Save the Date: Foodprint Toronto

By Nicola | Published: July 6, 2010

IMAGE: Foodprint Toronto (logo designed by the awesomely talented Nikki Hiatt).

The sharp-eyed among you — or at least the sharp-eyed among those of you who visit the site rather than reading through RSS — might have noticed the CN Tower has replaced the Empire State Building in the Foodprint logo. It’s true: Sarah Rich and I are very excited to announce that we’re hosting our next Foodprint Project event in Toronto on Saturday, July 31.

Foodprint Toronto is the second in a series of international conversations about food and the city. The first, held in New York City earlier this year, was a packed-out success, with a stellar line-up of speakers jumping to their feet to share their opinions on topics as diverse as food deserts and food printing, as well as tell fascinating stories about the role of protein in the city’s farmers’ markets and oysters in the city’s history. (You can still download videos of the event for free on iTunes U.)

IMAGE: Makalé Faber Cullen addressing an overflowing Studio-X audience at Foodprint NYC. Photos by Ho Kyung Lee, Columbia GSAPP.

We’re hoping to replicate that energy in Toronto at the end of this month, and our timing means we’ll have a lot to discuss. In June alone, the Toronto Board of Health formally adopted a new city-wide food strategy and the Metcalf Foundation released its Food Solutions reports, filled with practical recommendations for fixing Toronto’s food system.

IMAGE: Every year, more than a million tonnes of produce travel through the Ontario Food Terminal, which has not shut down for a single day since it was opened in 1954.

IMAGE: A donut from Tim Hortons, the ubiquitous Canadian franchise. Photo by Jim Ross for The New York Times.

Meanwhile, Edible Geography’s Toronto-based friends, including Quiet Babylon and Infranet Lab, have recommended a range of reading material, speakers, sites, and themes. We’re researching everything from the Ontario Food Terminal (Toronto’s massive fruit and vegetable wholesale market) to the 7,000 working farms within Ontario’s newly protected Greenbelt, and drawing inspiration from Coach House Books‘ encyclopedic The Edible City: Toronto’s Food From Farm To Fork, and Alphabet City’s gorgeous Food volume.

IMAGE: Nina-Marie Lister’s map of Toronto’s foodshed, showing cattle, vegetable crops, and fruit crops produced within a 200km radius of the city. In her essay, Placing Food, Lister notes that, “In 1960 most of Toronto’s food came from within 350 kilometres of the city, or almost entirely from within its foodshed. Today, at least 60 percent of the fresh produce consumed in Toronto is imported from the United States, a third of this arrives during Ontario’s growing season.”

IMAGE: Until recently, Toronto city regulations restricted street food to “cooked meats,” which limited cart vendors and mobile snackers to a depressingly homogenous selection of hot dogs and kebabs.

Foodprint Toronto is curated into four separate panel discussions, over the course of which we’ll explore the forces that shape the city’s food and speculate on how to feed Toronto in the future. Given the quality and range of expertise in our list of confirmed panelists, I’m looking forward to an afternoon of conversations that encompass the impact of changing perceptions of “brain food” on Toronto’s school meals, the transportation challenges associated with maintaining urban food processing capacity, and the edible design potential of Toronto’s ravines, among many other topics!

IMAGE: Architect and panelist Chris Hardwicke’s Ravine City proposal, “an urban ecosystem of collective housing that restores and enhances the ravine system of Toronto.”

And for those of you who endured the crush at Foodprint NYC: sorry, but we have learned our lesson, and secured a much bigger venue for Foodprint Toronto. We’ve been lucky to find a generous host in Artscape Wychwood Barns (map), an amazing regeneration project that transformed Toronto Transit Commission’s disused streetcar repair facilities into a community centre, complete with artists’ live/work studios, rehearsal and event space, and The Stop Community Food Centre’s Green Barn: a year-round temperate greenhouse, sustainable food education centre, sheltered garden, outdoor bake oven, and compost demonstration site.

More details follow below, but to stay up-to-date as we share research, confirm speakers, and add program elements, please join the Foodprint Project mailing list and follow us on Twitter. If you have ideas, suggestions, questions, or offers of sponsorship (food, beverages, and videography would be particularly welcome), feel free to leave a comment or email me directly — I’d love to hear from you. You can also download our press release here.

IMAGE: Toronto’s Victory Gardens. In Lorraine Johnson’s essay, Revisiting Victory: Gardens Past, Gardens Future, she writes that, “Five out of every ten urban households surveyed in 1943 planned to have a Victory Garden. [...] The Torontonians of 1943 responded to the call to grow food, to become ‘a city of community gardens,’ not only because it was the right thing to do in a time of war, but because the City enacted policies that turned it into an easily possible thing to do.”

IMAGE: Susan Ho’s company, Tea Aura Inc., developed its tea-infused cookie business at the Toronto Food Business Incubator, a city initiative run by Foodprint Toronto panelist Michael Wolfson. Photo by Brett Gundlock/National Post.

Foodprint Toronto

Date: Saturday, July 31

Time: 12:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Location: Artscape Wychwood Barns (map)

Program Schedule:

12:30 – 1:30: Zoning Diet | How do zoning, policy, and economics shape Toronto’s food systems?
1:30 – 2:30: Culinary Cartography | What can we learn when we map Toronto using food as the metric?
3:00 – 4:00: Edible Archaeology | How has today’s food culture in Toronto been shaped by social changes, economic fluctuations, and technological innovations throughout the city’s history?
4:00 – 5:00: Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios | What are the opportunities and challenges of Toronto’s possible food futures?

Panelists include:

• Natasha & Andrew Akiwenze, Akiwenzie’s Fish
• Barbara Emanuel, Senior Policy Advisor, Toronto Board of Health, City of Toronto, and co-author, Cultivating Food Connections
• Mark Fram, architectural consultant, designer, and urban planner
• Chris Hardwicke, Associate, Sweeny Sterling Finlayson & Co Architects, and designer, Farm City, Ravine City, and Velo-City
• John Knechtel, Director, Alphabet City Media
• Shawn Micallef, Senior Editor, Spacing magazine, and author, Stroll
• Darren O’Donnell, Artistic Director, Mammalian Diving Reflex
• Rebecca O’Neill, Department of History, University of Toronto
• Kathryn Scharf, Program Director, The Stop Community Food Centre, and co-author, Metcalf Food Solutions Report, In Every Community A Place For Food
• Lola Sheppard, Principal, Lateral Architecture, Director, InfraNet Lab, and Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo
• Jessica Duffin Wolfe, Arts and Books Editor, Spacing magazine
• Michael Wolfson, Food & Beverage Cluster Specialist, City of Toronto
• Robert Wright, Associate Professor, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto

[NOTE: A huge thanks to our numerous behind-the-scenes advisors and helpers, including Tim Maly, Mason White and Lola Sheppard, Andrew Blum, Leslie McBeth, Valentine Cadieux, Laura Taylor, Rebecca Federman, Geoff Manaugh, and Alexis Madrigal, who deserves a medal for his heroic work on our lovely new website.]

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The Tyburn Angling Society

By Nicola | Published: June 30, 2010

A tip passed along from BLDGBLOG’s meeting with documentary filmmakers tracing lost rivers in cities all over the world led me to the Tyburn Angling Society, and its curious confluence of daylighting, urban foraging, and legislative archaeology.

IMAGE: The crest of the Tyburn Angling Society, from Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation, available here as a pdf.

The story begins in 959, when King Edgar the Peaceable, whose reign was otherwise noted for stability, monastic reforms, and sexual appetite, issued a royal charter listing the privileges and imposts of Westminster. According to property developer Jim Bowdidge, that document also founded the Tyburn Angling Society, by royal decree.

IMAGE: King Edgar’s decree establishing the Tyburn Angling Society; details show the all-important Anglo-Saxon words “andlang teoburnan.” From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

Bowdidge is a sport fisherman and epicure — his popular column in Fieldsports Magazine: The Shooting and Fishing Quarterly is called “Jimmer’s Dinners” — and he happened to live in a flat above the Tyburn, which is one of the lost rivers of London, having been fully enclosed and absorbed into the city’s sewer system.

IMAGE: The traces of the Tyburn. Photos via The Londonist, whose guide to the river provides directions to several grates and manhole covers through which you can listen to the river even today.

IMAGE: The Tyburn supposedly runs through the basement of Gray’s Antiques. Photo via Wikipedia.

“In its heyday,” according to a Property Week investigation, “the Tyburn supported some of London’s best salmon fishing and provided cooking water to the burgeoning financial centre.” Indeed, Wikipedia reports that even today, Gray’s Antiques shop, near Bond Street, claims to have a section of the Tyburn running through its basement, “full of golden fish,” although this seems somewhat unlikely.

IMAGE: The lost rivers of London, via Strange Maps.

IMAGE: Amy Sharrocks leads a walk retracing the course of the Walbrook. Photo by Ruth Corney for the Independent.

However, retracing and reclaiming the lost rivers of London is a relatively popular activity these days, from artist Amy Sharrocks leading groups of blue-clad people on river walks to the River Restoration Centre’s London River Action Plan, which has Mayor Boris Johnson’s backing. With healthy fish, sea-horses, dolphins, and even a whale being found in the Thames for the first time in a century, if not more, it seems increasingly likely that London’s rivers might one day provide a plentiful protein source for urban fishermen, as well as sport for anglers.

This spring, for example, wild-born trout fry were found in the Wandle for the first time in eighty years, causing local angler Theo Pike to tell National Geographic that, “It’s like New Zealand out there.” Although the Wandle was apparently one of Nelson’s favourite trout-fishing streams, by the 1960s it had been “officially designated an open sewer.”

