Save the Date! Foodprint NYC

By Nicola | Published: January 27, 2010


I am incredibly pleased to announce that Edible Geography is poised to make its first foray into the physical world, by co-organising Foodprint NYC, which is itself the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city.

The event will take place one month from today, on Saturday, February 27, from 1 to 5:30 p.m., and is kindly being hosted by Columbia University’s downtown Studio-X space. Excitingly, that means as well as being free and open to the New York-based public, it will also be available to the rest of the world as a audio and video download through Columbia’s iTunes U Channel.

IMAGE: (left) Milk wagon and old houses, Grove St., Manhattan, Berenice Abbott, courtesy NYPL; (right) Food cart in Flushing, Queens, via.

I’m especially thrilled to be collaborating with good friend and long-time food, culture, architecture, and sustainability writer, Sarah Rich. Our idea for Foodprint NYC came from a shared curiosity in feeding the city: how our urban food systems work today, how historical forces have shaped them till now, how they might develop in the future – and how these food systems, in turn, have shaped our environment and ourselves.

IMAGE: A Gastronomical Map of Manhattan, via.

The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: “Zoning Diet,” about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; “Culinary Cartography,” a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviours; “Edible Archaeology,” about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and “Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios,” an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.

In other words, the afternoon’s discussions might range from cluster analysis of bodega inventories to the cultural impact of the ice-box, from urban food deserts to peak phosphorus, and from an analysis of fried chicken’s ubiquity to the functional foods of the future.

IMAGE: (left) From Mapping Food Partnerships, a project of panelist Tom Forster, (right) Phillips Design Food Concepts, via.

Sarah and I are hoping to create a genuinely lively, surprising, and inspiring set of conversations by making sure each panel includes a range of voices, including designers, policy-makers, flavour scientists, culinary historians, architects, anthropologists, health professionals, and food producers and retailers.

I’ll be posting the panelists along with more details nearer the time, but for now, if you’re in NYC or can get here for the afternoon, please save the date: it should be a fun, casual, and – judging by the panelists we’ve already confirmed – incredibly interesting few hours, and I’d love to see you there! Meanwhile, please feel free to leave suggestions, questions, and ideas in the comments, or email me directly.

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Publishing Food #2

By Nicola | Published: January 24, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMAGE: An advertisement for van Houten Chocolate Letters, via

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

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

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Digital Fabricator, via Amit Zoran.

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

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Virtuoso Mixer, via Amit Zoran.

IMAGE: The Cornucopia Robotic Chef, via Amit Zoran.

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

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

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

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

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

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The Self-Consuming Barbecue Pavilion

By Nicola | Published: January 21, 2010

In a fantastic hybrid of edible architecture and temporary summer pavilion, architect Caroline O’Donnell has proposed Bloodline, a free-standing, self-consuming grilling shelter.

IMAGE: Sectional model through the preparation bench, Bloodline pavilion. All images courtesy Caroline O’Donnell except where otherwise noted; her project is supported by the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Bloodline is the outcome of O’Donnell’s 2007 fellowship and residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, a grant-making and residency institution housed in the late-Baroque “Solitude Castle” near Stuttgart in southern Germany.

Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, built Schloss Solitude in 1763 as a private pleasure house – a cross between a party castle, summer retreat, and hunting lodge. Solitude was intended to be more intimate and less formal than his royal palace at Ludwigsburg, like the Trianons were to Versailles.

IMAGE: Akademie Schloss Solitude, via Wikimedia.

Among the prerequisites for an eighteenth-century aristocrat to achieve relaxation were a natural setting and, perhaps more importantly, minimal interaction with the servant classes. However, since domestic service was still required (aristocratic relaxation did not encompass preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals, for example), palace architects had to resort to an extremely elaborate set of spatial tricks and distortions to make the servers as invisible as possible. The original design for the Petit Trianon even included a mechanism for raising and lowering the dining table through the floor so that it could be set and cleared out of sight.

According to O’Donnell, “The guides at Schloss Solitude could not understand why I wanted to see the service spaces, and tried to convince me that they were not interesting. I kept telling them in bad German that I was an architect and therefore interested in uninteresting spaces, but that seemed to cause more confusion.”

IMAGE: The secret service spaces at Ludwigsburg (left) and Schloss Solitude (right).

What she found, eventually, were a series of awkward and cramped service cupboards and passages, filling in the spaces around the formal, symmetrical rooms. They are the negative space of pure classical order; the banished evidence of domestic effort and bodily needs.

Interestingly, O’Donnell noticed that at Karl Eugen’s main palace, Ludwigsburg Castle, the formal rooms are arranged around the edge, concealing a rabbit warren of service spaces in the interior.

Meanwhile at Solitude, the reverse is true: the cupboards, closets, and service passages are banished to the edge, with the result that seven of the fourteen windows on the perfectly symmetrical south façade actually open onto these deformed, hidden spaces.

