soundscrapers, and Quiet Babylon), I managed to find some edible/geographical inspiration in the course materials and will be joining in the discussion with a couple of posts of my own.

BLDGBLOG’s original brief asks studio participants to “look at naturally occurring processes and forms—specifically, glaciers, islands, and storms—and to ask how these might be subject to architectural re-design.” As a case study for the glacier module, BLDGBLOG then refers to a little-known but centuries-old vernacular tradition of growing artificial glaciers in the Himalayas.

Detailed instructions for artificial glacier construction are available in this 2008 New Scientist article by Ed Douglas, “How to grow a glacier,” which in turn draws heavily on the master’s thesis of Norweigian International Environment and Development Studies student, Ingvar Teiten (available as a pdf).

IMAGE: “Glaciers to Order” infographic from New Scientist.

Fascinatingly, it seems that ice can be differentiated by gender, at least for glacier-building purposes:

A “male” glacier is one that is covered in stones and soil and moves slowly or not at all. A “female” one is whiter, and grows more quickly, yielding more water. “It is important to have both sexes,” a glacier grower from the village of Ghwari in Baltistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, told Tveiten, “The ice which we found underneath the rocks in our own valley was only of one sex. Therefore it didn’t increase. We had to add the opposite sex to it so it could increase.”

As it happens, glacier builders are not the only ones studying ice typologies.

In the past few years, several avant-garde bartenders have taken their cocktailing to the next level by implementing an “Ice Program.” A recent article in the The Atlantic quoted Toby Maloney, a partner in Chicago’s Violet Hour bar, saying:

“Ice is as important to a bartender as a stove is to a chef,” he explained, in the cadence of an oft-cited mantra. “With a chef, it’s a matter of heating things up. With a bartender, it’s a matter of cooling things down. You’d never tell a chef he could have only a stove-top burner or a fryer. And I couldn’t do without at least three or four different types of ice.”

IMAGE: Cheater ice. Photo by Melissa Hom, from a slideshow in New York magazine.

For mixologists, one of the main ice form differentials is melt rate. In all the but most exclusive bars, for example, most drinks are still made using “cheater ice” – standard, machine-made, rounded half-cylinders, often with a hollow interior. This shape is quick-melting and designed to fit the maximum number in a glass. According to “molecular mixologist” Eben Freeman, as quoted in New York magazine:

Really, these are designed to cheat the consumer. They’re designed so as many as possible can be packed into a glass, therefore taking up the most room. If you’re serving just sodas, there’s less ounces of soda that goes into the glass, and if you’re making a mixed drink, it tastes strong, even though there isn’t that much booze in there.

Using cheater ice in an Old Fashioned results in “a debased ‘cocktail lite,’ with thin flavors and watery insipidness,” writes Atlantic columnist, Wayne Curtis. “A cheater-ice cocktail is chillier (numbing the taste buds) and more watery (making it flat).”

IMAGE: Kold-Draft ice. Photo by Melissa Hom, from a slideshow in New York magazine.

Freeman, Maloney, and their fellow ice-aficionados prefer to recreate the forms of ice listed in historic cocktail recipes: block, chunk, cracked, or snow. The popular Kold-Draft machines (from roughly $2,500, new) turn out perfect, solid 1.25″ cubes, which, bartenders note, means that you use just three or four cubes in a Collins glass.

Depending on the drink in question, others swear by two-inch cubes made in plastic household organiser trays (“which happens to fit just perfectly inside a double-old-fashioned glass,” says Eben Freeman), or even eight-inch tall columnular structures that, according to Kathryn Weatherup of New York City’s Weather Up bar, “fit perfectly into the rocks glasses that we use for the shaken-cocktail drinks.” Huge four-by-three inch ice blocks work best for punch-bowl service, while at the opposite end of the scale, fast-chilling crushed ice, or “snow,” is perfect for “juleps and swizzles.”

IMAGE: (left to right, top to bottom) 2″ ice cube, hand-carved ice sphere, snow, and an 8″ ice cube column. All photos by Melissa Hom, from a slideshow in New York magazine.

There is, as yet, no mention of gendered ice in the cocktail literature. No slow-moving manly chunks, on which a cask-aged rye would feel at home; no whiter, faster-melting feminine ice that would add a certain sparkle to a Cosmopolitan or Appletini; and certainly no glacially-married combination for the unisex martini.