IMAGE: Trout fishing in the Wandle. Photo via the Evening Standard.

Sadly, the prospects for a similar turnaround in the Tyburn seem less hopeful. Although the Tyburn Angling Society counts heavyweight politicians (including Ken Livingstone and Nicholas Soames) among its eighty-plus members, not only is the river’s course uncertain in places, it is also flows underneath some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Bowdidge himself admitted to Property Week that, if his plans were ever implemented, “Comfortably, £1bn worth of property is set to go.”

Nonetheless, in addition to a regular circuit of dinners, drinks, and fishing outings, the Tyburn Angling Society is committed to resurfacing the ancient stream — still theirs to fish, they argue, by a never-repealed royal decree. “You could have people fishing by the river in the middle of Mayfair,” Jim Bowdidge told the Evening Standard, “We would get the Wild Trout Trust to get the habitat right for small wild brown trout. Properly done, we could have salmon.”

IMAGE: Demolition zone for the Society’s proposed River Tyburn Restoration Project, Phase 1. From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

IMAGE: Daylighting the Tyburn through South Molton Street. From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

The Society’s architect, David Gaunt, has prepared a detailed map of the proposed demolition zone as well as renderings showing South Molton Street and Berkeley Square as watercourses. Bowdidge has descended into the sewer itself in order to report on the river’s condition (“Members were concerned by my reports on the poor level of fish stocks and the Honorary Ghillie was taken to task.”).

IMAGE: Jim Bowdidge visiting the Tyburn. From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the Society has consulted with Mr. Schatunowski of GVA Schatunowski Brooks, a specialised Rights of Light consultancy. Regular BLDGBLOG readers will be familiar with the concept of ancient lights, or a building owner’s right to “forbid any construction or other obstruction that would deprive him of that illumination.”

IMAGE: The Society has included plans for benches, platforms, and fishing huts in its proposal to daylight the Tyburn. From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

In order to compensate property owners whose buildings will be razed in order to daylight the Tyburn, Schatunowski and the Society have “developed the concept of ‘reverse rights of light,’” according to Bowdidge, under which “properties whose light and aspect is improved would pay a betterment levy.” Property Week further adds that “supportive landowners may be given riparian fishing rights.”

IMAGE: Berkeley Square as re-imagined by the Tyburn Angling Society. Of course, some properties would see their values rise due to waterfront views. From Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation.

Of course, the scheme is currently little more than a charming celebration of public school eccentricity combined with Photoshop. Nonetheless, the idea of digging through London’s medieval statutes to find and redeploy obscure laws in the interest of creating an edible landscape is quite appealing. Act now, before your right to drop citrus peel or drive sheep across London Bridge is repealed by the Statute Law Revision Team!

[NOTE: Thanks to BLDGBLOG and Katarina Soukup for the tip. Vaguely related: mammoth's excellent overview of Los Angeles' concrete river, and Julio the Sewer Diver.]

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The Axis of Food

By Nicola | Published: June 28, 2010

IMAGE: Watermelons at the Central de Abasto in DF. All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.

IMAGE: La Central de Abasto from a helicopter. Photo by Oscar Ruiz.

La Central de Abasto de la Ciudad de México is enormous. It sprawls across a 327 hectare site on the eastern edge of the D.F., dwarfing fellow wholesale food markets such as Hunt’s Point (24 hectares), Tsukiji (23 hectares), or even the massive Rungis, outside Paris (232 hectares).

La Central has its own postcode, its own 700-member police force, and its own border-style entry gates, but during my visit, its enormity truly hit home only when we had to take a taxi to get from flowers to fish. It was a solid fifteen minute ride from one section of the market to another!

IMAGE: Border control at La Central de Abasto. Photo via.

IMAGE: Official map of La Central de Abasto.

When the Central de Abasto was opened in 1982, approximately eighty percent of Mexico’s food supply passed through its 111 kilometres of passageways. In other words, an incredible four fifths of everything that every Mexican, from Cancun to Monterrey, ate every day passed through one single site in the nation’s capital. It was “one of Mexico’s last experiments in central economic planning,” as sociologist Gerardo Torres Salcido told USA Today.

Even today, between twenty and thirty percent of the country’s food is sold at La Central. According to David Lida (whose enjoyable book about Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, contains an entire chapter on food, and who I was lucky to see in conversation as Jace Clayton’s guest at Postopolis! DF), “on a daily basis thirty thousand tons of food are trucked here from the rest of the country, and sold to three hundred thousand customers — mainly people who sell in smaller markets, to restaurants and food stands all over the city.”

In 2009, La Central was the second only to the Mexican stock exchange in business volume. Lida’s description continues:

About $8 billion a year changes hands, mostly in cash; as such, merchandisers are prime prey to kidnappers. One vendor handed over half a million dollars to have his son released from captivity. He had that much money lying around at home; it was his float.

When we arrived at La Central at 5:30 a.m. one Thursday morning during Postopolis! DF, things were still pretty busy. For the most part, traffic consists of men (cargadores) pushing trolleys or pulling handcarts at a half-run, on which anything from two to twenty pallets of mangoes, crates of canteloupes, or boxes of oranges are stacked.

If you are in their way (there is almost no way not to be), the cargadores whistle — and, by the end of our visit, I had started to notice that the pitch and phrasing of these whistles varies according to the navigational information it communicates. In other words, “Passing on your left!” sounds different from “Watch out, I’m about to cut you off.”

Their job must be brutal, particularly since the pedestrian walkways between aisles are raised up a level to allow lorries to pass beneath — a clever design that means each delivery involves negotiating several concrete ramps. What’s more, according to Lida:

The cargodores do not even earn a salary. Indeed, to rent their handcarts, they have to pay a little over a dollar a day to a character known as El Chino, a former street child and cargador himself. The workers vary between twelve and seventy years old. They charge between twenty and forty cents per box, depending on how heavy the load is and how far it has to be carried. An old man calculated that he earned about seven or eight dollars for a day’s work.

In between jobs, and as the flow of trade slows down, the trolleys double as backrests, seats, and even beds.

We began in the fruit and vegetable section, which stood out for its carefully ordered displays and fantastic signage. Oranges and potatoes were fed through a sorting machine, but even mangoes were carefully boxed by size, a task that could only have been done by hand.

Each display was topped by a sign — occasionally hand-lettered, but for the most part pre-printed. Many said fairly predictable things, like “Best Quality!” and “Lowest Price!” Others seemed to show a delightful sense of humour, such as the green beans “Without Cholesterol!” or the carrots “As Seen On TV!”

Still others professed surprise, delight, and teenage enthusiasm: “How cool!”, “This is the bomb!” and “F***ing great grapes!”

The fruit and vegetable section then spilled over into a set of open-walled pavilions, in which men and women stripped the thorns off nopales and washed carrots.

We were trying to find the flower market, but were waylaid by a corridor filled with Hallmark-style junk.

Dotted throughout the distinct sections were snack vendors, doing a brisk trade in tamale sandwiches (the cargadores need double carbs), freshly-squeezed juice, and Nescafé. I took photos of the youngest juicer and the most beaten-up pot I saw.

La Central de Abasto was designed by celebrated Mexican architect Abraham Zabludovsky, better known for his Museo Tamayo and Biblioteca Nacional. Its vast, modular forms are certainly striking, particularly when seen from above.

IMAGE: Satellite photo via Google Maps.

Frequently, however, the hangar-like shapes have been filled with a variety of random structures — storage or office spaces. The business of food distribution has generated its own forms within the shelter provided.

The scale of transactions seemed to vary wildly, with fresh produce leaving the market piled high in refrigerated lorries, ramshackle trucks, and even taxis.

La Central was built to replace an older, smaller wholesale market, La Merced, just as Rungis was built to replace Les Halles. In both cases, the market had expanded beyond its central site, and was denigrated by city officials as cramped, dirty, and unsafe. La Merced was (and still is) notorious for its underage prostitutes; Les Halles — Zola’s “belly of Paris” — was equally surrounded by rough-edged bars, restaurants, and brothels.

IMAGE: Les Halles butchers enjoying an after-work drink, Paris, 1962. Photo by Tom Palumbo via kottke.

Cities with a centralised food distribution system traditionally kept markets close to the seat of government, recognising the power of food as a political tool. That proximity was intended to help kings and ministers maintain tight control over the urban populace through the supply of food, but as cities and the markets that fed them grew, the strategy backfired. As Carolyn Steel puts it, in her excellent book, Hungry City: “By concentrating all the city’s food in one place, they created a powerhouse strong enough to defy them.”

By the 1970s, as Robert Moses rammed thirteen expressways through New York City, it seemed rational to authorities in Paris and Mexico City to start afresh, and move the messy business of food to spacious, orderly, hygienic, and purpose-built facilities at a safe distance outside town. La Central de Abasto’s stated mission is to: “Be the axis of the country’s food supply system, in order to regulate the market and offer the consumer quality and price.”

If the construction of La Central tells us a fascinating story about the evolution of governmental attempts to control food in order to tame cities, the market’s declining market share, down to handling between twenty and thirty percent of the nation’s food supply from eighty percent when it was first built, is testament to radical shifts in scale within the food business.

In other words, La Central was built to be the giant hub that tied together smallish farmers and merchants with smallish tianguis and restauranteurs. Food flowed through a single site that connected producers to vendors in a process that theoretically created greater efficiency and more competitive prices.