IMAGE: The south-facing façade of Schloss Solitude, in which seven of its windows actually open onto service spaces, rather than public rooms, via.

IMAGE: The negative spaces into which domestic functions were banished at Schloss Solitude (left); many were used as fire-spaces (right).

Among the domestic functions concealed in this way was fire maintenance: tiny fire-spaces were used for storing firewood and also enabled servants to stoke open fires while remaining behind the scenes.

O’Donnell explained that when she finally gained access to a fire-space, she noticed “the effects of this small-scale and contorted space on the body,” but she was most fascinated “by this idea of the fire-space as a window, through which the stooping servant had a rare window into the lives of his masters” – and, in some ways, a more complete or privileged understanding of the space of the palace as a whole.

IMAGE: Bloodline elevation drawings, showing the stacked grillholz cuboid exterior concealing the irregular interior.

So, back to the barbecue pavilion: O’Donnell’s Bloodline proposal would use 360 bags of grillholz (German barbecue wood sticks) as the cladding – enough for a summer season, or ninety barbecues at four bags per cook-out. As July fades into August, and then into September, the pavilion will gradually be dismantled: the architecture’s fiery function will lead it to literally consume itself from the outside in. This is an incredibly poetic literalisation of the shelter’s function: architecture parlante at its finest.

The pavilion also plays on O’Donnell’s initial fascination with Solitude’s squished fire-spaces. Bloodline begins the summer as a perfect, platonic cube, but gradually grills itself down to an awkwardly shaped frame that mirrors a section through the original fire-space. In other words, through use, the mini-barbecue palace will reveal its contorted, service-space origins – a slow, season-long process of revelation.

IMAGE: The pavilion will begin the summer as a platonic cube, before being eroded through repeated barbecuing to reveal its hidden fire-space form.

Like Solitude’s original fire-spaces, which servants had to bend down and crawl to enter, the Bloodline barbecue pavilion is only designed to fit one person. And, as in the originals, that one person – the servant or barbecuer-in-chief, depending on how you look at these things – has a unique, more omniscient view.

Ludwigsburg and Solitude castles are linked by Solitudeallee, each palace is also aligned on its own axis of symmetry. When O’Donnell looked at these lines in satellite view, it became clear that there was a third axis, emerging from the forest, which was missing a castle.

Ingeniously, O’Donnell’s proposed site for Bloodline means that our barbecuing hero, standing in front of the grill-window on the southwest-facing side of the pavilion, is the only person in their party who can see that they are actually inside the missing third castle.

IMAGE: Plotting the axes and intersections of Ludwigsburg and Solitude: O’Donnell explained that “only the forest is missing a castle.”

In other words, while their friends and family relax in the grounds outside the pavilion, eating sausages they haven’t had to prepare, “only the servant (or grill-master) will know the truth,” explains O’Donnell, “although they can sneak others in, to share the secret.”

IMAGE: Renderings of Bloodline, showing the grill-window and entrance.

IMAGE: The interior of the Bloodline barbecue pavilion, looking out towards the grill-window’s privileged view.

In terms of grilling experience, the barbecue pavilion that becomes a secret, personal castle seems second to none. “After that, the sausages are not my responsibility,” O’Donnell told me. “There are however custom spaces built into the pavilion on the west side for a fire-extinguisher and a fire-blanket, as well as a big vent on the east side that aligns with the prevailing wind and uses the stack-effect to ventilate the space naturally.”

A couple of thoughts immediately come to mind here: firstly, that this is the perfect Father’s Day gift. After all, doesn’t every red-blooded male secretly crave his own barbecue castle: a private space of solitude, unspoken power, and burger perfection? Lowe’s or Homebase could even stock build-your-own kits, for an extra DIY frisson.

IMAGE: (left) Inside Bloodline (the server has clearly sneaked in a few friends); (right) Stacked grillholz will form the façade and the barbecue fuel. The wood sticks’ colour even matches the ochre putty exterior of Schloss Solitude.

I’m also reminded, via a link that was (coincidentally?) sent to me separately by Caroline O’Donnell, of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theory that cooking is the root cause of human civilisation. His basic idea is that the discovery of cooking allowed us to unlock many more calories in food, which gave us more energy for less effort, which in turn resulted in a massive increase in brain size in Homo sapiens (as compared to our primate ancestors).


IMAGE: Stages of consumption. At the end, all that will remain is the ash bench (bottom right), which O’Donnell plans to leave on site once the summer is over, “as a clue to the missing castle.”

That expanded brain of course led, eventually, to the flowering of the Baroque, in which rococo pleasure palaces were cleverly designed to hide any evidence of cooking facilities. O’Donnell’s pavilion gives cooking its due once again, as over the course of the summer Solitude’s missing third palace is revealed to be a a functional fire-space, rather than the abstracted perfection of a symmetrical cube. Barbecuing German day-trippers will thus be paying inadvertent homage to the role of fire in human civilisation.

