Foodscape Mapping

At the invitation of architect Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, I was just in Berlin to lead a workshop on “Foodscape Mapping” at the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

IMAGE: Talking about chewing gum mapping. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

I pulled together a presentation that included many of my favourite examples of foodscape mapping, using Christopher Stocks’ vegetable gazetteer to discuss the ways in which the things we choose to mark on maps tell us what to look at and value, before moving on to the idea of a map as a spatial diagnostic, enabling food detectives to spot patterns and test correlations.

IMAGE: Alex Toland begins to paint the map with coffee.

In addition to revealing the hidden overlaps and trends that suggest opportunities for effective interventions, maps can also make disconnected, distributed parts visible as a substantive whole. My examples here ranged in scale and ambition from Jeff Sisson’s bodega mapping project to Nicholas de Monchaux’s Local Code.

With only a brief diversion into the insights afforded by frequently overlooked spatial data, such as chewing gum deposits, rat infestations, and sewer smells, I ended with a look at the artificial geography of food packaging as a way to emphasise the value of making foodscape maps.

Rather than the comfortable abstractions of pastoral imagery and made-up place names, cartography requires and inspires curiosity — a close examination of the foodscape, prompting questions and requiring decisions about metrics, and perhaps even suggesting opportunities to re-draw the map.

IMAGE: Alex and I preparing the map.

Having made my case, we then made a map! My Berlin-based collaborator, the artist, urban ecologist, and soil expert Alexandra Regan Toland, and I had started work at the crack of dawn to create a coffee-wash street map of Lab’s immediate vicinity, in the fashionable former East German neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg.

IMAGE: Alex and I preparing the map.

Each of the workshop participants was given a instruction sheet and sent out to gather spatial food data.

Alex and I had had a lot of fun working together over the past few weeks to come up with a variety of challenges tailored to the local foodscape, from “Der Preis ist Heiß,” charting the price geography of such standards as coffee, beer, and brötchen, to the “Prenzlauer Berg Plate,” which mapped the neighborhood according to the dining recommendations of the people we encountered on its streets.

IMAGE: Worksheets, maps, plates, stickers, and to-go cups, all set up ready to map the neighbourhood foodscape. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

“Edible Bingo” asked participants to collect photographs, edible evidence, and location data for a variety of food landmarks: a food resource for non-humans; a mobile food or drink vendor; a place where food could be grown or scavenged; and food or drink-related litter or waste. Every ten minutes, we asked participants to record where they were and what they could smell.

Finally, each different group received a special assignment, which asked them to map the edible environment according to one of the following themes: nutrition and perception (keeping count of the use of the word “Bio,” for example, or finding the products with the most sugar and fat), according to its place of origin (both for cuisines and groceries), according to its place on the junk-wild gradient, where 1 was ultra-processed and 5 was totally wild, and, finally, according to its place in time, from trends such as bubble tea to former breweries, and from seasonal Werder cherries to late-night convenience shops (spätis).

IMAGE: “Die essbare Landscaft” — our worksheets were in English and also, thanks to Alex, German. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

After a forty-minute safari, we all reassembled at the Guggenheim lab to add our data to the map. Although it was hardly a scientific study, it was fascinating to hear anecdotes, examine the edible evidence, and speculate as to the reasons behind the patterns we noticed.

IMAGE: “The Price is Right” or “Der Preis ist Heiß,” mapping coffee, bier, and bread roll prices. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

As we collated our findings using stickers and felt tips, we hypothesised that variations in the price of coffee could be attributed either to the division between Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg or based on proximity to the U-Bahn versus the Straßenbahn.

IMAGE: Mapping the edible landscape at the Guggenheim Lab in Berlin.

We noted that dining suggestions from the people who worked in Prenzlauer Berg restaurants and coffee shops were all for places that were elsewhere in Berlin, where they lived, which led us to think of the neighbourhood’s food service professionals as a migratory population, inhabiting Prenzlauer Berg only during popular eating and drinking hours.

IMAGE: “Prenzlauer Berg Plates” documented local recommendations on where to eat. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

Vietnamese restaurants quickly emerged as the most common global cuisine, a legacy of socialist bloc trade and training relationships between East Germany and Vietnam. The neighbourhood was also rich in foraging opportunities, with groups finding mushrooms, dandelion leaves, rose hips, lavender, and even marijuana plants, growing freely in the park.

IMAGE: Edible evidence on Schönhauser Allee. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

Other highlights included a photograph of a giant cow, which spurred some discussion of the large number of ice cream shops in the area (attributed to the preponderance of young families); a lovely advertisement for a vegetable parade, which our enthusiastic participants liked so much that they brought it back with them; and some reflection on the difficulty of collecting brötchen data in the late afternoon (when all the bread rolls have been sold and the bakeries are closed).

IMAGE: The completed map, with dots, lines, photos, plates, and edible evidence all overlapping. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

Thanks to the energy, initiative, and keen eyes of the workshop participants, and despite the fact that we had only forty minutes on an extremely hot day, we nonetheless managed to gather enough information to start asking new questions and formulating new analyses about the edible landscape, as well as to begin a discussion about what we wished we had found, what we wished wasn’t there, what we’d have liked to have seen more of, and what we were surprised to find or not find.

IMAGE: The workshop from above.

Although we didn’t have time for this, the next step, of course, is to share these maps: perhaps an audio tour that combines bubble tea shops with the history of East Berlin’s relationship with both Vietnam and hipster culture, or a Prenzlauer Berg twinning program that pairs dining experiences in the neighbourhood with ones in the areas where the restaurant cooks and servers actually come from…

NOTE: Thanks to everyone who attended and participated for a wonderful afternoon, to the team at the BMW Guggenheim Lab for the invitation (and especially to Sascha, Amara, and Babette for their help setting up), to Alex Toland for being such a wonderful collaborator, and to Geoff Manaugh for helping with everything, throughout.

The Universal Tea Machine

What do you get if you cross Alan Turing with the London Olympics?