But following on from NAFTA in the early 1990s, food producers and vendors have consolidated and expanded in scale, shrinking the role of the hub in the middle. Walmart has set up its own supplier relationships and distribution networks; Smithfield Factory Farms is perfectly capable of finding customers without trucking its pigs all the way to a covered market on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Although supply and demand no longer meet at one central market, Mexico’s food system has not decentralised — it has just centralised elsewhere along the chain.

According to USA Today, a 2008 government report concluded that La Central was gradually shifting toward small wholesale or retail customers, “meaning it is basically just becoming a big public market.”

Trucking in food from around the country in order to truck it out again a few hours later certainly seems to make no sense in terms of Mexico City’s already disastrous congestion problems. It’s also easy to imagine the food safety issues, from terrorism to traceability, associated with concentrating eighty percent of the national food supply in a single site.

Unfortunately, the Central de Abasto system is not being replaced with a solution that makes those problems any less pressing.

Despite its transformation, La Central still preserves some of what made central markets such a vital part of the city: noise, rubbish, smells, and a heterotopic mixing of rich and poor, city and countryside. Overwhelmed by its size, chaos, and the sheer volume of food, a visitor can gain “an awareness of what it takes to sustain urban life,” to again quote Carolyn Steel.

By way of contrast, I highly recommend this gorgeous video of the clean, well-lit, and gently bleeping spaces of New York’s Hunt’s Point Food Distribution Center, as shot by fellow Postopolis! DF participant and Urban Omnibus project director, Cassim Shepherd.

[NOTE: This post is part of a series of reports from my time in Mexico City as part of Postopolis! DF, which was presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture from June 8 to June 12, 2010. I owe an enormous thanks to Daniela Hernandez, Rodrigo Escandon, and Blair Richardson, who heroically got up at 4:30 a.m. after a night of parties and concerts, in order to help me navigate La Central!]

Posted in Day Out, Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Talking Nose

By Nicola | Published: June 22, 2010

IMAGE: Still from Talking Nose video. All images courtesy Sissel Tolaas, unless otherwise credited.

Artist Sissel Tolaas was one of the people I most wanted to speak at Postopolis! DF, having seen her discussing smell as design in New York earlier this year. Although she was not able to join us in person, she generously allowed me to screen her olfactory investigation of Mexico City, Talking Nose — which was also the first time the video and soundtrack had been seen and heard in the place where it was made.

IMAGE: Still from Talking Nose.

Tolaas is half-Norwegian, half-Icelandic, and lives in Berlin. Her artistic practice explores olfaction — the sense of smell — by working with the odor molecules that our noses detect and the language we use to describe them. She first became interested in smell twenty years ago, as an outgrowth of art projects related to weather, the atmosphere, and its ingredients. As she explained to Mono.Kultur magazine, whose most recent issue was devoted to her work (to the extent that its pages are impregnated with several of her smells, making it hard to read in public!):

In the beginning [...], I created weather situations that didn’t exist. I was trying to provoke people to talk about the weather in a different way. So I created these situations in my lab or in my flat where you had sunshine or explosions, hurricanes… It was during these experiments that I discovered smell.

IMAGE: Anatomy and physiology of the human nose, via.

Our sense of smell is both fundamental and neglected. As Tolaas pointed out to me in an email, every time we breathe, we inhale smell data, and “each day we breathe about 23,040 times.”

Yet as a means of experiencing, describing, and designing the world, sight, hearing, taste, and even touch seem more influential — perhaps in part because, amazingly, no one actually understands how the sense of smell works. There are compelling theories, but the exact way in which the brain detects and decodes odorant molecules is still a scientific mystery.

IMAGE: Sissel Tolaas on a smell walk.

Tolaas began training her sense of smell in the early 1990s, collecting bits and pieces — swatches of fabric, bits of food, crayon stubs, banana peels — that held a specific smell, and archiving them in a personal odour library of 6,723 airtight tins. She used this archive to train — to sharpen her olfactory acuity and to breakdown her smell prejudices, so that she could approach smellscapes without the distraction of disgust. She’s also been training her teenage daughter, Tara, since birth.

Following on from odor gathering, Tolaas drew on her chemistry background to move into smell analysis and recreation. Somewhat magically, scientists at the major fragrance and flavour companies have developed so-called “headspace technology,” which allows them to capture any smell in the world by enclosing it in a vacuum-sealed jar with odour-absorbent paper, cloth, or gels. The material is then broken down into a molecular ingredient list using mass spectrometry or gas chromatography, so that it can be rebuilt in the lab from off-the-shelf chemicals.

IMAGE: Sissel Tolaas’ smell archive is stored in 6,723 airtight tins.

IMAGE: Every smell in Tolaas’ archive is labeled with the date and place it was collected. Photo via Sight Unseen.

Givaudan or IFF might use headspace technology on jungle treks to sample the rare blue lotus or capture the fragrance of previously unknown orchid varieties. Tolaas’ uses vary: she has created “Swedish smells” for Ikea and Volvo, and is currently working on a suite of brand identity odours for Adidas but has also recreated the smell of a battlefield for the German Museum of Military History in Dresden.

IMAGE: Headspace technology used in the field by Roman Kaiser, chemist, botanist and perfumer at the Givaudan fragrances and flavours company. Image courtesy Givaudan, via Time

IMAGE: Current projects in Tolaas’s lab space. Photo via Sight Unseen.

I first encountered Tolaas’ work at the Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark last summer.  To make her piece, Fear 9, Tolaas asked nine highly phobic men to wear a sweat-collecting device “the size of a cell phone” under their armpit while exposing themselves to the situations they most feared. They then mailed the sweat (overnight delivery) to Tolaas’ lab, where she chemically analysed it, recreated it, and then used micro-encapsulation technology to turn the Louisiana gallery wall into a giant scratch and sniff embodiment of fear.

The nine men’s smells (which you can also experience in Mono.Kultur) vary in intriguing ways, and elicited equally interesting responses: Tolaas explained that Guy #9 was very popular, particularly with one woman who “came every day for three months and kissed the wall up and down with different lipsticks.” (Number 9 was definitely my favourite too: spicy and light, where the others were pungent, rancid, and gym locker-ish.) Meanwhile, Guy #5 brought a ninety-year-old Korean war veteran to tears, taking him back to the battlefield in a visceral yet cathartic way. Tolaas gave him a small vial of the scent to take home.

IMAGE: Fear 9, by Sissel Tolaas.

Tolaas has even used headspace technology to distill and recreate the smell of money for a major bank — and, although she does not use perfume or deodorant, she will sometimes wear a drop of that to a business meeting, where it seems to guarantee positive results. She also wears her own smell — extracted, recreated, and applied in concentrated form — as both cologne and identity-reinforcement:

When I reproduce my own sweat and put it back on my own body the intellectual and psychological reaction I have to that, to my self, is just unbelievable. It’s fantastic. I rediscover myself as a human being.

IMAGE: Sissel Tolaas creating smells in her Berlin lab.

In contrast. Americans collectively spend $1.7 billion each year on antiperspirants and deodorants to mask their personal odour. The West is “smell-blinded,” according to Tolaas, who argues that “in modern Western culture, the topic of smell is repressed and its social history ignored.”

In his 2005 essay, Towards A Sensorial Urbanism, architect and author Mirko Zardini extends Tolaas’ diagnosis of smell-suppression to the spaces and cities we live in:

City planning has long privileged qualities of urban space based exclusively on visual perception. Above all, […] odours have been considered disturbing elements, and architecture and city planning have exclusively been concerned with marginalizing them, covering them up, or eliminating them altogether.

IMAGE: Mexico City’s varied smellscapes.

Tolaas’ own interest in the spatial effects of olfaction has led her to explore the smellscapes of different cities, from Paris and Vienna to Kansas City, using structured walks, interviews, and headspace technology. She explains:

Just as society is crisscrossed with symbolic and actual smell boundaries, so is the urban environment. The different smell spaces of the modern city are largely a product of zoning laws. These laws regulate the kinds of construction and sorts of activity that may go on in the different areas, and by so doing also regulate the distribution and circulation of smells.

Tolaas’ work, however, goes beyond simply mapping or recreating a sensory geography, into an investigation of smell as information — information that, if it was broadly shared and understood, could “play a role in communication and navigation.” To that end, she also researches the limited language with which we describe smell, in an attempt to move beyond preference (“good” and “bad” smells) and analogy.

In one experiment, she asked volunteers to smell two jars filled with the same relatively neutral air. Proving that verbal expectations can create olfactory illusions, they consistently reported preferring the jar labeled “cheddar” over the one labelled “body odour,” regardless of the fact that the sampled air smelled of neither.

IMAGE: Mexico City’s smog layer.

In Talking Nose, the project that we invited her to present at Postopolis! DF, Tolaas was inspired to investigate Mexico City’s smellscape by its notorious pollution:

In Mexico City, you can cut the air with a knife. But bad smells simply are not noticed any more. Imagine if this technique were carried over into the other senses and eyesores were made invisible or the noises of construction and traffic inaudible. Half of the sensory reality of our cities would vanish. Apart from the likely problems of safety, we would lose our ability to experience the environment we live in and react to it according to that experience.

Beginning in 2001, she began to study Mexico City in terms of the chemical signals in its environment, visiting more than two hundred different neighbourhoods repeatedly in order to research and identify the key smells of each. Using headspace technology, she then re-presented those smells in a scratch and sniff map of the city.

IMAGE: Talking Nose as installed at Harvard in 2009.

IMAGE: Talking Nose as installed at Harvard in 2009.