I can’t imagine, however, that once introduced to the magic of artificial glacier-growing, the ice avant-garde would simply import its gender stereotypes and be done.

Instead, why not build their own on-site, custom glaciers?

IMAGE: Ice-picked ice from Milk and Honey bar, whose owner Sasha Petraske told New York magazine, “We freeze filtered water into a block and then cut it.” Photo by Melissa Hom.

After all, Japanese-trained mixologists already freeze water into large blocks, in order to hand carve spheres, diamonds, or abstract ice shards using both knives and ice picks. A small home-grown glacier, built in a bar’s basement or backroom, could not only sustain a weekend’s worth of heavy drinking, but also provide creative bartenders with a much greater sculptural scope.

Then there is the question of ingredients. While traditional techniques call for pebbles and sawdust to be embedded in a glacier’s starter matrix, today’s cocktailing elite could substitute orchid flowers, raspberries, or espresso beans to create flavour accented glaciers – and then invite guests to watch them hand hew berry-studded chunks, the perfect finishing touch for a Brownie Cognac or Irish coffee. The theatrical potential of custom artificial glaciers might be second only to the champagne fountain.

IMAGE: (left to right) Raspberry-embedded ice, ice-tea cube, and orchid-flower-embedded ice. All photos by Melissa Hom, from a slideshow in New York magazine.

Sophisticated bartenders already use double- or triple-filtered water for their cubes, but in order to build and maintain your own in-house glacier, it would make sense to set up a sponsorship deal with a high-end mineral water (Canada’s Berg, perhaps, made exclusively from Newfoundland icebergs) – or perhaps even a liquor company, for pure, glacier-fresh Absolut ice crystals and shards of frozen Courvoisier. In fact, multiple mini-glaciers would be required to permit the most ambitious alcoholic pairings.

As part of the current artisinal trend in beer, wine, and spirits, if not in terms of form and flavour design, vernacular Himalayan glacier grafting techniques have the potential to revolutionise the cocktails of tomorrow.

IMAGE: Increasing disorder in a dining table, Diller + Scofidio, via deconcrete.

This drawing by architects Diller + Scofidio, titled Increasing Disorder In A Dining Table, documents the progression of a meal from a perfectly laid table, through a motion-trace palimpsest of the dinner party in action, to the wreckage of dirty dishes and crumpled napkins that confronts the host(s) after the last guest has departed. Or the other way round, if you read from left to right…

IMAGE: How to lay a formal dining table, complete with oyster fork and shery glass, via YourDinnerParty.co.uk.

IMAGE: Napkin (or serviette?) origami instructions, via Mrs. Beeton’s authoritative Book of Household Management.

Diller + Scofidio’s drawings fill the gap left by etiquette books, which meticulously diagram the set design necessary for a successful dinner party, but fail to map the equally choreographed during-dinner movements and post-dinner dérangement that ensue. In fact, the reversed order of the Diller & Scofidio drawings almost seems to imply that the perfect dinner party could be run equally smoothly both forwards, starting with a perfectly laid table, and backwards, starting from the aesthetically arranged débris, if one was simply equipped with thorough stage directions.

This is Dinner Party as absurdist theatre, a fertile territory for playwrights, and one that Diller + Scofidio have also explored elsewhere, most notably with their interactive video installation, Indigestion. In that piece, viewers could experience a dining performance from both the perpective of the diners’ dialogue (an audio track) and their hand movements projected onto the flat surface of a dinner table. But, like those micro facial expressions that give away liars, the two scripts did not necessarily tell the same story.

IMAGE: Indigestion (detail), Diller + Scofidio, photo courtesy Jan Sprij, via

Of course, Diller + Scofidio’s drawings could equally be read as an IDEO-style set of studies analysing the food user experience – breaking down each movement into its fundamental elements in order to design a more optimal dining interface. After all, if the actions compressed into Diller + Scofidio’s middle drawing could be separated out, frame by frame, the result would be a map of dining table usepaths.