IMAGE: Some of O’Donnell’s incredibly complex cut files for fabrication.

Caroline O’Donnell is working with Akademie Schloss Solitude to secure funding for the pavilion: the hope is to install it during the summer of 2011. My thanks are due to her for an incredibly interesting conversation, and also to Nathan Friedman, who has been working on Bloodline with O’Donnell for the past few months.

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Digest | Feeding the Bronx

By Nicola | Published: January 12, 2010

The Center for Urban Pedagogy has created an awesome new video that explores some of the economic and consumer forces that combine to create the South Bronx foodscape. It’s called Bodega Down Bronx, and you can watch it in full (a half hour well spent) over over at Design Observer, where it premiered earlier this month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMAGE: Bodega owner. Still from Bodega Down Bronx.

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

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

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

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

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Vegetable Tourism

By Nicola | Published: January 11, 2010

The logical offspring of two recent food trends – gastro-tourism and heirloom fruit and veg – is clearly vegetable tourism. After all, if people will travel to Melton Mowbray for an authentic pork pie and pay extra for a Brandywine tomato, why not make a pilgrimage to the site where “one of the fastest growing and earliest-harvesting of all peas,” the Prince Albert, was first bred and grown? Or the nursery where Kirke’s Blue plum (“juicy flesh and a free stone”) was raised in the 1820s?

IMAGE: Vintage seed packet, from London’s lovely Garden Museum. According to Forgotten Fruits by Christopher Stocks, the Ailsa Craig is named after “an uncanny looking island of the Scottish coast,” which could, “with a little imagination, be said to bear a passing resemblance to a submerged onion of titanic size.” The island is “composed of a fine granite that provided the material for most of the world’s curling stones” and is now home to about 70,000 gannets.

The would-be vegetable tourist could do worse than start with Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits, a hugely enjoyable (re)introduction to the most important or interesting of Britain’s traditional and forgotten fruit and vegetable varieties. Tucked into the appendices is a map and gazetteer, “in the cause of stimulating local pride, as well as offering some intriguing destinations for a most enjoyable pilgrimage.”

IMAGE: A Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits)

The social, agricultural, and geographical history woven into just a brief introduction to Vaux’s Self-Folding lettuce or the Bedford Fillbasket brussels sprout is incredible.

Stocks’ suggested sites in Scotland, for example, would take the vegetable tourist from the Isle of Arran, where Donald Mackelvie bred the purple-skinned Arran Victory, to the Arbroath home of the Golden Wonder, a chance mutation discovered in a field of Maincrop by John Brown in 1906, and raw ingredient of the original ready-salted crisp.

Along the way, Stocks’ intrepid tourist would encounter William Sim, who abandoned potatoes in favour of emigration and carnations (his is still the best-selling carnation variety in America), as well as the Scottish Potato Bubble of 1900-04, fuelled in part by Archibald Findlay of Fife, a grocer’s son and breeder of optimistically named varieties such as Eldorado and Millionmaker.

IMAGE: A Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits)

IMAGE: Detail map, from the Vegetable Gazetteer of the British Isles (from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits). In Brixton, we find (58), (59), and (60), sites associated with the Prince Albert rhubarb, Victoria plum, and Victoria rhubarb. Brompton is home to (61), Kirke’s blue plum, while Lewisham’s claim to vegetable fame is (62), Hawkes’ Champagne rhubarb. Still south of the river, (63), James’s Longkeeping onion, is from Lower Marsh, Waterloo, while New Cross is the origin of (64), the Prince Albert pea.

Of course, the sceptic might be wondering what there actually is to see on the Scottish potato trail – and perhaps even speculating as to whether this kind of tourism might be more suited to the armchair adventurer. Speaking as one of the latter, I can confirm that Stocks’ series of gooseberry biographies and celery vignettes is perfectly suited for consumption as paperback non-fiction.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that vegetable writing is up there with wine label descriptions in the underappreciated micro-literature stakes, whether consumed in book form, or encountered on supermarket labels, seed packets, or the Heirloom Gazetteer™ iPhone app of the future.

IMAGE: A pride of potatoes. Photo from the Garden Museum’s fascinating archive of gardening images.

Many of the stops on Stocks’ sightseeing itinerary have the potential to be somewhat underwhelming, given his descriptions. The original home of Cox’s Orange Pippin, which accounts for more than half of the dessert apples grown in the UK, is now underneath a “deeply uninspiring block of modern low-rise flats,” “sandwiched between Heathrow airport, the Queen Mother reservoir, and the M25.”

Meanwhile in Markinch, Scotland, the achievements of potato entrepreneur and pub landlord Archibald Findlay, father of the Up to Date and British Queen as well as the previously mentioned Eldorado and Millionmaker, have only recently been marked by a plaque outside the Chinese restaurant that replaced his Portland Bar.