IMAGE: The Universal Tea Machine, Smout Allen and You+Pea with Iain Borden.

According to British architects Smout Allen, the answer is a very variable cup of tea.

Their Universal Tea Machine, designed at the Bartlett School of Architecture in collaboration with You+Pea and Iain Borden, is “a gargantuan cross between a tea-making device, a primitive computer and a pinball machine.” It will be inaugurated on Friday, July 27, as part of Mayor Boris Johnson’s amusingly named “LOOK & FEEL” initiative for the 2012 London Games, which also includes more than 25 kilometres of bunting, some carousels, and a variety of over-sized sporting equipment left scattered around the city as if by the gods of Mt. Olympus themselves.

IMAGE: A giant shot-putt, part of the Mayor of London’s Incredible Installations series.

The Universal Tea Machine will dispense up to 2,000 free, freshly made cups of tea each week from its temporary home next to a giant screen streaming Olympic coverage in Victoria Park, Hackney — but you will only receive a nice builder’s brew with milk and sugar, as opposed to a dry tea bag with three sugar lumps or a cup of hot milk and water, if you can perform binary addition.

That’s because, while half of the tea machine is a Heath Robinson-style assemblage of laser-cut aluminium wheels, pinions, and springs that flick sugar cubes, open hot water taps, and tip milk cartons, the other half uses hockey balls, over-sized fluorescent-painted marble runs, and logic gate flippers to create a functioning binary adder.


IMAGE: The Universal Tea Machine, Smout Allen and You+Pea with Iain Borden.

Would-be tea drinkers will have to perform five sequential additions correctly in order to produce a perfect cuppa. If you are numerically illiterate, like me, this will be no easy task. Mark Smout walked me through it over the phone:

There is a spinning drum at the top, which will show a number that you have to arrive at using the five numbers that are available to you: 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16.

So, if it shows the number 17, you’d pull the 16 lever and the 1 lever. Then the machine will drop a teabag in your cup, and the drum will show the next number — say, 21. You’d have to pull the number 4 lever, to add to the 17 to make 21 — at which point, you’d get a splash of milk. Then you might be given the number 28, and you’d have to pull the 4, the 2, and the 1 for a sugar.

And so on, twice more, for water and a stir.


IMAGE: The Universal Tea Machine, Smout Allen and You+Pea with Iain Borden.

Mistakes lead to potentially disastrous repercussions: your cup will miss out on one part of the tea assembly line and get an extra of another, so you may end up with a lot of milk and no hot water, or two sugars but no teabag at all. If you don’t take sugar and have a Master’s in mathematics or computer science, Mark suggests that you could deliberately perform that calculation incorrectly and hope to receive just a double stir — but the risk of a milky cuppa is real.

IMAGE: Sandra Youkhana of You+Pea peaks through the number 16, during the fabrication of the Universal Tea Machine.

The Universal Tea Machine is obviously a lot of fun, but it also continues an important thread in Smout Allen’s previous work: designing extremely complex, dynamic systems, whether it be flood-control infrastructure or Earth-Moon interactions, in such a way that their workings are somehow spectacularised, becoming accessible and engaging to non-experts.


LINE BREAK

VIDEO: Lunar Wood by Smout Allen.

The team copied the giant sawtooth mechanism for lifting the balls up to the top from a children’s penguin race game, there are little flags at the logic gates that pop up to tell you when you’ve released a number correctly, and everything is brightly coloured and oversized.

IMAGE: The Universal Tea Machine under construction.

“With Turing’s centenary,” explained Mark, “there was also a lot of talk about children not learning any computing language in school and, indeed, not knowing how binary functions are performed, even though it is the corner stone of computing. We thought we would try to build something that would allow kids — and adults, under the guise of letting their children play with it — learn about that stuff in a fun way.”

IMAGE: A giant concrete cake created by Westby & Jones in collaboration with Bompas & Parr.

The UTM is currently being fabricated by Westby & Jones, whose previous work includes a collaboration with Bompas & Parr on a brutalist birthday cake for the Barbican, and Ollie Palmer, of ant ballet fame.

Inevitably there have been some hiccups: food safety regulations require that the delicate clockwork machinery of the tea-making apparatus be hosed down each evening and none of the official Olympic food and beverage sponsors seem to be able to supply sugar cubes. Meanwhile, rising material costs have produced a sort of inverse Moore’s Law effect, cutting the device’s planned computing power in half.

IMAGE: The Universal Tea Machine, Smout Allen and You+Pea with Iain Borden.

But Mark Smout was quietly confident that, come next Friday, he’ll be one of hundreds wearing a poncho and enjoying a hot cup of tea while watching Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony on the big screen in Victoria Park. “After all,” he added, “what could be more British than queuing for a slightly dodgy cup of tea in the rain?”

UPDATE: Check out this video of the Universal Tea Machine in action!

 

Wet Cherries

At this time of year, Washington state’s cherry growers have their local helicopter pilot on speed dial.

IMAGE: A helicopter acts as a giant blow dryer above a Montana cherry orchard.

They are not taking triumphant joy rides over their ripening red crop, or conducting aerial surveillance of their picking force. Instead, they are paying $600 a day for the helicopter to blow dry their cherries.

While wind and birds pose problems, rain is a disaster: as the Seattle Times explains, “all it takes is a summer shower to swell the fruit, already fat with juice, until its skin splits.”

At that point, a harvest that might have been worth more than $10,000 per acre loses up to seventy percent of its value. Grower Denny Hayden, with 250 acres of cherries, grumbles to Times reporter Lynda Mapes that: “It would be a lot easier if I went every year to Vegas and threw my money on the table, instead of this water torture.”

IMAGE: A still from a pilot Maria Langer’s helicopter nose-cam (via An Eclectic Mind).