IMAGE: Increasing disorder in a dining table (detail), Diller & Scofidio

IMAGE: Financial usepaths, via Tim Boucher

IMAGE: Users co-opting and reacting to the design of their environment, from Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts

What if we studied dinner party usepaths – “ways of doing things which are typical and which tend to work according to the people who most commonly perform the activity in question,” in Tim Boucher’s helpful definition – and redesigned our dining rooms, table cloths, and place settings accordingly?

Subtle tweaks could encourage cross-table conversation, or make it hard for the guest who always drinks too much to get hold of their wine glass. Playful hosts could insert thought-provoking obstacles into the decor, guaranteed to interrupt force of habit and prompt discussion. And teaching kids table manners might no longer be such a struggle, since the dining environment itself would reinforce them.

NOTE: Thanks to Geoff for pointing out the Diller + Scofidio drawing, and Melissa Clemmer for my copy of Thoughtless Acts!

IMAGE: Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War | 2007. From You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD, where you can see many more photos from the series.

In America, 99.5% of households own at least one fridge. For many people who hear that statement, the surprising news is that 0.5% (1,520,299 households) don’t! What do those people do? Food processors, dishwashers, even ovens: most kitchen appliances seem totally optional. But living without a refrigerator seems slightly insane, if not completely impossible.

Of course, such dependence wasn’t always the case (nor is it still, in many parts of the world). In her excellent book, Fresh, Susanne Freidberg describes the inauspicious origins of the artificial cold chain, from ice plant infernos to frigoriphobie (the French refrigeration industry’s term for widespread public antipathy to cold storage).

During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the combination of technological advances, war (during World War One, Europeans relied on beef imported in refrigerated steamships to meet demand, while patriotic Americans were urged to conserve food and save leftovers using an icebox), urbanisation and suburbanisation, lifestyle changes, and sustained, pervasive marketing (“Kelvinated foods just fairly coax midsummer appetites!”) meant that by 1940, more than half of American households owned a refrigerator.

IMAGE: Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables | 2008.

IMAGE: Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily | 2008. Both images from You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD.

Perhaps to an even greater extent than the car, the refrigerator didn’t just become ubiquitous – it became essential. Freidberg quotes a 1931 article from Golden Book Magazine, called “The New Ice Age,” which speculates on what the world would look like without it:

If the stupendous system of food preservation [...] which supports us were interfered with, even for a short time, our present daily existence would become unworkable. Cities with thousands of inhabitants would fade away. We would probably turn into beasts in our frantic struggles to reach the source of supply. It is not extravagant to say that our present form of civilization is dependent upon refrigeration.

The refrigerated cold chain played a huge role in reshaping the geography of food, removing the constraints of season, climate, and proximity in favour of monocultural economies of scale, astronomical food mileage, and permanent global summertime.

Freidberg’s book, however, concentrates on another, equally fascinating, impact of artificial refrigeration and food preservation: the ways in which they blurred “the known physics of freshness,” and undermined “traditional understandings of food quality related to time, season, and place,” creating a widespread mistrust, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding of “fresh” food that persists today.

IMAGE: Graphic Designer/Print Shop Owner | 2-Person Household | Founder of www.DeliverUsFromLiberals.com | 2008. From You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” Found via GOOD.

It is that lost knowledge about fresh food – what it should look like, how long it should last, how we should treat it – that designer Jihyun Ryou wanted to reintroduce in her thesis project at Design Academy Eindhoven, Save Food From The Refrigerator.

Ryou’s initial research brought her to the same starting point as Susanne Freidberg: artificial refrigeration has radically redefined our relationship with fresh food, and not necessarily for the better. Her solution is a set of ingenious, wall-mounted storage units that draw on traditional, pre-refrigeration food preservation techniques.

IMAGE: Verticality of Root Vegetables, Jihyun Ryou. Found via The Ecology of Food.

IMAGE: Humidity of Fruit Vegetables, Jihyun Ryou

Ryou’s designs rely on information that used to be common knowledge: for example, that root vegetables such as carrots and leeks last longer when buried upright in slightly damp sand, mimicking their growing conditions. Meanwhile, fruit vegetables (peppers, courgettes, and aubergines, for example) benefit from moist storage, rather than the cold and dry environment in the fridge.