Meanwhile, Tolaas also filmed 2,100 Mexico City residents as they described the smell of the city and its atmosphere in their mother tongue. Alongside the scratch and sniff map, she presented a video of their noses, sniffing, and mouths, silently translating the invisible city, as well as — separately and deliberately out of synch — an audio track of smell descriptors: “rusty, sweet and old,” “pleasant, aromatic, light,” and “perfume-y; flowers, and vanilla.”

Presented together, the smells, the map, and the words, combined with looping video footage of chilangos smelling and describing, effectively reframed the experience of Mexico City in olfactory terms.

IMAGE: Still from Talking Nose.

What’s more, according to Tolaas, when she asked Mexico City’s inhabitants to use their nose to perceive the city, many of them associated themselves and their activities with the smells (and pollution) they described. Several of them, it seemed to her, were making that connection for the first time, exactly as she had hoped:

Challenging people to use their noses gives them new methods to approach their
 realities; it doesn’t matter whether they smell a so-called bad or good smell. What counts
 is that they rediscover their own surroundings in that very moment—be it other human
 beings, places, the city — and start to approach it differently.

IMAGE: Tolaas’ scratch and sniff map of Mexico City.

IMAGE: Still from Talking Nose.

[NOTE: This post is part of a series of reports from my time in Mexico City as part of Postopolis! DF, which was presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture from June 8 to June 12, 2010. For more about Postopolis! DF, including my fellow bloggers, their speakers, and the sponsors and organisers (to whom I am very grateful), visit www.postopolis.org. My sincere thanks are also due to Sissel Tolaas, who scrambled to get her materials to me in time, and to the fabulous Paola Antonelli for the introduction ]

Posted in Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Julio the Sewer Diver

By Nicola | Published: June 16, 2010

Long-time Pruned readers (which I encourage you all to become, if you are not already) might remember a short post from January 2007, which introduced Carlos Barrios, a former accountant turned official Mexico City sewer diver.

These Washington Post descriptions of his workday spent immersed in “garbage, bacteria, excrement, dead animals—even the occasional murder victim” certainly stuck with me, so when the organizers of Postopolis! DF asked me to select five guest speakers with a unique and intriguing perspective on the geography of Mexico City, I set my heart on tracking down a sewer diver.

IMAGE: Stills from a short 2006 National Geographic video about Mexico City’s sewer divers. Carlos Barrios is lowered into the sewer in the cage.

After all, the infrastructure of waste disposal is the (frequently invisible) corollary of consumption, and who better to map its patterns and peculiarities than someone who spends all day submerged in the city’s various excreta? In addition, the sewage system is intimately tied to the city’s fascinating—and pressing—water issues: indeed, both are managed by one government agency, the Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de México.

The topic of water actually came up earlier during the week at Postopolis, when one of Jace Clayton’s invited speakers, architect and urban planner Jorge Legoretta, traced Mexico City’s hydrological history and predicted that it will suffer a serious flood in the next twenty to thirty years.

IMAGE: Jorge Legorreta compared the basin in which Mexico City sits to the traditional molcajete, a basaltic mortar used to make salsas and guacamole.

In his fascinating presentation, Legorreta explained that Mexico City lies in a basin ringed by volcanoes, into which forty-five different rivers drain (some glacier-fed and seasonal, others year-round). Indeed, the city’s Aztec precursor, Tenochtitlan, was actually built on an island surrounded by lakes and criss-crossed by canals. These lakes and waterways were promptly drained by the Spanish conquistadors in order to deprive the Aztecs, with their lightweight and manoeuvrable canoes, of any military advantage.

IMAGE: The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was a city of canals and artificial islands built on a lake.

To make matters worse, Mexico City is now pumping water up from its aquifer so fast that it is sinking an average of seven centimetres per year (up to forty-four centimetres per year in some parts of the city). As a result, many older parts of the city’s mixed wastewater and sewage system have lost their grade, making the task of draining the city during the rainy season’s intense thunderstorms even more challenging.

Until a recent renovation in 2008, the system’s principal canal—“the most important pipe in the country” according to Ramon Aguirre, Director of the Sistema de Aguas—had not been emptied and repaired in thirty-five years.

IMAGE: A team carrying out the first maintenance operations in more than thirty-five years during a 28-day shut down of the Emisor Canal in 2008. Photo via Water and Waste Water International.

To maintain this fragile, overburdened system, Mexico City relies on a team of two divers—the only sewage divers in the world. On Saturday, June 12, at Postopolis! DF, we were lucky to be joined by one of them: Julio Cou Cámara.

A cheerful and charming middle-aged man with a couple of missing teeth and an evident pride in his work, Julio described his twenty-seven year career diving blind beneath the streets of the city, clearing blockages and repairing infrastructure in order to prevent the kinds of catastrophic floods predicted by Legorreta. His presentation is transcribed below.

•••

Julio Cou Cámara: Good afternoon, my name is Julio and I’m a diver in the sewage here in Mexico City. What I do is a bit weird. Most people, when I tell them that I’m a diver, they think, “Oh wow, that’s beautiful—the ocean and the beach.”

But no, we are divers of the sewage.

I’m part of a team, and we work for the government in DF, in the Sistema de Aguas. We’re a water emergency team, so we participate in everything that has to do with flooding and repairing drainage systems. Under the city, under the streets where you walk, that’s where we dive.

What we mostly do is maintenance. We repair pumps, we take out debris—we take out bodies of animals, bodies of people, and all the rubbish. There’s so much rubbish in the drainage system, it’s very harmful to us and to the city.

IMAGE: Julio with his family at Postopolis! DF.

People are always wondering why there’s so much flooding in the city. I can tell you that the city floods because of all the rubbish that creates blockages in our drainage system. If we were maybe a bit more conscious about rubbish and we didn’t throw it on the street, we wouldn’t have this many flooding problems in the city. People complain—they say, “There’s almost a lake in the street.” Well, yeah—that lake is there because of your rubbish.

The drainage system is constantly being maintained—all year long, twenty-four hours a day, there are people working. They need a diver when they can’t stop the pumping plant, because if they stopped it, the city would be flooded. That’s when they ask for my help. We go there and we see what the problem is and we do the job.

We work blindly in the black water. It contains animal poo, human poo, hospital waste… any kind of pollution you can think of. All of that is in the sewage water. That’s where we work. Right now there are only two of us diving for Mexico City.

I brought some of my equipment. Many people think we scuba dive, but no: we use specific equipment. It’s technically quite different—we have different air hoses and compressors, and so on. Because we can’t see what we’re doing and it’s completely dark down there, we don’t have the same instruments. There are people on the surface with computers telling me where I’m going and what I’m doing.

IMAGE: Julio demonstrates his sewage diving equipment to the audience at Postopolis! DF

This is my helmet or mask. [lifts up helmet] It’s quite heavy. Inside, we have a microphone and headphones so that we can communicate with the surface. They give us instructions from above.

This is my drysuit. [lifts up drysuit] These Norwegian suits that we have, they’re one-piece suits that are hermetically sealed. I could it put on over what I’m wearing right now and dive, and my clothes wouldn’t get wet at all. I’d just put on my gloves and attach the air hose and then I’d be ready to start working.

IMAGE: Julio demonstrates his sewage diving equipment to the audience at Postopolis! DF

People often ask me what I see down there. Do I find money or jewellery?  No, you can’t really see any of those things. Montezuma’s treasure may be down there, but I will most likely never find it, because you can’t see anything—all you can do is feel blockages.

In terms of things we come across: we find lots of cigarette butts. I’ve had blockages caused by pieces of carpets, pieces of cars, or even body parts. Removing these kinds of things from the sewage is part of our work. People who work nearby or are walking past think, “Look at that crazy guy, he’s getting into the sewage.” But yeah, of course—that’s just what we do.

A normal day for me… well, what can I tell you? I go into the office, and if there are no emergencies then we work on maintaining the equipment. This equipment has to be in one hundred percent perfect condition—it mustn’t fail. My other colleague and I have our gear ready at all times. We work during the night as well as during the day. It’s not as though day or night makes a difference for us, because we can’t see anything down there anyway.

There are about fifteen pumping plants around the city and they vary in depth from eight to fifteen and even twenty metres. The deep sewage pipes in Mexico City are from fifty metres to two hundred metres below the surface. There are 650 kilometres of pipes. All of the city’s waste-water and sewage runs through these pipes, and most of it ends up going all the way to the state of Hidalgo.

Sewage leaves the loo in your house—that’s the primary source—and it goes to a secondary collection system in the street, and then it goes down to the deep sewage.

I’m not sure what else I can tell you. I’m fascinated by the job that I do. Even though not many people see it or know about it, I believe we do a very important job for all of us. Sometimes you can’t stop the pumping plant or you can’t dig up the street and get to the sewage pipes from the surface. That’s when we come in. It’s a very satisfying job. I like knowing that I am part of a system working to help keep the city safe.

IMAGE: Diver Luis Covarrubias pictured being lowered into Mexico City’s sewers in 2006. Photo by Edward A. Ornelas for Metro.

I guess the most important thing I can say is: don’t throw rubbish in the street. Not because I want to be out of a job, but because flooding is one of the biggest challenges that Mexico City has. Rubbish and our water problems go hand in hand.

Thank you so much for this invitation, and if you have any questions, I’ll be glad to answer them.

Edible Geography: When you’re in the sewers, do you notice a difference between different neighbourhoods and parts of the city based on the kinds of debris you encounter or the smells or sounds? I know you can’t see anything, but can you sense what is above you in other ways?

Julio: Actually, I can dive for ten or fifteen minutes to unblock a plant, and then come to the surface for a rest, and when I go down again, it’s changed completely. The water moves constantly and it carries a lot of rubbish, which could be anything—we never know what the water will bring next. But I would say that, more or less, I’m like a blind person that starts feeling and seeing with my other senses, so that I can identify if something is a tree trunk or a tyre or whatever. But many times, I can take something out, and then two minutes later there’s another obstruction. What I’m feeling always changes, depending on what the water brings.