With the stakes that high, Hayden deals with three-tenths of an inch of rain over eight hours during the harvest by calling in his helicopter. The rain started at 3 a.m., Mapes writes, so he began by using “tractor sprayers to blow calcium on the trees to slow the uptake of water into the fruit by osmosis.”

Then, as soon as it was light, his contracted helicopter took off, flying extremely low (between 5 and 10 feet, depending on variety, tree density, and rainfall) and incredibly slowly (about 10 miles per hour) over the cherries, in order to blow dry them from above. Veteran cherry drying pilot Maria Langer (who is also a freelance writer and author of the blog An Eclectic Mind) explains that “the downwash from our rotor blades shakes the branches, thus shaking off accumulated water.”

IMAGE: Still from a YouTube video of helicopter blowdrying a cherry orchard.

The cherry drying business is seasonal — Langer travels up to Washington from Arizona, where her normal business lies in tours and aerial photography, each summer. It is also dangerous and boring, but utterly unique — cherries are the only fruit dried by helicopter, because of their vulnerability and value.

In fact, the next cherry you enjoy might have been dried four times or more, while pickers climb up and down 10-foot ladders, “visiting and revisiting the trees a minimum of three to five times to pick each cherry as it comes to maximum size and ripeness.” And that’s before they are hydro-cooled, sorted, and shipped to the consumer in twenty-four hours or less.

IMAGE: Cherries, via.

Understanding the effort that goes into this harvest makes a punnet of fresh, ripe cherries — already semi-miraculous — truly seem more precious than a ruby.

Note: The Seattle Times story found via @helenabottemiller.

Artificial Flavours and Archigram

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be talking about artificial flavours at 6:30pm tonight, at The Studio Loft in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, as part of MCA Denver’s excellent Mixed Taste series — I believe that there are still a few tickets available.

The genius of the series, which was developed in 2004 by the museum’s Director and Chief Animator, Adam Lerner, lies in its format: two speakers give back-to-back presentations on seemingly unrelated topics, such as Hegel and spontaneous human combustion, or fingerprinting and traditional Sumatran architecture, and, miraculously, the juxtaposition and unexpected overlaps turn out to shed new light on each topic.

Meanwhile, the question and answer session that follows the presentations is a very different thing from your typical post-lecture awkward silence punctuated with rambling observations — having the audience do the work of synthesising the two topics makes for a much more energetic conversation. I was lucky enough to attend one last year, on blood sausage and urban spelunking, that inspired a fascinating conversation about mining and charcuterie’s shared challenge of creating structure through casing.

IMAGE: Chef Jorel Pierce, of blood sausage fame. Photograph by Lori Midson for Westword.

In any case, I’ll be talking about the mechanics of flavour perception, the anal glands of beavers, my recent adventures in search of flavour factories in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and much more. I also spent yesterday making oatmeal raisin cookies with fake and real cinnamon for your sampling delight. And I’m paired with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, who is going to be discussing Archigram, an avant-garde architectural group from the ’60s. It should be a lot of fun: come along if you can!

Clod Crushers and Cucumber Straighteners

IMAGE: An English cucumber straightener from the mid-nineteenth century, via the Old Garden Tools museum.

This is not what you (probably) think it is. It is, in fact, a glass cucumber straightener from the mid-nineteenth century, invented by George Stephenson, who also happened to build the first public railway line in the world.

Apparently, Stephenson grew frustrated with the crookedness of the cucumbers growing in his Tapton House gardens and had several glass cylinders made at his Newcastle steam engine factory in order to control the wayward vegetables.

IMAGE: George Stephenson’s patented cucumber straightener in front of its home at the Chesterfield Museum, Derbyshire, via Tanners Yard Press.

Rumour has it that Stephenson also invented, or at least improved upon, the cucumber slicer, in his pursuit of the perfect sandwich for his afternoon tea.

IMAGE: George Stephenson’s cucumber slicer, from the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield.

IMAGE: Cucumber straightening glasses advertised in a mid-nineteenth century horticultural catalogue, via the Old Garden Tools museum.

Farmers today use improved, non-bendy varietals, grown on a trellis structure so that gravity helps straighten their cucumbers, but perfectionist Victorian gardeners relied on Stephenson’s blown glass cylinders in order to avoid the kinks that not only make a cucumber harder to slice, but can also affect its taste by restricting water and nutrient passage. It’s a device that embodies the imperatives of economic botany: the aesthetic and biological rationalisation of plants for human use.

A Victorian glass cucumber straightener is just one of the more than 100 such antique gardening tools currently on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum in the Bronx, alongside mole forks, beet hoes, clod crushers, and wasp catchers.

The exhibition, Dibbles and Daisy Grubbers: The Art of the Garden Tool, closes on Sunday, July 1 (meaning, sadly, that I will not have the chance to see it), and represents just a tiny fraction of the 10,000 gardening implements, some of which date back to the 1500s, that landscape architect Mark Morrison has collected over the past thirty-five years.

IMAGE: Antique garden tools on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum.

The devices on display are organised by function, from seed sowing to pruning and pest control, followed by fruit harvesting and asparagus digging. Some are easily recognisable — a spade is a spade, whether it is today’s assembly-line model with a plastic handle, an elegant lady’s trowel used by Queen Victoria, or a hand-forged, battered, and rusted wood and iron implement from the eighteenth century.

IMAGE: Antique garden tools on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum.

Others are more obscure, particularly those related to fruit and vegetable cultivation and harvest. Although the keen allotment grower or kitchen gardener might still require them, mechanical, industrial-scale agriculture has for the most part overridden the gastronomical preferences that led the French and English to develop different asparagus knives, one for slicing under the soil to produce a white-stemmed vegetable, and the other for sawing through the spear at the surface, for a springy, green shoot.

IMAGE: Antique garden tools on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum. Morrison’s collection includes 350 watering cans.

Mechanisation has also made redundant the custom-made nineteenth-century leather lawn boots (seen above), which would have been worn by a horse so that it didn’t harm the grass as it dragged a mower across it.

IMAGE: Antique garden tools on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum.