IMAGE: Breathing of Egg, Jihyun Ryou

IMAGE: Symbiosis of Potato + Apple, Jihyun Ryou

Before refrigeration and permanently lit hen houses, eggs were a seasonal phenomenon: hens laid their eggs in spring, and they lasted for a few weeks in barns or pantries. Since most people buy and use eggs within that window, and since eggs stored in the refrigerator easily absorb the odour of neighbouring items, Ryou proposes a separate egg shelf complete with freshness tester (a fresh egg sinks in water). Meanwhile, her apple and potato storage unit takes advantage of the ethylene gas emitted by apples in order to control sprouting in potatoes.

Leaving aside the potential food preservation benefits and possible energy savings, perhaps the most important aspect of Ryou’s food shelves is their visibility. By putting fresh fruit and vegetables on the wall, Ryou’s design would force us to actually look at our food. The result of this daily confrontation, she hopes, is that we would eat more healthily, waste less, and – intangibly but importantly – rebuild our relationship with these equally biological and perishable, if slightly less animate, fellow organisms:

In the current food preservation situation [...], we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology. We don’t observe the food any more and don’t understand how to treat it. My design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between us as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings.

I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced in our culture.

Ryou doesn’t call for the complete elimination of the refrigerator, but her idea of redesigning domestic space to suit food (as opposed to redesigning food to suit our appliances) is pretty exciting. Unfortunately, her elegant designs are not commercially available, although they don’t look impossible to recreate with quite a basic set of carpentry skills.

IMAGE: Vegetable sheep, New Zealand, via Purse Lip Square Jaw.

New Zealand is famous for its sheep. In the early eighties, there were apparently twenty-two sheep in New Zealand for every human, although, by 2008, Meat and Wool New Zealand revealed that this ratio had dropped precipitously, down to just eight sheep per human, “due to drought and the expansion of dairying.”

Sheep are not indigenous to New Zealand, however: they were introduced in the early 1800s by British settlers. Bizarrely, the landscape was already covered in off-white, wooly, bobbly sheep-like plants, which the settlers promptly named “vegetable sheep.” Like the phantom armies of General Patton, or the fake Crimean villages built to fool Catherine the Great, the vegetable sheep can, at least at a distance, confuse shepherds and their dogs:

Though singular and interesting to the botanist, these plants are of no value economically, but, on the contrary, as we have shown, certain species of them are a plague to the shepherds, inasmuch as they give them much trouble and annoyance to discern between an animal sheep and a vegetable sheep.

– John R. Jackson, “The Vegetable Sheep of New Zealand,” The Intellectual Observer: Review of Natural History, Microscopic Research and Recreative Science, Volume XI, pp. 128-135, London: Groombridge and Sons, 1867.

IMAGE: The Canterbury vegetable sheep on display at the Auckland Museum; it is apparently “quite firm to walk on.”

IMAGE: Capturing the vegetable sheep for museum display, via Purse Lip Square Jaw.

The plants are members of the daisy family, specifically Raoulia mammillaris and Raoulia eximia, “which as densely compacted, rounded cushion plants grow to several feet across and sometimes 2 ft high.” The Auckland Museum boasts a yellowed specimen with a fresh weight of 61kg – you can read an ode written to mark its successful “capture” here.

IMAGE: Fast food expenditure per capita, where the darkest (purple) areas spend between $500.01 and $707.75 a head, and the lightest areas (pale blue) spend between $320.64 and $400. All maps via the USDA Food Environment Atlas, except where otherwise noted.

IMAGE: Low income pre-school obesity rate, where the darkest areas represent the highest levels, between 20.1% and 39.7% obesity, while the lightest coloured areas show the lowest levels, from 2.1% to 5%.

On Tuesday, as part of Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood-obesity campaign, Let’s Move!, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched an exciting new tool: the Food Environment Atlas. Developed by the USDA’s Economic Research Service in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control, the National Cancer Institute, the National Farm-to-School Network, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, the atlas allows anyone with an internet connection to create custom maps of their food environment. What’s more, it even makes the data sets embedded in the atlas available for download.

The Atlas currently maps ninety food environment indicators, divided into three broad categories. “Food Choices” includes both measurements of food access and consumption, from the number of supermarkets per 1000 people to restaurant expenditures per capita. “Health and Well-Being” tracks dietary outcomes, such as hunger, diabetes, and obesity. “Community Characteristics” adds an extra level of demographic data, including income levels and metro/non-metro status.