IMAGE: Carlos Barrios being lowered into the sewers. On the right, in the blue T-shirt, is Julio Cou Cámara. Photo by Mary Jordan for The Washington Post.

Audience Member: What’s the speed of the water down there? I have to imagine that it’s a little redundant to ask you how dangerous your work is, but what are the specific dangers that you find down there? Could the flow just carry you away?

Julio: The water moves at about five or six kilometres per hour on average. It depends on where you are in the  system and on the slope of the pipe at that point. It can go really slow or really fast depending on the pumping system and how close you are to it.

The dangers that we face are not normal diving dangers—decompression and all that. The main danger that we face is getting cut somehow, because the rubbish is filled with glass, nails, syringes—all kinds of sharp things. If the suit was cut and we got an open wound, that’s an infection for sure.

Another danger that we have to deal with is when you’re taking the pieces out. We remove really large pieces—a half tonne or more, even three or four tonnes sometimes. We do that with cranes, but we have to be careful to move out of the way so that the piece doesn’t swing and hit us or fall on us.

Our air and our communication comes from a cable that is attached to the helmet, and if that cable got stuck or detached, or breaks, that would be really dangerous. Luckily, up until now, we haven’t had any problems with that.

Joseph Grima: If there were one piece of technology that could be invented to make your job easier, what would it be?

Julio: It’s a difficult question. We’ve tried a lot of different lamps, for example. We’d love to be able to see down there, but the water is so dirty and it’s got so many particles in it that the light reflects off everything and bounces on your eyes and you still can’t see. Eight hundred watts—one thousand watts even—and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face. Apart from something that could help me see down there, I can’t think of anything. Fancy things like a robot or a submarine wouldn’t really help with the kinds of things I do. And we’d still be in the same situation: we can’t see anything down there, so we have to feel it.

IMAGE: Stills from a short 2006 National Geographic video about Mexico City’s sewer divers. On the left, Carlos Barrios removes a dead dog from the sewer, on the right, Julio Cou Cámara fastens Barrios into his suit.

Edible Geography: In your free time or holidays, do you dive for fun in the ocean?

Julio: Yes. I like going to the beach and I love diving. I do go diving for fun, because it’s another world. The sea is one world, and the sewage is another world. In the sewage I can’t see anything and—sorry for the word—there’s shit everywhere, and in the sea I see fishes and it’s beautiful. I just like diving, so I like both.

Daniela Hernandez: What kind of protection do you receive because of the risks you take?

Julio: As sewage divers, we are paid a bit more than the usual government salary for the risk that we take. We also receive extra medical benefits. Sometimes we even have an ambulance with us, waiting at the surface in case anything happens.

Audience Member: Can you take me into the sewage system?

Julio: No, no, we can’t take anyone down into the sewage. It’s too dangerous. Maybe you’ve been hearing about what they’ve been finding now that they’ve been closing the pipes for repairs. When the rubbish rots, it’s toxic and very corrosive. The governor of the city came down to see the repair work but we had to put him in special equipment because there’s a lot of toxic gases down there.

IMAGE: Teams carrying out the first maintenance operations in more than thirty-five years during a 28-day shut down of the Emisor Canal in 2008. They are wearing respirators, goggles, suits, and gloves. Photo via Water and Waste Water International.

Audience Member: Sometimes I feel like my job is not that great and my office is not adequate to my needs—the internet connection is too slow or the coffee machine sucks—but still, what on earth motivates you every day to get up and work in the sewers?

Julio: Honestly, what motivates me is the pleasure I get in my work. I’ve been working for twenty-seven years in the sewage of Mexico City. I started to swim when I was eight years old; I was a swimming teacher and a diving teacher. My whole life I’ve loved being in water, swimming and diving.

When they offered me this job, I did think, what am I doing, agreeing to spend every day swimming in the city’s sewage? But it gives me such pleasure and personal satisfaction to do my job and know that I’m doing a lot of good for a lot of people without them knowing. My wife knows that when the news shows a hurricane or a big thunderstorm coming, I start getting antsy. She’ll say, “What, you want to go and work now, or what?” I think it’s the adrenaline. I just want to get down there and work.

IMAGE: Julio’s wife and son at Postopolis! DF.

Ethel Baraona Pohl: What sort of training do you have before you start doing this kind of work?

Julio: When I started working, I was already a sports diver. I already knew scuba equipment from diving in lakes or the ocean—but I never thought I was going to dive in sewage! The equipment was really interesting to me: it’s very specific equipment that I would never be able to get my hands on otherwise.

Otherwise, the other requirement for being a sewage diver is that you’re not disgusted by the water, because sometimes we arrive at the place and it really smells. For some people, that smell can be unbearable. We’re so used to it, we don’t even smell it anymore. When I come back up to the street from being down in the drains, people can smell me, but I can’t smell it at all.

So basically, as long as you’re not disgusted by the sewage and you like diving, you are qualified to do this job.

Audience Member: Nicola said that you are the only sewage diving team in the world. How do other cities deal with blockages? Why is Mexico City’s sewage system different?

Julio: That’s my understanding, too: we are the only ones in the world that dive in the sewage. I’m not sure, but I think perhaps there aren’t as many people living in some of these other cities—and also in other parts of the world they have a culture of throwing their rubbish in the bin. They don’t pollute the water so much. That respect for the water system doesn’t exist in Mexico City, so that’s why we need a sewage diving team.

Edible Geography: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve come across down in the sewers?

Julio: It’s all pretty weird. One time we took out half of a Volkswagen. How did it end up there? We don’t know. One time we took out a fifteen metre roll of carpet that was obstructing a whole pipe. Really, anything you can think of, we can find it in the sewage. It’s a dump yard. That’s the problem.

Audience Member: I know you get instructions from the surface, but what tools do you have to get your orientation down there and navigate back to the surface in the dark?

Julio: We know the plans of the system very well. We know how all the pipes and pumps and different parts work and how they’re made. If they tell me go to plant X because a pump is stuck, I know exactly how that pump is situated and how it works. So we go in with a pretty good idea of the layout.

IMAGE: Divers being lowered into the sewer in a cage. Photo by Roberto García Ortiz / La Jornada via

If we go in to do a search for a body, for example, and we’re not in the parts we know well, near the pumping plants, we really depend on the person on the other end of the cable. He’ll say, for example, that you’re going to get out of the basket that you’re lowered in on, and you’re going to walk right. He can see a little dot on his screen that tells him where I am, so he can say, no, no, you’ve gone too far, or whatever. We rely completely on the cord that links us to the surface.

Edible Geography: Do you often feel fear, or have there been particular moments when you thought something might go really wrong?

Julio: Fear is always there. I can’t tell you that I’m ever not afraid. When they tell me I’m going to dive I always get really nervous. Mentally, I go over everything I might need to do and imagine every problem that I might encounter.

IMAGE: Julio answering more audience questions after his presentation at Postopolis! DF.

We put a lot of trust in the people that are up there at the surface, operating the crane and the communications cable. They’re working to keep us safe. Still, we’re always afraid. I can come up and rest for a half hour and the fear is still there when I go back down.

Edible Geography: How often do you dive, on average? Are there particularly busy times, such as in the rainy season?

Julio: Normally we dive between three and four days per month. A dive can last for ten minutes or six hours. We come up and rest, and then we continue, so sometimes we’re out there for thirty-six hours straight, if it’s a bad blockage. In the rainy season, it’s much more intense. We could be diving everyday in the rainy season. We have to be ready at all times throughout the year, though.

[NOTE: Tracking down a sewer diver is not easy, particularly if you (like me) don’t speak Spanish. I owe a huge thanks to the awesome and persistent Daniela Hernandez, who ended up submitting memos, faxing forms, and repeatedly visiting the dusty, filing-cabinet and index-card-stuffed headquarters of the Sistema before eventually securing a permission slip from Chief Aguirre himself.

I’m also extremely grateful to Julio Cou Cámara and his family for giving up several hours on a Saturday (in the rainy season!) to present at Postopolis! DF, and to the heroic anonymous translator whose efforts meant Julio and I could communicate in real-time, despite not having a word in common.

This post is part of a series of reports from my time in Mexico City as part of Postopolis! DF, which was presented by Storefront for Art and Architecture from June 8 to June 12, 2010. For more about Postopolis! DF, including my fellow bloggers, their speakers, and the sponsors and organisers (to whom I am very grateful), visit www.postopolis.org.]

Posted in Digest, Postopolis! DF, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Fueling Mexico City: A Grain Revolution

By Nicola | Published: June 14, 2010

IMAGE: Walmart, Mexico City. Walmart sells more food each year than anyone else in Mexico. It is the country’s biggest private employer, with a range of supermarkets (the high-end Superama and discount Bodega), department stores (the wonderfully named Suburbia) and restaurants (VIPS, El Portón, and Ragazzi) to suit all budgets and tastes. Rachel Laudan took me to her local Walmart (a convenient five-minute walk away) and commented on the Walmart-induced improvement in Mexico’s customer service.

Apologies for the prolonged silence here at Edible Geography. It is one of the ironies of Postopolis!—the blogger-curated “Ponzi scheme of ideas” (in the words of its co-founder Joseph Grima) whose most recent iteration took place last week in Mexico City—that there is not really enough time to post during the event itself.