But, whether obsolete or simply old, each tool represents an intimate design response that balances the biological and environmental needs of plants with the desires and physiology of humans — they are devices that mediate that domestic relationship, supplementing the limitations of the human body and the shortcomings of environment, defending against the competition posed by pests, and sculpting plant forms to optimise their aesthetic appeal, fruiting potential, and harvestability.

IMAGE: Antique garden tools on display at the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum.

Together, the story these tools tell is of the ways humans have remade nature (including themselves) — a long and ever-evolving project to terraform the Earth, for subsistence as well as for pleasure.

While walking a New York Times reporter through the exhibition, Morrison explained that, “when he scans his racks of 150 trowels and 350 watering cans, he is reminded of rural subsistence farmers over the centuries and their backbreaking labor and hungry families.”

He can’t help but wonder, he says: “How many people’s lives did these save; how many people did they feed?”

Thanks to Georgia Silvera Seamans (Local Ecologist) for the link — and, if you’re in New York, please check out the exhibition in its final days and let me know what you think.

Previously on Edible Geography: The Agri-Tech Catalogue.

Endangered Cake Museum

I learned of the existence of the world’s first and, to the best of my knowledge, only cake museum in the same moment as I heard the shocking news that its continued survival is under threat due to budget problems in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

IMAGE: Frances Kuyper and part of her cake collection, photographed in 2007 by Flickr user jericl cat

The cake museum was founded in 1994 by Frances Kuyper, a vaudeville performer turned cake decorator extraordinaire who was “known for her pioneering use of the airbrush,” according to the Los Angeles Times. In fact, as fellow member of the International Cake Exploration Societé Carolyn Mathewson elaborated, “She was the first to airbrush a cake without blowing holes in the frosting.”

IMAGE: Princess Diana, on a cake model decorated by Frances Kuyper in the 1990s, and photographed by Gary Friedman for the Los Angeles Times.

The museum’s collection of more than 140 cakes is actually inedible — their plastic or styrofoam bases simply serve as a foundation to showcase many of the most advanced techniques in sugar-work and decoration. Their first public display was in Pasadena, in a building next to Kuyper’s home that “she and her husband, retired mailman Frankie Kuyper, spent their $40,000 savings on converting into an exhibition area” — preparations that included, according to a 1996 Los Angeles Times report, a preemptive vermin strike:

“I had the place fogged with bug bombs before I opened,” said Kuyper, 78. “I have a termite guy come every month. I’ve tried to think of everything.”

When Frankie passed away and Frances moved to a Boyle Heights retirement community, its administrators allowed her to relocate the museum to its basement, where she continued to receive visitors and conduct tours and demonstrations by appointment until her death in July 2010.

IMAGE: A photograph of the cakes on display in their retirement community basement home, taken by Pleasure Palate in 2007.

Once again, the LA Times, whose cake museum coverage has been exemplary, was on the story, noting the uncertainty over the museum’s fate in Kuyper’s obituary, and following up with the thrilling tale of its rescue in August 2010, when “bakery students from a San Fernando Valley vocational school saved more than a hundred colorfully decorated cakes from a trip to the dumpster.”

As the article elaborates, the rescue mission was orchestrated by Susan Holtz, a culinary department instructor at the West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills who had been in the habit of bringing her students to visit Frances Kuyper and study the cake collection.

Upon hearing of Frances’ death, Holtz called the retirement home and learned that they were just two weeks’ away from throwing the cakes out. She quickly arranged to find space for them at the vocational college, “recruiting student draftsmen from the school’s computer-aided design class to draw up permanent displays for the cakes and fledgling woodworkers from its carpentry class to build them.”

IMAGE: A photograph of the cakes on display in their retirement community basement home, taken by Pleasure Palate in 2007.

As Holtz explained to the LA Times reporter, Bob Pool, back in 2010:

These are famous cakes. They show a lot of advanced techniques. […] There are really important people in the industry here. About three dozen cake artists are represented. Look at this upside-down pineapple cake. It’s famous; it’s in books. Colette Peters of New York did it. She made cakes for royalty. They fly in their own seats when they’re delivered on planes.

However, as Pool reported yesterday, in his most recent cake museum update, budget troubles prompted LAUSD to cut its adult education offerings in half earlier this month, and West Valley Occupational Center’s entire teaching, administrative and support staff all received layoff notices. With the culinary program and the school’s future uncertain, the cakes are currently in limbo. Holtz told Pool that she left “signs begging that she be called at home before the district throws out of any of Kuyper’s cakes if the culinary program is permanently scrapped.”

“I’ll rent a storage unit if I have to,” Holtz said. “I don’t want these cakes to be thrown out. We have a lot of history in these. They cannot be thrown out.”

The fate of a fifty-year-old textbook example of Lambeth overpiping or a virtuoso yet rather terrifying airbrush portrait of Princess Diana may not be the most critical issues facing civilisation at this moment, but, nonetheless, the destruction of the world’s first and only cake museum seems like an unnecessary and avoidable minor tragedy. Fellow cake enthusiasts: Can you help?

NOTE: Thanks to Geoff Manaugh for alerting me to both the cake museum’s existence and uncertain future!

Lunch: An Urban Invention

Lunch may be the second meal of the day today, but it was the last of the three daily meals to rise above its snack origins to achieve that status.

IMAGE: “Lunch” entry in A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson, London: J. and P. Knapton; J. and T. Longman, 1755. NYPL, Rare Book Division.

As late as 1755, according to Samuel Johnson’s definition, lunch was simply “as much food as one’s hand can hold” — which, as Laura Shapiro, culinary historian and co-curator of the New York Public Library’s new Lunch Hour NYC exhibition, recently explained to me, “means that it’s still sort of a snack that you can have at any time of the day.”

And it wasn’t until later still — around 1850 — that lunch became a regular fixture between breakfast and dinner, added Rebecca Federman, the exhibition’s co-curator, Culinary Collections Librarian at the NYPL, author of Cooked Books, and a star panelist at Foodprint NYC.