The idea, then, is that researchers, policy-makers, and individuals can compare counties across America, comparing and analysing the correlation between food choice, health outcomes, and population characteristics.

So, what do you see when you look at America using food as the metric?

IMAGE: Adult diabetes rate: the darkest green represents areas where the rate of adult diabetes is between 12.1%  and 17.4%; the lightest green areas have an adult diabetes rate between 3.2% and 8%.

IMAGE: Sales tax on vended pretzels and crisps (chips), varying from a maximum (dark red) of between 5.01% and 7%, to no tax at all (light orange).

IMAGE: Poverty rate. In the darkest areas, between 25.1% and 54% of the population is below the poverty line, while in the lightest areas, the percentage is between 3.1% and 10%.

Each indicator generates a different map of America: by looking at them side by side we can begin to find food patterns and stories. Comparing these three maps (above) showing the incidence of adult diabetes, the percentage sales tax on vended crisps, and the poverty rate, for example, you can begin to make a compelling case that the relationship between diabetes and poverty is much closer than the relationship between high taxes on junk food and healthy adults.

IMAGE: Weight of fruit and vegetables eaten at home, per capita, ranging from 191 to 252lbs in the darkest areas to 143 to 160lbs in the lightest areas.

IMAGE: Number of farmer’s markets per 1,000 head of population, where the darkest green areas have 0.26 to 1.01 markets per 1,000 people, and the lightest areas have between 0 and 0.05 farmer’s markets per 1,000.

IMAGE: Metropolitan (pink) and non-metropolitan (green) counties of the United States.

Interestingly, while the number of farmer’s markets seems to correlate pretty well with non-urban areas, it has a much looser connection to the weight of fruit and vegetables consumed per capita. What’s going on there?

Of course, that question points to one of the limitations of this kind of spatial analysis: finding patterns and correlations is not the same thing as determining cause and effect. Still, knowing enough to ask the question is half the battle.

Another potential weakness is that the kinds of data you measure and plug in to the Atlas determine the questions you subsequently ask and – obviously – the conclusions you can draw. There are plenty of other factors that shape our food environments but are not (yet) factored into this Atlas, some of which are much harder to measure than others: food marketing spend, agricultural subsidies, environmental sustainability, global trade, industry consolidation, number of local food processors, first-generation immigrant population, the strength of regional food traditions and heritage, education levels, employment, health insurance, white-collar versus blue-collar jobs, civic engagement, and so on…

Some of the most intriguing recent findings on obesity show that social networks are an extremely strong force in shaping diet and health outcomes: imagine a Food Environment Atlas that could map Facebook connections onto gallons per capita consumption of soft drinks!

IMAGE: Gallons per capita consumption of soft drinks, ranging from 81 to 89 gallons a head in the darkest areas to 49 to 60 gallons in the lightest areas.

IMAGE: Connections between places that share Facebook friends, as visualised by former Apple engineer Peter Warden after analysing 210 million profiles, via. Intriguingly, for residents of the Nomadic West “Starbucks is almost always the top fan page.” What other links between Facebook profiles and food behaviours await discovery?

IMAGE: Video by Nicholas Christakis, based on his joint study, with J.H. Fowler, on “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007. For more on Christakis and Fowler’s findings, I recommend reading “Are Your Friends Making You Fat,” by Clive Thompson, published on September 10, 2009, in the New York Times.

Meanwhile, some food patterns simply benefit from a more nuanced analysis than the Food Environment Atlas is able to provide. Mapping cupcake bakeries as a marker of gentrification, or the relative spiciness of curries in neighbourhoods of first- and second-generation immigrants, for example, provides fascinating insights on a finer-grained, street-by-street basis than is possible in the county- and state-sized blocks of the USDA data sets.

Finally, the Atlas is glitchy and sort of ugly, and the advanced search function, which is supposed to enable queries that use multiple indicators, is extremely un-user-friendly.

IMAGE: Percentage of the total population in each county that is low income and lives more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store, where the lightest areas range from 0% to 15%, and the darkest areas from 40.1% to 79.5%.