Now—post-Postopolis!—I’m excited to begin belatedly reporting on a frenzied and fascinating week of presentations, excursions, and garañona. One of the highlights of my time in DF was the chance to meet Rachel Laudan, whose blog is on my regular reading list.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan holding Mexico’s favourite snack, the Twinkie-esque Gansito.

Rachel Laudan’s background is as a historian of science but, while teaching at the University of Hawaii, she became interested in the history, geography, and politics of food. Her subsequent book on the fusion cuisine of Hawaii, The Food of Paradise, won the prestigious Julia Child Award in 1997. Although she is originally from the UK, she has been living in Mexico for the past twenty-odd years—and luckily for me, she moved to Mexico City itself in February.

Despite being busy with the final draft of her forthcoming book (“a world history of food”) for the University of California Press, Rachel took me on a lovely guided wander round the varied foodscape of her neighbourhood. Beginning at Walmart and ending with a filling and economical meal at a comida corrida, via a traditional bakery, we explored the intersection of food, class, and economics in contemporary Mexico.

From the broccoli in our lunchtime tortitas (originally grown for export to America, it is now replacing the more traditional cauliflower) to the upper-class custom of a pre-marital stint in culinary school with one’s servant, Rachel traced the edible archaeology behind almost everything we saw.

IMAGE: Wedding cake model at a Mexican bakery; traditionally, upper-class girls would be sent to culinary school with their servants before they got married, so that they could learn how to supervise (and the servants could learn how to make fancier European dishes).

Our mini-tour was then capped by Rachel’s presentation at Postopolis! DF, where she spoke to an eager audience of designers, architects, urbanists, and bloggers. I’m delighted to be able to publish the transcript of Rachel’s provocative explanation of the direct link between advances in grain processing technology and the emergence of a thriving middle class in Mexico City, below.

In due course, Domus, one of the event’s co-sponsors, will be releasing the edited video of her presentation (and all fifty others) online, so that you can fully appreciate Rachel’s maize-grinding demonstration!

•••

Rachel Laudan: All cities require fuel: oil, gas, electricity, and so on. What I want to talk about today is the energy that fuels the people in the cities—food. Without food energy, a city is nothing. A city is nothing without the people who work and play and enjoy or suffer through the city, and they require food.

IMAGE: Tortillas. Photo by Nick Gilman, author of a handy guide to Mexico City’s food, via Rachel Laudan.

I want to talk in four short bursts. The first is about what all cities need in the way of food. The second is the reason why Mexico City had a particularly hard time with food. The third describes a revolution in the food of Mexico City that has taken place in the twenty years since I first saw it. And the fourth is about the kind of trade-offs that had to be made to undergo that revolution in food.

So: what do cities need in terms of food? There’s only one way to feed a city, at least historically, and that’s to feed it with grains—rice, wheat, maize, barley, sorghum, etc.. You can go round the world, and there just aren’t cities that aren’t fed on grains, except for possibly in the high Andes. Basically, to maintain a city, you’ve got to get grains into it. Be it Bangkok, be it Guangzhou, be it London, or be it Rome—throughout history, grains and cities are two sides of the coin.

And what do you need in terms of grains? For most of history—really, until about 150 years ago—most people in most cities, except for the very wealthy, lived almost exclusively on grains. They got about ninety percent of their calories from grains.

That meant that for every single person in a city you had to have 2 lbs of grains a day, turned into something that people could eat.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan holds up a kilo of tortillas—the daily grain requirement for each city dweller.

[Holding up a standard supermarket package of tortillas.] This is a kilo of tortillas. That’s what one person in a city needed. It’s the same weight, more or less, whatever the grain is—you can go to the historical record, you can research in China, in India, in the Near East, and you will still be talking about 2 lbs of grain-based food for every person in the city every day.

So you can do some calculations. If you’ve got a city of a million, like ancient Rome,  you’ve got to get two million pounds of grain into the city every day. It’s the same for all the cities in the world— it’s 2 lbs of grain per person. That’s the power, that’s the energy that drives cities.

So let’s start with that for Mexico City. What are Mexico City’s grains? Pre-conquest, of course, it was just maize. Post-conquest, it’s maize and wheat. I want to talk primarily about maize, and we’ll move onto wheat later on.

Maize is not the greatest grain for the person who is preparing it. Because when I say that cities live off grain, I’m actually telling a lie. Cities don’t live off grain. Grain is not edible. Maize is not edible, wheat is not edible—if you eat a lot of wheat or a lot of maize, it will go straight through the system. Grains—maize, wheat, or rice, it doesn’t matter which—are only edible once they have been processed and cooked into boiled rice, bread, tortillas—whatever the end product is. That’s what you eat.

IMAGE: Women grinding maize: a processing technique that remained the same from antiquity until surprisingly recently. Image courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Yesterday, Nicola was saying that food blogs can be a bit girly. Let me tell you, there’s nothing girly about processing maize to make tortillas.

The Mexicans in the audience will know this, but if you don’t, here is what you have to do to turn maize into a tortilla. First of all you have to cook the maize with something alkaline. Today you can use cement, but in the past they used the salt from the dry lake bed around Mexico City. You have to take the grains off the maize, which is very time-consuming, and then you heat it, you cook it, and you rub the husks off.

Then, when you have got your wet-cooked maize, you have to grind it. For thousands of years, Mexican women ground maize like this. [kneels to demonstrate] I’ve spent some time grinding. You have a metate, and you start with your handful of maize and you put it here and you grind it down to end of the grindstone, and it’s not fine yet. You use your fingers to move it back up again, and you grind it all the way back down again. Then you move it back up again—and to get it fine enough to make tortillas you have to do this five times for each handful of maize.

IMAGE: Rachel Laudan mimes wet-grinding maize at Postopolis! DF.

Depending on how good you are, it takes somewhere between fifty minutes and an hour to do enough maize for tortillas for one person. That means for a family of five someone is going to be spending four or five hours a day doing nothing but grind. [gets up] It’s very exhausting, grinding.

When I first got to Mexico, young women, particularly in the country, would say to each other, “Do you grind?” Imagine it! The girl who worked for me when I first came here, when she was twelve years old, her parents handed her the mano, the thing you grind with, and they said, “OK, girl, now it’s time you start grinding.” That meant, in sickness and in health, from Monday to Saturday—on Sunday, you ate stale tortillas—she ground for four or five hours a day.

When I was twelve years old, I had my first period. I though, “Oh my god, is this what I’m going to have to put up with for the rest of my life? Roll on menopause!” But imagine if I’d been a little Mexican girl, twelve years old, and I’d not only had my first period, but I’d also been handed the grindstone and I knew that from then on, for five hours a day, six days a week, I was going to grind…

It is a very, very time-consuming thing. It’s terrible for the individual: arthritis, bad knees, no time to spend with the children, and no opportunity to go to school. It’s also, obviously, not a great thing for the society if you’ve got one fifth of your adults doing nothing but grinding.

IMAGE: Masa on a traditional metate, photo via.

That kind of labour-intensive grinding was what they did in Ur, and in ancient cities of the Middle East and Egypt. By the time you get to Rome, roughly—by about the birth of Christ—in the Middle East and in Europe, they get a rotary grindstone, and instead of requiring one person per every five to spend all day grinding this two pounds of grain that everybody in the city needs, they get it down to one in thirty. Then they get watermills and it goes down to one in three hundred—and nowadays we don’t even think about it! There are big steel rollers up there in Minneapolis and they’re grinding grain for hundreds of thousands of people, using just a handful of workers.

Now why didn’t Mexico do that? Was it just backward? Why didn’t it move to other forms of grinding? The trouble is if you grind wet, you cannot use these other rotary grindstones. So even if the Mexicans had had them, they couldn’t have used them. When the Spaniards came here they brought rotary grindstones, but you just can’t grind wet maize with rotary grindstones. And if you want tortillas—which we now know have nutritional advantages, but they are also a flexible bread, and hence more appealing than the kind of porridge-y things or tamales that you would have otherwise—you have to grind wet.

IMAGE: Atole, a kind of sweetened corn porridge drink, which to me tastes like thin, lumpy rice-pudding. Photo via.

Therefore, in Mexico, right up until about twenty years ago, large numbers of Mexican women were spending five hours a day grinding. Just imagine Mexico City: every household had somebody grinding tortillas. The landscape of Mexico City up until fifty years ago, and in many ways even later, is one of bakeries that make wheat breads for the upper class or perhaps for breakfast or the evening meal, and then in every household, somewhere in a back room, somebody grinding maize to make tortillas for the main meal of the day.

IMAGE: Mexican pastries at Walmart’s in-store bakery.

That’s all changed. You can still find the odd person who grinds in Mexico City, but it doesn’t happen very much.

So, what’s the revolution that’s occurred? What’s happened to Mexico?

It took about a century. In the late nineteenth century, people began trying to find ways of mechanizing this business of grinding and cooking tortillas. Three things happened: first of all, they worked out how to make a mechanical mill that could grind wet. You still find these mills in many rural villages today—people cook their maize at home, and then they take it to the mill and grind it, and then they take it home and cook their tortillas. Those mills really came to Mexico City in the fifties and sixties—it had been invented earlier, but it needs electricity, and the early ones weren’t very good, and so on.

The second thing is that they invented a tortilla machine. If you live in Mexico, or even if you are a visitor here, and you go into any of the big grocery stores, you can see a tortilla machine back in the corner. It’s a kind of Heath-Robinson-esque contraption that cooks the tortillas.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria

And the third thing that happened, finally—this really took place in the seventies and eighties—is that the company now called Gruma (Grupa Maseca) discovered a way to take the wet, alkali-treated maize, grind it, dehydrate it, and put it into packets. You’ve seen those packets in the grocery stores, I’m sure.