Finally, by the turn of the century, “lunch was taking place between 12 and 2, more or less,” concludes Shapiro. It was a real meal at last, with a time associated with it, and particular foods and places assigned to it.

IMAGE: Lunch venue with a deli counter, silver gelatin print, 1942. NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division.

Those foods and places — the shifting cultural and spatial geography of lunch — form the meat of the library’s new exhibition, which opens today and runs until mid-February at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street.

But the context for the entire project, which has been nearly two years in the making, lies in the fact that lunch is an urban invention — it is a former snack that only became the day’s third fixed meal as society urbanised and industrialised, and workers were unable to return home for dinner (always the main meal of the day) until late at night. As Shapiro explained:

Lunch came into its own — it really acquired the size and shape and substance that it has in America today — in New York. New York is emblematic, arguably, of large North American manufacturing cities — it has all the conditions that make America different from the Old World in terms of speed and work and the arrangement of life. In New York, the focus of people’s lives is work, and lunch is the meal that was just made to fit into the industrial, urban work day.

Although my adventures with Venue mean that I can’t be in New York for the exhibition’s opening, Shapiro and Federman were kind enough to sit down with me to discuss its themes and highlights, including a quick but fascinating digression into the lost world of ladylike peanut butter sandwich recipes, before I left town. You can read highlights of our discussion, which covers women’s lunching liberation, soda fountain slang, and the horror of salad, below, alongside photographs of the exhibition’s artifacts and installation.

IMAGE: Metal lunchboxes from the 1950s line the wall in this section of the exhibition. Photograph by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

• • •

 The Technology of Lunch: Sliced Bread and the Automat

Laura Shapiro: Sliced wrapped bread first appeared in 1930, and that became the sandwich standard right away. They had the slicing technology before then, but they didn’t have the wrapping technology and the two had to go together.

Before sliced bread, the lunch literature is full of advice on social distinctions and the thickness of bread in sandwiches. You slice it very thick and you leave the crusts on if you’re giving them to workers, but for ladies, it should be extremely, extremely thin. Women’s magazines actually published directions on how to get your bread slices thin enough for a ladies lunch. You butter the cut side of the loaf first, and then slice as close to the butter as you possibly can.

IMAGE: Cover of Beech-Nut Peanut Butter: The Great Tea and Luncheon Delicacy as Served in New York recipe book, published in 1914, and available as a PDF here.

Edible Geography: Were there buttering instructions too?

Shapiro: Certainly — butter had to go all the way to the edges, and so on. But the interesting thing is peanut butter, which was introduced as a high-end spread for bread. Even though it was cheap, it had a kind of ladylike aura about it, and so ladies’ lunches would feature perfectly sliced, hair-thin bread, spread with butter and crushed peanut butter — you would grind your own peanuts and mix them with something to make it more spreadable. Peanut butter and celery, peanut butter club, peanut butter salad — even peanut butter and nasturtium!

Rebecca Federman: I have a friend who still has peanut butter with butter. It’s good.

Shapiro: Jelly didn’t come later, until peanut butter filtered down to become children’s food — and then that was it. The ladylike recipes, with nasturtiums and so on, disappear completely.

IMAGE: Recipe for a peanut butter and nasturtium sandwich, from Beech-Nut Peanut Butter: The Great Tea and Luncheon Delicacy as Served in New York.

IMAGE: An Automat installed at the New York Public Library for the exhibition, alongside Berenice Abbott’s ”Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan,” from 1936. The first American Automat opened in Philadelphia in 1902, but quickly became an icon of New York City when it arrived ten years later. Photograph by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

Edible Geography: Leaving ladies’ luncheons aside, lunch is set apart by being the first meal that is regularly eaten outside of the house, right?

Shapiro: Exactly, which meant it needed to be not only a low-cost and fast meal, but also reliably clean and high quality. All of those elements led to standardisation and automation. We have a display of the soda fountain slang — all of the drugstore lunch counters and soda fountains developed a special shorthand and insider lingo, which they would yell back and forth to communicate with each other. Jello was called “nervous pudding” — that was my favourite.

IMAGE: Automat instructions, via The Atlantic.

Federman: Then we have an Automat — a real one, restored to working order by Andy Pastore. The library actually has an amazing collection of Horn & Hardart Automat papers thanks to Robert F. Byrnes, who was an executive there for his whole career. No other single restaurant organization, certainly not in New York, has a collection to match that. It is the archive that all restaurants should look at, because they should all be doing this.

It’s organized by location, and within each location’s folder, by date. If they changed the sign, or if they put in a revolving door, they took a picture. They took pictures of the inside with people, so you see how people were eating, what they were wearing, whether they were sitting alone, and so on. They took pictures of the outside, so you get the street scenes. And then there are recipes!

IMAGE: A Horn & Hardart Automat in 1965, photographed by Neil Boenzi for The New York Times.

Shapiro: Every Horn & Hardart location had a manager’s book, with the rules for doing every single thing — how to squeeze the orange juice, how much filling to put on each sandwich, how to treat your customers, and how often to throw out the coffee. All the food came from a central commissary, which was a block-large building on 50th Street, between 10th and 11th. They did nearly everything there, for economy of scale and for quality control, and then they had extremely precise instructions for anything that had to be made in store. The idea was that any Automat you went to, you would get precisely the same dish.

Federman: And you never saw the people preparing your food, which somehow made it seem more sanitary, as if strangers weren’t touching your lunch. In the exhibition, we show the mechanics, so you can peek backstage and see how it worked.

IMAGE: The back of the restored Automat, installed at the New York Public Library’s Lunch Hour NYC exhibition. Photograph by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

 • • •

Defining Lunch: the Hot, the Hand-Held, and the Hungry

Edible Geography: For the purposes of the exhibition, how do you actually define lunch?