Nonetheless, all of these weaknesses are far less important than the basic idea, which is that looking at landscapes through the lens of food can tell us all sorts of important things that we might otherwise miss. What’s more, re-perceiving a community in terms of food availability and behaviours is a pre-requisite to an even more exciting next step: actively designing for a healthy food environment. After all, if you begin measuring food access as an indicator of your community’s health and well-being, you might then enact zoning laws and introduce tax incentives to eliminate food deserts, for example.

So while the spatial analysis the Food Environment Atlas aims to offer is interesting, its potential to reframe food as a design tool, capable of reshaping the built environment and the economic landscape in the interests of both human and environmental health, could actually be revolutionary.

IMAGE: Some pasta shapes, from L’Enciclopedia della Pasta.

UNESCO, the branch of the United Nations that is best known for its list of World Heritage Sites, also curates a number of other programs that aim to record and safeguard natural and cultural treasures. The Global Geoparks Network, for example, seeks to promote and conserve Earth’s geological heritage, while the fantastically named Memory of the World project was launched in 1992 “to guard against collective amnesia” by preserving and disseminating archive holdings worldwide.

Other UNESCO lists catalogue significant literary cities, biospheres, wetlands, and endangered languages. Amidst this variety, there isn’t a UNESCO list dedicated to designating and protecting outstanding examples of our global food heritage. Indeed, senior UNESCO official Cherif Khaznadar is on record as saying, “There is no category at UNESCO for gastronomy.”

Nonetheless, last week, the Mexican government submitted a proposal to UNESCO on behalf of the cuisine of Michoacán. Their hope is to have its tamales, guava paste, and cotija cheese added to the Intangible Heritage List, which recognises “practices, representations, and expressions, and knowledge and skills which are transmitted from generation to generation and which provide communities and groups with a sense of identity and continuity.”

IMAGE: The typical dishes of Michoacán, via Mexico Cooks! (left) tacos de borrego a la penca, (right) blackberry tamales.

Despite these broad criteria, there are currently no foods or culinary traditions on the Intangible Heritage List. Launched in 2003, the list has inscribed a grand total of 181 expressions of intangible heritage worthy of preservation, from Albanian Folk Iso-Polyphony to the Tango, and from the Cultural Space of Jemaa el-Fna Square to the Traditional Design and Practices for Building Chinese Wooden Arch Bridges.

Thus far, however, French cuisine has been rejected twice, while Mexican cuisine has been turned down once already.

The benefits of recognition lie mainly in the boost to local pride and international renown, although there are some funds available for preservation efforts. Michoacán’s tourism secretary, Genovevo Figueroa, hopes that UNESCO recognition would correct common misperceptions of Mexican cooking as “lots of grease and spices.” Meanwhile, launching France’s second failed bid in February 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy declared that, “We have the best gastronomy in the world — at least from our point of view. We want it to be recognised among world heritage.”

Critics have been divided as to whether culinary traditions should be included on the Intangible Heritage List or not. Those arguing against tend to worry that labeling a cuisine as one of the treasures of human patrimony will have a stifling effect, discouraging innovation and marking the beginning of a slow, smug “mummification.” Their opponents counter that UNESCO is careful to define Intangible Heritage as “traditional and living at the same time,” and “constantly recreated,” and that formal recognition would help defend national cuisines under threat from globalisation and changing lifestyles.

IMAGE: China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, (left) Chinese calligraphy, (right) dim sum

IMAGE: France’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, (left) Aubusson tapestry, via UNESCO, (right) a croissant.

Ultimately, it seems that UNESCO may yet accept that culinary traditions are a cultural expression as fundamental to identity and worthy of recognition as dance, theatre, or music. In 2009, the Section of Intangible Cultural Heritage held a special Expert Meeting on Culinary Practices, and in their October 2009 report on rejected nominations, the Bureau of the 4th Session of the Committee noted that many requests for inscription had failed due to incomplete applications, rather than fundamental ineligibility.

One day, perhaps, the traditions embodied in dim sum will take their place alongside Chinese calligraphy, and the artisanal craft of croissant-baking will be accorded the same respect now due to Aubusson tapestry….

1. An analysis of food remains at three sites in Lower Manhattan showed that the kinds of fish eighteenth-century New Yorkers ate changed significantly over time: social archaeologist Nan Rothschild found that “early New Yorkers consumed sheepshead (71% of all fish bones), with striped bass second (24%). By 1760, only 4% of the fish bones came from sheepshead, and a bit more from striped bass; the new leaders were sea bass and scup.”