IMAGE: Maseca, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

By the 1970s, five percent of the maize for tortillas in Mexico came from Maseca. By the 1990s, it was fifteen percent. Maseca now has plans—whether they’ll pull it off, I don’t know—to take over all the tortillerias in the country.

Another thing that happened, during this crucial fifty-year period between 1945-ish and the end of the twentieth century, was that bread changed in Mexico. Traditional bread in Mexico was bread by the small piece, made in the traditional oven: the bolillo, the semita, and the numerous small breads you still see in Mexican bakeries today.

IMAGE: A bolillo and a semita, photos courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Beginning in 1945, an immigrant from Catalonia, Lorenzo Servitje, bought two second-hand loaf-making machines from the United States—the kind that make sliced white bread. The Servitje family founded the Bimbo company, which is now, as you know, omnipresent in Mexico. Bimbo bread lasts a long time and became widely available, and Bimbo now the largest bakery in the world. It is the fifth biggest food company in the world.

And so now, what does the landscape of Mexico City look like in terms of grains? It’s a whole series of Walmarts with in-house tortillerias and bakeries and shelf after shelf of Bimbo.

IMAGE: Bimbo bread, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Bimbo is not as good as a bolillo. A machine-made tortilla is not anything like a homemade tortilla – it’s not even in the same universe.

Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.

Audience Member: What do you personally think about Gruma trying to take over the tortilla business?

Rachel Laudan: I think I’ve got the same mixed feelings that many Mexicans do. It would be nice if there were more masa harina companies, and it would be nice if Gruma couldn’t get a monopoly, but are we going to go back to grinding at home for five hours a day? No.

IMAGE: Walmart’s in-store tortilleria, photo courtesy Rachel Laudan.

Am I terribly upset that there seems to be a near one hundred percent takeover of not-such-good tortillas? Well, one of the interesting things about this story is that we’re apt to assume trends go on forever—but think about two of the things I just mentioned in my talk. There wasn’t a Bimbo company in 1945 and there wasn’t a Walmart in 1945. So I think all kinds of things can and might happen.

One of the negative effects of having had tortillas subsidized for so long in Mexico—which has really aided the poor—is that nobody has wanted to invest huge amounts of money into developing better tortilla machines and flour mills and things. Now, maybe, we’re at a point where we’re developing a boutique market for good tortillas. And there are better tortilla machines coming out now—we’ve got ones that rotate and flip the tortillas like you do on the comal, so they’re much closer to the taste of the handmade ones. So I think there will be a movement for good tortillas.

IMAGE: A Bimbo employee stocking the shelves at Walmart. Rachel pointed out his suit and tie, and explained that the Bimbo company was founded along Fordist “welfare capitalist” principles, paying above the average and demanding, in return, hard work, loyalty and adherence to a conservative social code.

Edible Geography: Did the move away from grinding at home have spatial repercussions? Was there an empty room in people’s houses all of a sudden?

Rachel Laudan: In the city, I’m not so sure. In the country, there used to be two kitchens—the regular kitchen and the black kitchen. In fact, there still often are. The black kitchen is where you grind and where you cook tortillas and the regular kitchen is where you might have your other stove. But I’m sure people can find something to do with that extra space in the house, especially in the city. Now, of course, you’d probably put a great big refrigerator on the floor space that used to be occupied with your grindstone, because with a refrigerator, you don’t have to make your tortillas every day, because they last from one day to the next.

Audience Member: Can you talk about other gender divisions in the production of food?

Rachel Laudan: It’s a good question—I’d like to think more about it. Agriculture was always male, and bakeries were always male. I think a lot of street food is female.

Edible Geography: Just to range further a little further afield, into the global geography of culinary techniques, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts about something you blogged about recently: the Columbian exchange that did or did not happen in 1492.

Rachel Laudan: Well, we’ve all heard about the Columbian exchange. It’s a cliché at this point: Mexico’s gifts to the world and so on. In fact, there may have been an exchange of plants, but there was no exchange of cuisines.

What happened was that European techniques—wheat mills and bread-baking, for example—came to Mexico, but what Mexicans knew about how to process food did not go to the Old World. The process of adding alkali to maize and grinding it wet didn’t go. The Europeans ground maize like they ground wheat, and they got pellagra, and they went blind, and they died.

The technique of dehydrating chiles and grinding them and rehydrating them to make some of the healthiest sauces in the world has never moved out of Mexico. It hasn’t even got to the United States, for goodness’ sake—what most of the United States thinks is a salsa is some chopped-up tomato with a few chiles in it. I mean, that’s a sort-of salsa, but it’s nothing like the wonderful salsas you find in Mexican cuisine. So no, there wasn’t a Columbian exchange in food. But the question of why not needs a much longer answer than we have time for today.

[NOTE: A huge thanks to Rachel Laudan for agreeing to speak at Postopolis! DF, preparing and delivering such a fascinating talk, and allowing me to publish it online here—not to mention generously showing me round her corner of the metropolis earlier the same day. To find out why there was no Columbian exchange, as well as much more, you will want to read Rachel’s blog at www.rachellaudan.com and follow her on Twitter @rachellaudan.

More recaps and round-ups from my week in Mexico City are forthcoming; meanwhile, many thanks to the organizers, sponsors, and fellow bloggers who made Postopolis! DF such a fantastic, overwhelming, and fun event.]

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Postopolis! DF: Schedule Announced

By Nicola | Published: June 2, 2010

IMAGE: Canned chiles in a Mexico City supermarket by Flickr user hmerinomx.

With less than a week to go, the schedule for Postopolis! DF has been announced, and it’s going to be an amazing week. I’m especially excited to introduce the speakers I invited, who (if I do say so myself) make an eclectic, prestigious, and extremely interesting group.

On Wednesday, June 9, historian Rachel Laudan will kick things off at 4:00 pm. Her excellent blog, which has been a regular highlight in my RSS reader for some time now, often reads like a detective story: Laudan frequently begins with a witness statement (for example, Nobel prize-winning author Octavia Paz‘s observation that the curries of India reminded him of Mexican mole) and then puts together geographical, historical, and culinary clues to reach a Miss Marple-worthy elucidation.

IMAGE: From a recent post by Rachel Laudan, “How to Make 3-D Gelatina,” a common Mexican treat with its roots in the eighteenth-century tradition of spectacular, sculptural desserts.

Laudan will be bringing two or three such intriguing food mysteries to present at Postopolis! DF. Meanwhile, if there’s ever been anything that has puzzled or intrigued you about Mexican food, this will be a fantastic chance to ask the expert (in person, or leave a comment and I’ll make sure to pass it along).

On Thursday, June 10, I’m looking forward to presenting the first Mexico City screening of artist Sissel Tolaas’ film, Talking Nose. She describes the work as “a project on smell as information — a system for communication and navigation,” and for the film, she “asked 2,000 people to please describe the smell of Mexico City in their own mother-tongue language.” From their narration, as well as on-the-ground smell capturing (“we went with black glasses and really forced our noses to do the job”), she created a olfactory map of the city that combines chemical analysis with linguistic descriptions. In addition to the film and soundtrack, there is a chance that Tolaas will be able to join us by video conference to discuss the project and answer any questions.

IMAGE: (left) Sissel Tolaas and the smells of Mexico City, via; (right) Mexico City smog “could be killing off residents’ sense of smell” according to scientists, photo by Daniel Aguilar for Reuters.

Another of my guests will lead off the evening’s schedule on Friday, June 11, at 4:00 pm. Dr. Ravi Singh is “Chief Rust Buster” and distinguished research scientist at CIMMYT, the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Centre. He’s currently in St. Petersburg, presenting at a global conference to discuss how best to combat the threat that pandemic wheat rust poses to the world’s food supply.

IMAGE: (left) Dr. Singh at Cornell University at the launch of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project, via; (right) wheat breeders in protective clothing surveying “the first batch of mutant wheat and barley” in a rust-endemic hotspot in Kenya, photo by Prof. M.G. Kinyua, Moi University.

Dr. Singh will not only discuss wheat breeding and the geographical implications of crop pandemics and prevention measures, but also give a short introduction to the fascinating history of CIMMYT and the Green Revolution, which began as a Rockefeller Foundation anti-hunger program after the Second World War, and fundamentally reshaped global land use, geopolitics, and the way the world is fed (Gary H. Toenniessen, director of agricultural programs for the Rockefeller Foundation, estimates that every day half the world’s population eats grain descended from one of the high yield Green Revolution varieties).

Mexico City’s finest urban farmers, Sembradores Urbanos, will be my guests on Saturday, June 12, at 4:30 pm, discussing their work, which includes founding the Centro de Agricultura Urbana Romita — the first community space and demonstration plot dedicated to urban agriculture in Mexico — as well mapping community gardens, providing composting kits, and many other educational programs and activities. I’m looking forward to hearing their perspective on the particular challenges and opportunities Mexico City presents as a productive landscape.

IMAGE: Map of the landscape of urban agriculture in Mexico City, by Sembradores Urbanos.

My fifth speaker is a man of mystery, inspired by this post on Pruned. All things being equal, and pending written confirmation from the Sanitation Department, we will be joined on Saturday, June 10th, by an official Mexico City sewer diver.

Back in 2004, Washington Post journalist Mary Jordan interviewed one of the team of four: Carlos Barrios Orta, a former accountant turned sewer driver whose job is to hand-clear obstructions, from plastic bottles to human bodies, from the 600 miles of wastewater pipes underneath Mexico City. Fingers crossed, this nameless diver will provide a unique insight into the infrastructural landscape of water and waste that lies beneath North America’s largest city.