Federman: Drawing the line between street food, snacks, and lunch is tricky. We start the exhibition with a look at the varying definitions of “lunch,” and the early Samuel Johnson category of hand-held food. We have a hot-dog cart, an oyster cart, and a pretzel cart.

IMAGE: Street food installation, including a hot-dog cart on loan from Worksman Cycles. Photograph by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

Shapiro: The street foods that go way back, like hot dogs and pizza, have never changed. It was lunch one hundred years ago, and it’s still lunch today. But, with waves of immigration, you see new lunch foods, so we have a small thing on Jamaican beef patties as one of the most recent lunch standards. The Jamaican beef patty shows up after 1965, after new immigration laws mean that more and more Caribbeans are coming to the city. Five minutes later, historically speaking, they’re everywhere — they’re in Grand Central Station, they’re in the school lunch program, and they’re an icon of New York.

IMAGE: Oysters were once the iconic street food of New York City, but over-consumption, pollution, and harbour dredging dramatically reduced their supply and priced them up into the fancy food category. Photograph of Lunch Hour NYC installation by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

Federman: We also have these wonderful posters that people would display when they were selling apples during the Depression. For some people, especially then, an apple was lunch. The whole program was a huge mistake, but these apple sellers on the streets of New York became one of the lasting images of the Depression. The International Apple Shippers’ Association concocted the plan to get rid of a surplus of apples from the West Coast, but the market quickly became saturated, and then the surplus ran out and the price went up, and, meanwhile, the apple sellers no longer counted as unemployed for official purposes.

Shapiro: And there were so many complaints about apple cores in the streets.

Federman: I have no idea how these posters ended up in the library’s collection — I’d guess that some librarian just collected them off the streets. The exhibition is really made up of these kinds of pieces of ephemera — magazines and newspapers and clippings that document aspects of everyday life that aren’t necessarily documented elsewhere.

IMAGE: Placard advertising apple selling by the Depression-era unemployed, 1930. NYPL, Rare Book Division.

Shapiro: There are very few lunch cookbooks. There might be a section with luncheon menus, but you rarely see a lunch recipe. Instead, you see advice: this is good for lunch, bring this to a picnic lunch, the leftovers from this will make a good lunch, and so on.

The midday meal at home, because it was only for women and children, was especially overlooked. In the domesticity literature, you even see reminders not to neglect lunch, and to have more than a bite, catch-as-catch-can, because it’s important to keep up your strength for the day.

Federman: Finding what people actually eat everyday is almost always a challenge. In the exhibition, we have a couple of interviews with recent immigrants about how their lunches have changed since coming to this country. One of the people who was interviewed came from Tunisia and for him, lunch used to mean something warm. He has a hard time with lunch here.

Shapiro: He talks about salad with absolute horror!

IMAGE: A Heinz soup dispenser, a common feature of the soda fountain or luncheonette. Photograph of Lunch Hour NYC installation by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

Edible Geography: My own grandmother was of the firm belief that a nice hot soup was the best thing for lunch.

Shapiro: It was once a common idea here, that every meal should have one hot thing, to be a meal rather than a snack. You see it in ads from the 50s — the Campbell company would put out the suggestion that soup should be the one hot thing, even in summer.

• • •

Luncheon Etiquette: At-Risk Hats and Unescorted Women

Edible Geography: As a set of lunch venues emerged — the cafeteria or quick-lunch restaurant, the Automat, and even the street — were they accompanied by a lunch etiquette that differed from acceptable behaviour at breakfast and dinner?

Federman: Speed is the defining characteristic of New York lunch etiquette. People from other countries always noted the speed at which the people of New York ate. At the quick-lunch places, it was understood that you got in and got out as fast as you could and the normal rules were thrown out of the window. You can see that in illustrations from the time, and you can even get a sense from the menus, which deliberately say things like, “We are not responsible for your personal property.” You could drop your hat on a chair to save it while you got your food, but if someone else sat down faster than you, all bets were off. It was every luncher for him or herself.

IMAGE: Haim’s Quick-Lunch Restaurant menu. New York, 1906. NYPL, Rare Book Division.

Shapiro: Which is why, as women office workers came to be part of the crowd, the cafeterias were seen to be too busy and bustling for them. That’s when you got things like Schrafft’s — slightly nicer places that developed very feminine identities.

Actually, the first women’s club in America began meeting over lunch in New York in 1868. They met at Delmonico’s because, like most fancy restaurants at the time, Delmonico’s did not allow women in unescorted for lunch. So they just walked in and sat down, and that was the start of the womens’ club movement. It wasn’t the suffrage movement by a long shot, but it was an example of women standing up for themselves and expanding their lives.

They liberated Delmonico’s in 1868, but it took 101 years before they liberated the Plaza Hotel. In 1969, Betty Friedan led a group of women to lunch in the Oak Room at the Plaza, where they still did not serve women who were not escorted by men. They sat there for two hours and the waiters wouldn’t go near them. The Plaza changed their policy within a few months, but they would not serve Betty Friedan that day.

• • •

Lunch Power: Nutrition and Networking

IMAGE: Charitable Lunch. Photograph of Lunch Hour NYC installation by Jonathan Blanc for the New York Public Library.

Edible Geography: The provision of school lunch is an enormous topic, as well as a controversial one. Do you touch on that at all in the exhibition?

Federman: We do — we have a timeline that comes all the way up to the present moment, from the start of the New York school lunch program, which began in 1908, through to today. A charity organization started it — the New York School Lunch Committee — out of concern at tenement conditions and seeing kids coming to school malnourished, underweight, and pale. Their lunch wasn’t free, but for three cents, you could get soup or macaroni and a piece of bread, followed by a sweet cracker or fruit or something like that. It started in two schools in the city and expanded over time, and after about twelve years, it became part of the Board of Education.

IMAGE: Boys eating at P.S. 40, Jessie Tarbox Beals. Silver gelatin print, 1919. NYPL, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Shapiro: Everybody was worried about underweight as a form of malnutrition a hundred years ago, and now it’s the exact opposite. It’s still malnutrition, it just takes a different form as the country has changed.