Other varietals have been more fortunate. The Pershore Yellow Egg plum (“excellent for cooking and jam, if too dry to be pleasant eaten raw”) was first “discovered growing wild in Tiddesley Wood, just outside Pershore in Worcestershire, by a local man called George Crook.” Not only does Tiddesley Wood still survive, but the Yellow Egg still grows there, looked after by the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust.

IMAGE: A Pershore Yellow Egg growing in Tiddesley Wood, Worcestershire. Photo from Christopher Stocks’ Forgotten Fruits).

Meanwhile, the original Bramley’s Seedling apple tree, which accounts for up to ninety percent of all cookers sold in Britain, is still growing in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. According to Christopher Stocks, “around 1900, it blew over in a storm and the present tree grew up from a toppled branch.” What’s more, on its 200th anniversary in 2009, this venerable grandfather of so many apple crumbles, dumplings, and pies was succesfully cloned by scientists at the University of Nottingham.

Clearly, the fates of significant fruit and vegetable heritage sites have varied. Stocks’ quotes H. V. Taylor, a fruit expert writing in 1948:

The breeders of the new plums seem to have less sentiment for plums than for apples, for whilst pilgrimages are made to see the original trees of Beauty of Bath, Ribston Pippin, Bramley’s Seedling, Newton Wonder, etc., no attempt was made to preserve the original trees of important plum varieties…

Today, as Stocks points out, the origins of the Beauty of Bath have become obscure, while the orchard behind the Hardinge Arms, where the Newton Wonder apple tree was first cultivated by another publican, William Taylor, was chopped down to build new houses in 2004.

The practice of vegetable tourism, then, is perhaps less about the chance to enjoy unspoilt countryside or pick-your-own heritage vegetables, as much as a crusade to revive traditional varietals and the stories attached to them.

It is also a question of which histories we value. After all, there are blue plaques all over London, marking the houses where celebrated writers, artists, and statesmen lived or worked – but there is no sign to mark the site of Joseph Kirke’s nursery, former home of Kirke’s Blue, now buried under the Victoria & Albert Museum. As Stocks concludes:

It would be a fairly safe (if possibly contentious) bet that Cox’s Orange Pippin, say, has given more pleasure to more people over the years than the works of William Wordsworth, and is probably known to more people too. But while Wordsworth’s homes in Grasmere, Ryadal, and Cockermouth have been preserved for posterity, the house and garden where Richard Cox lived were swept away long ago…

IMAGE: The original Bramley’s Seedling tree. Photo courtesy Joan Morgan.

Taste and biodiversity value aside, the origins of these heirloom fruit and vegetables are signposts to a lost geography – vanished market gardens that still send up the odd radish or strawberry, or stray plum varieties, presumed lost until rediscovered in the back gardens and parks of Devon villages.

As Stocks’ guide and gazetteer makes clear, forgotten fruit and vegetables can tell us as much, if not more, about all kinds of changes in British society, land use, and diet over time, than their successful cousins. The stories that lie behind the development, naming, and distribution of different fruit and vegetable varietals are a form of archaeobotanical evidence, testifying to the impact of the railways, the economics of fruit storage, or the efforts and achievements of individual plant hunters and breeders.

January’s perhaps not the best season, but why not visit an Orange Jelly turnip (Chester) or Telephone pea (Thorp Perrow, North Yorkshire) soon?

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The Importance of Acoustics in Food Storage

By Nicola | Published: January 6, 2010

Deep in the archives of San Francisco-based Aquarius Records, buried between several days’ worth of “laptop glitchery” and “brutal industro-crunch,” lies this gem: Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs, (INRA, 2000, CD, 19:98).

IMAGE: Common stored grain pests, not shown to scale. Left to right, top to bottom: Rice weevil, Indian meal moth, Granary weevil and Flat grain beetle. Drawings via the University of Missouri guide to stored grain pests.

The CD is currently unavailable or out of stock, which is disappointing but unsurprising, given its intriguing description:

Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs appears to be an industrial document produced by the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection. This CD presents the sound investigation of the French team of Bunsel and Andrieu who used sensitive microphones with narrow frequency responses made to detect and identify the sounds of insect larvae which may be inhabiting otherwise quiet containers of grains and cereals.

A handful of examples of the sounds including the grain weevil, the Indian meal moth, and the Lesser mealworm are accompanied by a running narrative both explaining the techniques used and the identification of the insects. And in case you missed the first 30 minutes of the document, the kind people at the 5th International Working Conference On Stored-Product Protection repeat the program in French.

Mysteriously, the online proceedings of the 5th International Working Conference of Stored Product Protection (IWCSPP) do not include reference to any such CD. However, in Session 8, there is a short paper entitled “Automated acoustical detection of stored-grain insects and its potential in reducing insect problems,” by D. W. Hagstrum.

IMAGE: More common stored grain pests, not shown to scale. Left to right, top to bottom: Lesser grain borer, Red flour beetle, Cadelle, and Larger cabinet beetle. Drawings via the University of Missouri guide to stored grain pests.