Rothschild speculates that the reason for the disappearance of sheepshead and the triumph of scup is linked directly to the city’s physical growth. Apparently, while “sheepshead live close to shore, preferring uneven bottom surfaces,” scup prefer “smooth river bottoms,” which means that as New Yorkers reshaped the topography of their riverbeds with landfill, they were inadvertently redesigning their diets as well.

2.

IMAGE: Workers at Tortilleria Chinantla, which produces about one million tortillas daily and controls sixty percent of New York City’s restaurant, supermarket, and bodega business according to its owner, trained architect Erasmo Ponce. Chinantla is one of six tortillerias in Brooklyn’s Tortilla Triangle, one of the relatively few food manufacturing hubs that remain in New York City. As this New York Times article explains, “Tortillerias can work well as local businesses, because freshness is important to consumers and because the manufacturers’ profit margin is thin enough – 30 tortillas sell for about $1 in New York – that reduced distribution costs provide an edge.” (Photo via AP)

3. In 2001, Steve Ross of Coney Island Bialys & Bagels was invited to demonstrate traditional bagel making at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. Everything was going fine, until he gave the last of the thirty gallons of New York City water he had brought with him to Herman Vargas of Russ & Daughters, who was demonstrating authentic New York pickle-making next door.

“We tried to make a few bagels and bialys with Washington water and we couldn’t get a rise out of the dough,” reported Steve. Only the intervention of the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, which airlifted in twenty gallons of the finest city tap water, averted a “mediocre bread roll with a hole in the middle” disaster.

•••

These stories, and many more, all come from the pages of Gastropolis, a collection of essays about food and New York City, and the starting point for a free panel discussion of the same name at Brooklyn Library tomorrow. The book’s co-editors, Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, as well three of its chapter authors, Jessica B. Harris, Mark Russ Federman, and Annie Lanzillotto, will be participating in a conversation about the ways in which food communicates different aspects of New Yorkers’ personal, social, and ethnographic identities. The Gastropolis panel will start at 1:30 p.m. at the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza: more details and directions are available here, and all are welcome!

VIDEO: Made for the New York Public Library’s Mapping New York’s Shorelines exhibition, this video combines historic maps with a Google Earth flyover to reveal the outline of the eighteenth-century Rutgers Farm beneath today’s East Village.

Non-profit, for-profit, or community-supported? Allotment, front lawn, traffic island, or vacant lot? Distributed, vertical, or rooftop? Jobs, education, health, taste, or environmental sustainability? Farmer’s markets, veg box, or food co-ops?

Even as urban agriculture grows in popularity across the developed world, it can take quite different forms, at different scales, using different business models, and in pursuit of different goals, within the same neighbourhood of the same city. That’s understandable – and probably necessary – given the complexities of urban governance, land ownership, personal preferences, soil quality, and local economics.

But what would a citywide plan for urban agriculture look like? And is it even possible to achieve the benefits of designing at that scale – the leverage to pass laws and change zoning, for example, or the cost efficiencies of shared resources, processing facilities, and distribution networks – without losing the flexibility to create local solutions that meet local needs?

The Design Trust for Public Space is trying to answer these questions on the way to creating the first citywide plan for urban agriculture in New York, and they’re looking to hire two Project Fellows to conduct some of the research with them. The job descriptions are worth reading for inspiration purposes alone: one of these Fellows will be tasked with developing metrics that capture everything from sales, multipliers, and costs to public health, youth empowerment, and community building benefits, while the other will be developing a set of urban agriculture typologies, complete with case studies and an assessment of how each model works in the context of varying goals, available inputs, and audience.

It’s actually hard to imagine more useful questions to tackle, if you want to take urban agriculture from bourgeois hobby to viable food system.

Excitingly, the Fellows will also be working with City officials and Added Value, one of New York’s existing (and most successful) urban farms, in order to analyse how urban agriculture could fit within New York City’s food and waste systems, as well as map and evaluate City-owned land that could potentially be used for farming.

The anticipated duration of the project is twelve months, beginning in March 2010, and applications are due February 3rd. You can find all the details online here.