Federman: We also have a small section on the Brooklyn Navy Yard cafeteria, which was opened by Anne Tracy Morgan, who was J. P. Morgan’s daughter and a big philanthropist. She felt that by opening a cafeteria on site, the Brooklyn Navy Yards workers would get more nutritious meals than they would get outside or if they brought them from home. They hired all these quick-lunch workers from the city who knew how to feed large numbers of people very quickly, but it wasn’t terribly successful — it closed within a year or two. I think part of it had to do with the fact that they didn’t serve any beer.

Shapiro: Speaking of J. P. Morgan, we also have a section on the “power lunch,” which, while it has existed wherever men in suits have gathered on an expense account, gained its name here in New York in the seventies.

IMAGE: Lunch at the Four Seasons, photograph by Susan Stava. Courtesy of the Four Seasons, via New York Magazine.

Federman: And, of course, there’s a whole geography of power lunches — both the particular restaurants to be seen at, and then, within the dining room, where power players would sit.

Shapiro: One of the things we do in the exhibition is define power more broadly — it’s not always the guys in the suits. New York, as a city, is full of different power circles for different interest groups that derive a lot of their strength from association. So, for instance, we also have a section on the writers and theater people who gathered at the Algonquin — the Algonquin Round Table — in the 20s. In fact, I would say that New York gave us, for better or worse, the concept of power in lunch.

• • •

Thanks to Laura Shapiro and Rebecca Federman for a wonderful conversation and a rushed Pret a Manger sandwich. I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition in person soon — if you go, let me know what you think in the comments.

Urban Probiotics

IMAGE: Gut flora redesign, using a yogurt vehicle, is already a commonplace activity at breakfast tables around the world.

For many, the consumption of probiotic supplements is already a daily routine — a regular, intentional, and frequently yogurt-based effort to re-design our intestinal flora. This makes sense: the five hundred (or so) different species of bacteria living inside our guts have an important influence on everything from our ability to digest certain foods to our emotional well-being and behaviour.

Doses of “friendly” bacteria have already been shown to cure chronic digestive illnesses, and, according to Professor John Cryan of the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College, Cork, it’s highly likely that they will soon be used to treat “stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression.” These beneficial microbes are typically consumed orally, either dried and encapsulated in supplement form or cultured in a dairy base, although in extreme situations they can also be introduced directly to the colon using the somewhat horrifying-sounding technique of fecal transplant.

IMAGE: Probiotic bacteria.

Last month, however, scientists at the University of Toronto announced the results of a study that examined both babies’ gut bacteria and the bacteria present in dust samples from their homes. To their surprise, they found a significant overlap, suggesting, as Jessica Hamzelou writes in New Scientist, that babies “may be sharing their gut bacteria with the environment and vice versa.”

Extrapolating from this, public health researcher Pilar Francino goes on to speculate that “people living in the same dusty house may also share health and behavioural characteristics.”

IMAGE: A dusty house, via.

In other words, just as the colour of your walls has been shown to affect your heart rate and blood pressure, your home’s bacterial biome may be making you obese and anxious — or, of course, healthy and happy.

Forget yogurt or fecal transplants — it seems to be only a matter of time before we are able to intentionally inoculate our homes with custom blends of bacteria in order to redesign our gut flora. Designer dust will take its place alongside formaldehyde-free furniture polish and low VOC paint for the responsible homeowner.

IMAGE: A dust cloud envelopes a city, via.

Perhaps, given the rising cost of obesity-related diseases combined with the increasing occurrence of allergies, environmental bacteria supplementation will come to be seen as a public health issue, with sanitation crews spraying down pavements and gutters with a fine layer of dried lactobacilli each week.

Meanwhile, somewhere, someday, the Bazalgette of urban probiotics will install a city-wide enteric enhancement program, combining a biotic sensor network and precision bifidobacteria crop-dusting drones in order to transform the city’s streets, transit network, and shared spaces into a giant, shared digestive supplement.

Travels with Venue

IMAGE: Venue’s identity, designed by Folkert Gorter, spotted in the wild.

Site visits and interviews have formed the basis of many of my favourite posts on Edible Geography over the years, whether it be documenting a trip to the mushroom tunnel of Mittagong in Australia or discussing the particular flavour and effervescence of Antarctic ice cores with climatologist Paul Mayewski. I’m thrilled, then, to announce the launch of a new project, Venue, in which Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and I will travel around North America combining the two formats.

Over the next sixteen months, we’ll be traveling with Venue on a series of different expeditions to various corners (and centres) of the continent. We’ll be visiting a huge range of places and talking to an equally diverse group of people along the way, in order to assemble what we’ve been calling a curated X-ray or new core sample of the greater North American landscape — “a cumulative, participatory, and media-rich” narrative archive of the built, natural, fictional, internal, and virtual environments that we build and inhabit.

IMAGE: Film still from Our Daily Bread.

From fish farms to the potash mines where the raw ingredients for industrial fertiliser are extracted, and from water rights lawyers to sensory scientists, many of the sites and subjects of Venue’s research will, I hope, be of interest to Edible Geography readers and will thus be published here as well as on the Venue site. Others, such as ski resort designers and neon museums, are a little outside Edible Geography’s usual territory, but may well appeal to several of you nonetheless: if so, you can keep up with our adventures online and by Twitter and email, and explore our multimedia archive using an interactive map, as well as by search or keyword.

IMAGE: Potash mine near Saskatchewan, Canada; photograph by Martin Mraz.

In addition to Venue’s regular programming diet of site surveys, conversations, and reports, we also plan to sprinkle in occasional public workshops, presentations, and discussions, in an attempt to borrow some of the excitement of our other nomadic events series (Foodprint Project and Postopolis!) — the way a traveling and temporary community of ideas exchange can trigger unexpected connections and reveal larger, shared themes. I hope to see some of you at these — as before, the mailing list and our continually updated online schedule will be the best way to stay up to speed.