From that teasing clue, it is just a short step into the world of acoustic pest detection. David Hagstrum, as it turns out, is the co-author of a major textbook on the subject of food infestation control. His 323-page Fundamentals of Stored Product Entomology, published in 2008 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, includes a chapter specially devoted to the subject of designing an effective acoustic sampling programme.

Silos, bins, elevators, or UFO-like grain storage rings filled with wheat, oats, barley, or sorghum make an understandably attractive home for a number of insects and their larvae. The problem, as outlined by Francis Fleurat-Lessard in a paper submitted to the 9th IWCSPP, is that while “the presence of live insects in commercial grain lots is unacceptable in grain trade,” standard techniques of insect detection are slow, inaccurate, labour-intensive, expensive, or all of the above.

IMAGE: Grain Storage Ring. Photo courtesy Behlen Industries LP.

The U.S. Grain Inspection Service, Packers, and Stockyard Admininstration’s (GISPSA) standard quality assessment method involves sieving and visually inspecting a one kilogram sample: their guidelines “consider grains infested if the representative sample contains two or more live weevils, or one live weevil and one or more other live insects injurious to stored grain, or two or more live insects injurious to stored grain.”

However, since the larvae of many stored product pests grow inside grain kernels, where, Fleurat-Lessard notes, their “population density may be ten times more numerous than free-living adults,” a visually-inspected  “clean” sample may actually be completely infested with rice weevil larvae. To look inside grains, laboratories use X-rays or resonance spectroscopy, but these techniques are too expensive and impractical to deploy in bulk grain lots.

But while rice weevil larvae are invisible, they are not inaudible: the “mean sound pressure” of rice weevil larvae feeding inside a wheat kernel is 23 dB, according to the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The idea, then, is that if you could somehow design sensitive-enough acoustic probes, combined with software to match the probes’ input against a database of field recordings, you might be able to monitor insect activity in stored grain automatically and detect infestations at the larval stage.

A fairly select group of entomologists, including several specialists at the USDA’s Insect Behavior and Biocontrol Research Unit, have thus spent the past twenty years investigating the acoustic detection of insect noise. Major steps forward, as described by Fleurat-Lessard, came with the development of ever more sensitive sound technology, as well as innovative designs for “muffle boxes” that shield acoustic sensors in grain bins.

IMAGE: (left) Muffle box diagram, (right) Periodograms of sonic output from three different rice weevil larvae recorded using muffle box-shielded acoustic sensors. The lowest line records background noise levels. Diagrams from “Noise Shielding of Acoustic Devices for Insect Detection,” in the Journal of Economic Entomology.

Building a sound library of stored food insects was equally important – the field recordings on that Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs CD actually form the core of current acoustic pest detection databases. Years of research have gone into classifying the characteristic sonic signatures of different pest species at different stages in their lifecycles, to the point that a computer can now compare input from a grain silo’s acoustic sensor system against a library field recordings and tell you whether the rice weevil larvae eating your wheat kernels are sixteen or eighteen days old.

(For the curious, you can actually listen to the fairly revolting munching sounds of Indian meal moth and eighteen-day-old rice weevil larvae at the USDA website.)

IMAGE: Characteristic sound spectra of rice weevil larvae (left) and adults (right) in wheat. Diagrams via Francis Fleurat-Lessard’s paper, “Acoustic detection and automatic identification of insect stages activity in grain bulks by noise spectra processing through classification algorithms,” presented at the 9th International Working Conference on Stored Product Protection.

Other refinements include using algorithms to gauge pest population density and even location: the USDA’s ALFID, or Acoustic Location “Fingerprinting” Insect Detector “has a 90% probability of identifying two randomly located insects producing sounds in a wheat sample.”

IMAGE: Technicians holding an ALFID in an anechoic chamber. Photo by Keith Waller, via USDA research entomologist Richard Mankin.

In short, there is an entire sonic landscape of pests eating stored foods: a distinctive range of muffled boring, tapping, scraping, and crunching sounds emerging from supposedly silent grain elevators across the country.

But with acoustic pest detection in place, acoustic control cannot be far behind. Ultrasonic cockroach repellers and pigeon dispersal soundtracks lead the way in bio-acoustic pest management: the latter broadcasts pre-recorded pigeon distress calls that “harness the bird’s own inbuilt messaging to perform psychological warfare against them.”

IMAGE: The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) acoustic cannon mounted on a U.S. Navy vessel. According to Wikipedia, it emits a sound loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss and temporary disruption of vision, and has already been deployed against Somali pirate attacks and insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq. Photo via Wikipedia.

Perhaps the USDA could team up with its military cousins to invent a Confused flour beetle-specific LRAD-equivalent, in order to replace fumigants like aluminium phosphide and methoxychlor? With sound-defended food storage in place, ultimately the entire chain of food production could be acoustically enhanced, from sonically stimulated GM rice to taste-amplifying meal soundtracks.

NOTE: Thanks to BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, who originally showed me the Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs description at Aquarius Records’ site.

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The Wax Chamber

By Nicola | Published: January 4, 2010

IMAGE: Detail from Penelope Stewart’s Apian Screen, via Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In a tiny room off the main gallery space in Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, Canadian artist Penelope Stewart has glued hundreds of beeswax tiles to the walls, entirely covering the space from floor to ceiling. The tiles are four-inch squares, each a slightly different shade of golden brown, and they envelop the small space with a subdued but luminous warmth and an intense smell of honey.

IMAGE: Parois, by Penelope Stewart. Photo courtesy of the artist.

This is not the world’s first beeswax chamber – Stewart’s earlier works include a stunning 2007 piece, Parois, which used 4000 beeswax tiles to cover the walls of a small room in the Musée Barthète, Boussan, France. That installation drew its inspiration from the museum’s amazing collection of tiles, which ranges from ancient fragments to Tunisien ceramic and French faïence. 

IMAGE: Tiles on display at the obscure but fascinating Musée Barthète.

IMAGE: Detail from Penelope Stewart’s beeswax chamber at the Musée Barthète, inspired by the permanent collection. Photo courtesy of the artist.

IMAGE: Penelope Stewart’s beeswax chamber at the Musée Barthète at night. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The Museum De Pont in the Netherlands also has its own beeswax cabinet: in 1992, the German artist Wolfgang Laib used slabs of beeswax to construct a narrow, dead-ended space lit by a single light bulb, called Wachsraum.

IMAGE: Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax chambers: on the left is his 1992 Wachsraum at the Museum De Pont, and on the right is the cover of Wolfgang Laib – A Scented Journey, a booklet documenting the construction of a beeswax space in 1994, at the Henry Moore Foundation Studio in Halifax.

Even when experienced only through photos, these spaces feel sensorially overwhelming: the combination of warm, variegated yellowish light with the waxy, crystalline, yet invitingly malleable surface texture, as well as the reported sweet honey scent, seems both compelling and slightly headache-inducing. According to Kamiel van Kreij, whose graduate thesis at the University of Delft focused on sensory amplification in architecture, the wax also acts as an acoustic dampener, increasing the space’s visceral intensity.

Judging from the popularity of pieces like Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light or Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for immersive installations of this sort. Something about the disorientation and re-engagement of underused senses they induce is incredibly refreshing; no Googleplex, university library, or writers’ colony should be without its own beeswax chamber or halogen-lit salt cave.

In any case, what’s especially interesting about Stewart’s most recent beeswax room, Apian Screen, is that the designs on the tiles are drawn from utopian urban plans. According to a video interview, Stewart started looking at modernist drawings and proposals for the ideal metropolis after a visit to Canberra, the Australian capital city designed from scratch by Walter Burley Griffin at the start of the twentieth century.

IMAGE: Penelope Stewart’s Apian Screen, as seen in this video interview.

Fairly early on in her research, Stewart was struck by the frequent use of honeycomb and beehive metaphors in the imaginary cities of Gaudi, Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. In fact, entire books have been written on the influence of the “lucid, modular structure” of the apiary on the Modern movement; apparently, Le Corbusier “read The Dancing Bees by scientist Karl von Frisch several times, making extensive notes in the margin.”

IMAGE: Penelope Stewart in front of her Apian Screen, as seen in this video interview.

Stewart’s next step was to tessellate the abstract forms of ideal cities, both built and unbuilt. The final installation remixes elements of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, among others.

It’s an almost-too-perfect match of material realisation and metaphor: the organic nature of the vari-coloured beeswax both recalls and betrays its Utopian hive associations; the aesthetically pleasing recombination of the tiled squares plays on the modernist preference for geometric forms, repeated in alignment; while the enclosed, warm, and sensorially rich space of Stewart’s room is in sharp contrast to the hygienic efficiency and imposing open spaces of the twentieth-century planned city. Indeed, the Toronto Star’s reviewer notes that Apian Screen “is such a tight little package, aesthetically and conceptually, that I felt a little giddy.”

Exactly.

NOTE: I learned of Stewart’s Apian Screen from Quiet Babylon’s Tim Maly. His reliably interesting Twitter feed is @doingitwrong. Thanks, Tim! Unfortunately, Apian Screen closed just yesterday – we can but hope it will travel.

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The Great Green Saharan Wall, Redux

By Nicola | Published: December 31, 2009

IMAGE: The Green Barrier at Hassi Bahbah, Algeria, via.

Algeria is not a small country – according to Wikipedia, it is one hundred three-and-a-half times the size of Texas – but eighty-five percent of its territory consists of the Sahara desert. In fact, only a thin strip of land along the northern coastal edge of the country is cultivable.

IMAGE: Relief and satellite maps of Algeria, via Wikipedia.