IMAGE: The Venue tripds as superheroes in an illustration by Chris Woebken.

IMAGE: The Venue box under construction, photo by Semigood.

Physically, Venue is a collection of measuring tools and recording devices mounted on surveying tripods and a custom-designed pop-up interview desk. In addition to standard video, audio, and still photography, we’ll also be deploying a range of more whimsical, poetic, and obscure instruments to reveal invisible forces and impose alternate perceptual frameworks on the landscape. I’m particularly excited about this part of the project, as part of a longstanding interest in exploring how the technologies we use to explore and describe the landscape both shape and are shaped by the way we understand it.

IMAGE: Geoff Manaugh and Chris Woebken on a surveying tool reconnaissance mission.

IMAGE: The powder-coating room up in the Bronx in which Venue’s tripods and equipment were given a new look.

Interaction designer Chris Woebken, of fish-texting and beetle-wrestling fame, has created many of these devices for us, and we’ll also be experimenting with a Public Laboratory near-infrared balloon photography rig, Munsell soil charts, Matt Richardson’s textual Polaroid, and even a home-made cyanometer (to measure the blueness of the sky). Over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to read more about each of these, see them in action, and browse their output on the Venue site.

IMAGE: Multispectral balloon map of North Boulder Community Garden by Stewart Long and the Public Laboratory.

IMAGE: Descriptive Camera, by Matt Richardson.

We’ll be kicking things off on Friday, June 8, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, with our first public event — the Museum and its fantastic Center for Art + Environment are Venue’s literal and intellectual parents, without whose support this project would have never happened, and whose galleries and archive will be the ultimate recipient of everything that Venue collects over the next sixteen months. From 6 to 8 p.m. that evening, Venue will pop-up for the first time, at the members’ premiere of the Museum’s new Edward Burtynsky: Oil exhibition, and visitors will have a chance to see its various devices and instruments in action, learn more about the project, and suggest sites and people for us to visit.

IMAGE: Female Surveyors in 1918, General Land Office, via the Public Lands Foundation

A post like this wouldn’t be complete without a huge thanks to our wonderful partners, the Nevada Museum of Art‘s Center for Art + Environment and Studio-X NYC, and our generous supporters, the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Nevada Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as all the incredibly talented designers who have worked overtime to help us give shape to and realise this project: Chris Woebken, Folkert Gorter/Superfamous and Jon-Kyle Mohr of Cargo Collective, Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath of Outpost, Brendan Callahan and Thom Jones of Semigood, Greg Nanney, Matt Richardson, INABA, and Joe Alterio.

All of this is to say: stay tuned! Meanwhile, I’d be grateful for your suggestions of sites and people for Venue to visit over the next sixteen months: leave them in the comments or using our online form.

Prince Charles’ Leftover Bread Pudding

IMAGE: From left to right, Prince Charles’ leftover chunk of bread and butter pudding, Michael Winner, and the morsel of lemon drizzle cake he didn’t consume. Photo: Apex via The Guardian.

A charming article in today’s Guardian simultaneously alerts us to the existence, and plight of, the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers.

Founded by artists and former cafe owners Michael and Francesca Bennett, and inspired by the crust of a cheese and tomato sandwich left on the plate by photographer David Bailey, the museum consists of “a small decorative shelf covered with petite domes, all of which contain a morsel of food or wrappings.”

The Guardian catalogues twelve of the twenty-six specimens in the collection, including the smallest: “a speck of croissant left by the actor John Woodvine,” who is known (if at all) for his role in An American Werewolf in London.

Other treasures include a piece of musician Pete Doherty’s cheese and pesto toastie, “a little brittle, no mould;” a “chickpea from a mixed salad, desiccated,” from the lunch of a former staff member who came fourth on The Weakest Link; and a “tiny piece of bread and butter pudding, no mould,” left by the heir to the throne himself, Prince Charles.

Although Michael Bennett tells The Guardian that the museum is “a bit of seaside fun,” it somehow also seems to me to be a wonderful revival of the medieval religious tradition of the relic, transformed for a twenty-first century in which food porn and minor celebrity gossip have replaced hymns and Bible readings as our pervasive media environment.

IMAGE: A collection of thirty-nine saintly relics, individually wrapped in cloth and labeled, found in the back of a twelfth-century portable altarpiece at the British Museum. Relics are apparently divided into three distinct classes: body parts are first class; an object or a part of an object owned or touched by the saint are second class; and third class relics “are made by touching an object (typically a small piece of cloth) to either a first or second class relic,” meaning that there is no limit on the quantity of third class relics that can be made. Under this schema, celebrity leftovers would be second class relics.

Just as a scrap from St. Joseph’s cloak or the chalice from which St. Edmund drank provide an inspiring and tangible reminder that saints were also once flesh-and-blood humans who drank wine and wore clothes, so too does Michael Winner’s leftover crumb of lemon drizzle cake provide a physical tie to an otherwise extraordinary figure.

IMAGE: Ben Affleck and Hugh Grant eating, from a Huffington Post slideshow entitled “Celebrities Eating!”

Indeed, the fact that the rest of the lemon drizzle cake was transmuted into Michael Winner’s actual flesh and blood adds to the frisson of contact with the remainder. Even the Museum’s focus on the mould-free status of most of the leftovers adds to the sense that they, like St. Teresa’s finger or St. Catherine Laboure’s blue eyes, are miraculously incorruptible and thus filled with healing powers.

IMAGE: St. Teresa’s finger on display at the Convent in Avila.

Sadly, the Bennetts have now sold their Kingsand, Cornwall, cafe, and its new owners didn’t want to keep the museum running. “Now it sits,” reports The Guardian, “unviewed, in a spare bedroom,” waiting for the right person to pick up the baton:

If anyone would like to take on the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers, it’s up for grabs. They don’t want any money for it, just a good home.