In the 1970s, determined not to let the Sahara encroach further onto its thin sliver of agriculturally useful land, Algeria embarked on a sort of steampunk geoengineering project: planting a wall of trees up to 16 miles wide and 746 miles long along the entire length of the Sahara’s northern edge, from the Moroccan to the Tunisian border. Three hundred and ninety-five thousand acres of the Green Barrier, or barrage vert, were planted between 1974 and 1981, mostly by young men as part of their military service.

IMAGE: The Green Barrier as seen from ground level, via.

After this initial burst of activity, the Green Barrier ran into various economic, sociological, and ecological issues. The Barrier was a monoculture, entirely planted with the hardy, heat- and drought-tolerant Aleppo pine, which was a fine idea until the pine processionary moth moved in. Meanwhile, the funding ran out, and the local population, who hadn’t been included in the project’s planning or planting phases, saw the trees as a handy source of building materials and firewood. By 2007, the Sahara had migrated to within 125 miles of the Mediterranean, while the remains of the Barrier were described as “a depressing sight [...] more grey than green.”

Nonetheless, during this month’s equally depressing Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Senegalese officials told National Geographic that 326 miles of a second Great Green Wall had already been planted. The idea was proposed in 2005 by the former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, and formally adopted by the African Union in 2007.

If it is completed as planned, this vast agro-ecological defensive landscape will ultimately be 9.3 miles wide and 4350 miles long, crossing through eleven countries from Dakar to Djibouti.

IMAGE: The route of the proposed Great Green Wall.

Although this second green wall is also being built by soldiers (on loan from France), the team behind it do seem to be considering a wider range of vegetation, as well as ways to integrate the Great Green Wall into the lives and economy of local population. By including the native Acacia senegal in the plantings, for example, scientists hope that farmers will eventually be able to profit by harvesting the sap, which is better known as gum arabic, a key ingredient in soft drink syrups, confectionary, and cosmetics.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out as to whether ribbons of forest can actually hold back the encroaching sand. For example, the results of China’s own Green Wall project, which began in 1978 and is expected to reach the end of its fourth phase in 2010, have been pretty varied.

Most scientists agree that Africa’s Great Green Wall is not enough on its own, and that developing less-pasture intensive breeds of livestock, researching and implementing dry agriculture techniques, educating local farmers, improving water conservation and soil management, and reducing firewood-dependence among rural populations are equally – if not more – effective strategies against desertification.

IMAGE: Sunrise during the 2009 Great Sydney Dust Storm. Photo by Tim Wimborne/Reuters, via The Guardian.

Nonetheless, with desertification on the rise and the resulting dust storms being blamed for atmospheric pollution, glacial melt, harvest failures, and even the spread of infectious diseases, quarantining the deserts of the world behind ringed walls of carbon-absorbing artificial forests might not be such a bad idea.

NOTE: For a more ingenious Saharan wall proposal, which involves turning sand into sandstone by injecting it with bacillus pasteurii, check out Magnus Larsson’s Dune on BLDGBLOG, or watch his recent TED talk.

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Bread & Beer

By Nicola | Published: December 30, 2009



IMAGE: Model bakery from the tomb of Meketre, chancellor to Mentuhotep II and III. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Egypt, ~1975 B.C., plastered and painted wood, height of tallest figure is 18cm).

This model, part of the ancient Egyptian funerary equipment of Meketre, chancellor to Metuhotep II and III, represents a combined bakery and brewery. Even though many of the figures are performing the same tasks, each is unique (as in Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army or Antony Gormley’s Field).

According to Catharine Roehrig, Curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bread and beer were “the staples of the Egyptian diet”and were typically “made from the same ingredients and [...] produced in a bakery and brewery that were side by side.”

The baking of bread was a fairly straightforward process: the grain was pounded, ground into flour, formed into loaves, and baked. Brewing was a longer process requiring several extra steps.

The bakery supplied loaves of coarse barley flour that were only partially baked, so as not to kill the leavening agent. These loaves were broken up and mixed with water and crushed dates, which provided sugar to promote fermentation. When the resulting brew was ready, the thick liquid was strained through a sieve and decanted into jars that were sealed for later use.

As you can see in the architectural model, Meketre’s brewers and bakers worked side-by-side throughout the afterlife, in a single unit of grain-based production. By uniting the various possibilities of a plant under a single roof, Meketre’s model becomes a secular temple to both the generosity of grain and the alchemical powers of human ingenuity.

(On a similar note, check out Christien Meindertsma’s PIG 05049, which collects the various futures of a single pig between the covers of a single book.)

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Bronx Beer Caves

By Nicola | Published: December 27, 2009

IMAGE: Above-ground entrances to the Bronx beer caves. Photo by blogger Ed García Conde.

On Christmas Day, the New York Times broke the exciting news that a construction project in the South Bronx had uncovered several abandoned beer caves. In fact, an arched entrance to the largest one is currently visible at the corner of St. Ann’s Avenue and 156th Street. According to the Times:

The Joy Construction Corporation, a developer building housing on the site, uncovered the caves in May, soon after construction began. Work was replaced with wild speculation: Were the caves part of the Underground Railroad? Secret fallout shelters?

It took some research to confirm that an improbable answer was the right one: here in the South Bronx, less than two miles from Yankee Stadium, a network of old beer caves that had stood silent for generations.

IMAGE: Inside the Ebling Caves. Photo by Ruth Fremson for the New York Times.

IMAGE: The Ebling Brewing Company, South Bronx, via Flickr user The Earl of Steinway.

Apparently, the caves were originally built by the Ebling Brewing Company to age their lager. The company, which was founded in 1868, is long gone: the Times reported that Ebling was “hit hard by Prohibition,” and “limped along until the 1940s, when it finally closed.” After that, “the Ebling buildings were eventually razed and replaced with a crude parking lot. The caves, more than 20 feet wide and 100 feet deep in some places, were covered, forgotten by nearly everyone.”

IMAGE: Ebling’s Special Brew label, complete with the promise “Aged in Natural Rock Caves,” via.

Although Ebling labels claimed that their beer was “aged in natural rock caves,” their caverns were actually carefully constructed – some even had electricity. Now, however, the Times reports that the cave floors “are covered with rubble and dirt. Icicles glisten in the shards of light, rusty rods of mysterious purpose dangle from the ceiling, a wall of old bricks holds back the earth.”

IMAGE: Looking inside the Ebling Caves. Photo by blogger Ed García Conde.

Aging bottled beers in caves (or cellars) is actually a traditional Belgian brewing technique, which was more common in America before the advent of modern refrigeration. According to Ommegang Brewery, who claim to be the only company still cave-aging their Three Philosophers ale in the United States:

There is no doubt that these dark, silent, subterranean ‘cathedrals’ are the ideal surroundings for secondary fermentation and maturation of wines and beers. It is further known that cold constant temperature between 50 and 55 degrees leads to great complexity.

Ommegang ages its beer in natural limestone caverns in upstate New York, where the temperature is a constant 52º, while the manmade Ebling caves apparently rest at a slightly warmer 58º. Nonetheless, Ebling’s bottle maturation would presumably also have led to a “second fermentation,” which beer experts concur “produces a notable increase in carbonation, and a softer mouthfeel,” as well as the previously mentioned increase in complexity.

In fact, according to Allagash (another Belgian-style brewery based in the northeast U.S.), this technique, which is also known as the méthode champenoise, “leaves a small amount of yeast in the bottle, creating what is known as a ‘living’ beer. As a result, these styles have a greatly enhanced shelf life and some styles will age exceptionally, much like a fine wine.”

IMAGE: Allan Kaprow’s sketch for Eat, via.

Interestingly, Ebling’s cave have already experienced an earlier rediscovery. Allan Kaprow, an American performance artist, created his final “Environment” in the caves during two weekends in January 1964. The interactive installation, called Eat, could only be visited for one hour at a time, by reservation, according to a contemporary description by Michael Kirby in the Tulane Drama Review that is worth quoting at length:

After entering an old building that fronted low cliffs, the visitor walked through several corridors and doorways and finally came to the Environment. The rock from which the caves were carved had been somewhat incompletely covered with white paint – the place had once been used by Ebling Brewery – and age and seeping water had created a sense of decay. Black charred wooden beams stood propped against the walls in several places. Here and there water collected in depressions in the floor and trickled in rivulets through the dirt.

As they explored the installation, visitors encountered apples hanging “on rough strings” from the ceiling, to which they could help themselves if they wished. Or, Michael Kirby noted, “if [the visitor] was not very hungry, he could merely take a bite from it and leave it dangling.”



IMAGE: Spreads from Michael Kirby’s article about Allan Kaprow’s Eat in the Tulane Drama Review (Volume 10, Number 2, Winter, 1965), via the Design blog at the Walker Art Center.

Further inside the cave, “a girl sat at a small electric hot plate frying sliced bananas in brown sugar. If a spectator asked for some, she gave them to him, but she did not speak.” After encounters with similarly mute girls who would pour wine if asked, as well as a table laden with strawberry jam and sliced bread, visitors would reach the rear of the cave, where “a man sat with a large pot.”

‘Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Get ‘em! …,’ he called out mechanically over and over, pausing occasionally for a while and then continuing again. If a visitor climbed the ladder, the man cut a piece of boiled potato, salted it, and gave it to him.

The visitors were free to wander through the cave. Some ate and drank; others did not.

Sadly, the Ebling beer caves are being filled-in to support the foundations of the new buildings. According to the New York Times, four caverns have already been sealed, and the remaining three “will be closed off in the coming months.” The developer has, however, sold “truckloads of rock” from the caves “to a swimming pool company in Long Island that will use it in its landscaping projects.”

This seems a fittingly surreal postscript to Kaprow’s installation, if nothing else. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing that the caves cannot be re-used – whether to grow mushrooms, store cheese, or even age ultra-local Bronx moonshine.

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