IMAGE: Carlos Barrios Orta being lowered into Mexico City’s sewers. Photo by Mary Jordan for The Washington Post.

My co-curators and fellow bloggers have invited an equally diverse and inspiring selection of speakers (the full schedule is online here), there will be music and parties, and I have received some exciting suggestions for edible adventures in the city (thank you, commenters and emailers — please keep the ideas coming), so it should be a fantastic week!

[NOTE: Thanks to the Storefront team (especially Joseph Grima, Daniel Perlin, César Cotta, and José Esparza) for wrangling the schedule and coordinating logistics. I'm especially grateful to Daniel Hernandez of Intersections for reaching out to the Sembradores Urbanos, and the tireless Daniela Hernandez for negotiating with the Sanitation Department.]

Previously: Save The Date: Postopolis! DF

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The Dust of Our Ancestors

By Nicola | Published: June 1, 2010

IMAGE: Coffin via, pizza via.

A couple of weeks ago, Berlusconi mouthpiece Il Giornale ran an article alleging that Naples’ pizza ovens are fuelled by “wood from coffins dug up in the local cemetery”:

Pizza, one of the few symbols of Naples that endures… is hit by the concrete suspicion that it could be baked with wood from coffins. Not only the pizza, the bread, too, may have been cooked with the wood.

Veteran mafia prosecutor Giovandomenico Lepore is leading an investigation into the practice, in which gangs dig up caskets and sell them on to “hard-hearted” and/or “cost-cutting” bakery and pizzeria proprietors for use as firewood.

Apparently, cemetery theft is rampant in Naples, with 5,000 flowers vases “snatched in broad daylight” from local graveyards last year. There is, however, no word on whether the coffin wood is oak, as specified in the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana‘s guidelines for making authentic Neopolitan pizza.


IMAGES: Return to Sender artisan eco-casket by Greg Holdsworth.

I was reminded of this story during a visit to the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Triennial, Why Design Now?, last week. Among the innovations on display was a Return to Sender artisan eco-casket by New Zealand designer, Greg Holdsworth.

At the funeral of his father-in-law, who had been a wood-working enthusiast, Holdsworth was horrified to see that the coffin was made of formaldehyde-filled MDF with a plastic woodgrain and plastic handles applied to the exterior. His subsequent research showed that most Western caskets are made of similarly unsustainable and non-biodegradable materials, turning cemeteries into “parking lots” for the dead, as Cynthia Beal of the Natural Burial Company puts it.

Although perhaps not perfect pizza-oven fuel, Holdsworth’s design is a simple, lightly-oiled plywood casket deliberately designed to break down in the soil. Other eco-burial methods go further, embedding seeds in a paper coffin, creating artificial reefs from cremated ashes, or using a combination of liquid nitrogen and high-frequency vibrations to compost your corpse.

IMAGE: Illustrated description of the human-composting method of eco-burial, via Promessa.

Of course, turning dead bodies into worm food is standard in many parts of the world, long before its current growth in popularity in the West. For a long time, however, Western (and particularly Christian) burial practices have been defined by attempts to keep the body intact and ready for resurrection. One of the more mysterious and quixotic efforts to avoid the decomposition and re-absorption of our ancestors is documented in David Wilson’s wonderful film, ОЪЩЕЕ ДЕЛО, or The Common Task.

IMAGE: Nikolai Federov Federovich by Leonid Pasternak, via Wikipedia.

A co-production of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Kabinet, The Common Task narrates the story of Nikolai Fedorov Fedorovich — “his unusual origins, his modest life, and remarkable thought.” Hypnotically strange, the film conjurs up a pleasurable if slightly melancholy state of mystical suspended reality that is the hallmark of MJT productions.

As the voice-over relates, Nikolia Fedorov Fedorovich was “born in 1838 in south central Russia,” and, despite being “modest in the extreme and in all aspects of his life,” and never finishing his degree due to “an undisclosed incident,” he “became one of the most influential thinkers in Russia — not only for his, but for all time.”

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov had but one vast idea, one thought, one realisation from which the whole body of his work was to spring and that idea was that all problems known to man have a single root in the existence of death. [...] Accordingly, Fedorov clearly proposed a single task towards which all efforts of human kind should be directed — a common task for all mankind — the single undertaking to which all living humans should be devotedly engaged: the universal physical resurrection and resurrection of all who have gone before but are no longer living.

IMAGE: A drawing from the patent issued to George Willems of Roanoke, Illinois, in 1908, for a coffin-mounted periscope that could be used to “ensure the entombed person was still dead,” and presumably monitor their state of decay,  via.

Under the title “The Question of Sanitation,” Fedorov explored a major obstacle to universal resurrection, namely that “our need to eat to stay alive has caused us as a species to feed ourselves on the bodies of our forefathers. As the disintegrated bodies of our ancestors are returned to the earth and through the earth to the crops we eat, our bodies are nourished by those who have gone before.”

The solution, as Fedorov saw it, was to remove all risk of consuming ancestral dust by “resynthesizing our own bodies so that they no longer require nourishment from organic matter.”

IMAGE: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and some of his sketches for “lighter than air” ships, via and via. Tsiolkovsky, the stone-deaf father of Russian rocket science, also features in The Common Task, as Nikolai Federov’s “most ardent adherent.”

Sadly, Fedorov appears to have made little progress in this area, although his writings also advocate activities to enhance crop yields (to feed more people from fewer ancestors) through agricultural collectivisation, the elimination of wars, and artificial rainfall. The Common Task also traces the influence of Fedorov’s thinking on extra-terrestrial exploration through the founding of the Soviet space program. This formed an important consequence of his plans, because “as preceding generations are resurrected, the earth will overpopulate, and accordingly, man will have to look to the stars for our homes.”

IMAGE: Prahlad Jani, via and via.

As a side note, Federov’s resynthesis has perhaps been achieved by an Indian fakir with a soft palate deformation. According to the BBC, Prahlad Jani is in his eighties and claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades — a boast that appeared to be substantiated during a ten-day stay in a laboratory in 2003, during which time he consumed nothing, but remained in good health.

IMAGE: Model food dishes for the afterlife, Shaanxi province, China
, Ming dynasty, about AD 1450–1600, courtesy of the British Museum. The dishes form a “feast for the soul in the afterlife,” and consist of “five main meats (a goat, a pig, a rabbit, a fish, and a goose) and five accompanying dishes (pomegranates, peaches, water chestnuts, persimmons, and mantou [steamed bread]).”

Immortality, resurrection, fasting, and coffins: it seems that food frequently plays as important and varied a role in the afterlife as it does during life itself.

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Archaeo-alcohology

By Nicola | Published: May 28, 2010

IMAGE: Dogfish Head’s Theobroma next to Patrick McGovern’s Uncorking the Past.

With just a few hours left in this apartment, and much yet to be packed, it’s time to crack open the bottle of Dogfish Head’s Theobroma beer that has been lingering in the fridge, futilely awaiting an occasion when my taste buds and typing fingers feel — simultaneously — ready to do it justice.

The beer is one of the Delaware brewery‘s “liquid time capsules”: it was created in collaboration with biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern who, according to his University of Pennsylvania webpage, is “known as the ‘Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages.’”

McGovern’s enjoyable book, Uncorking the Past, begins with an amazing image: apparently, astronomers have used radio-waves to discover “massive clouds” of alcohol, “measuring billions of kilometers across,” scattered throughout interstellar space, “surrounding new star systems.” While he hints at a thrilling future of human “extraterrestrial ethanol” exploitation, McGovern’s primary interest is in the role alcohol played in ancient civilisation — and perhaps at the dawn of human life.

IMAGE: Colour-composite image of the Galactic Centre and Sagittarius B2 from the European Southern Observatory. Sagittarius B2 is a vast cloud of interstellar particles including alcohol in the form of methanol, ethanol, and vinyl ethanol.

Thus, when McGovern read an article by anthropologist John Henderson in the Cornell alumni newsletter describing trace residues of an unidentified beverage on ancient Mesoamerican pottery fragments, his interest was piqued.

The jars and bowls in question dated back to 1400 B.C., a time when Linear A was the popular alphabet of the Mediterranean, and Homer had yet to be born. The vessels had been excavated from Puerto Escondido in modern-day Honduras, in an area called the Ulúa Valley, known (according to records from the sixteenth century, when the Spanish invaded) for its excellent cacao. Henderson’s theory was that the people of Puerto Escondido had been among the earliest to domesticate Theobroma cacao, and that the pottery fragments he had found might once have contained a “frothy chocolate beverage.”

A couple of email exchanges later, and Patrick McGovern was collaborating with John Henderson (and chemist Jeffrey Hurst of chocolate giant Hershey Foods) to analyse the drinking vessels. As he reports in Uncorking the Past, “Either John had an eye for picking out chocolate vessels or Puerto Escondido was awash in cacao. Eleven of the thirteen pottery sherds tested positive for the fingerprint compound of cacao, theobromine.”

In other words, McGovern’s team had found the earliest known evidence for an “unadulterated alcoholic beverage made from sweet cacao pulp” — a ceremonial drink made from the fermented fruit that we now discard in favour of the chocolate-producing bean it surrounds.

IMAGE: A cacao pod, cut in half to show the beans and pulp, via.

Plain cacao alcohol is “an abundant liquor of the smoothest taste, between sour and sweet, which is of the most refreshing coolness,” according to early Spanish records quoted by McGovern. Later, Mayans switched to using the bitter, chocolate beans as the base for an elite beverage whose flavour was usually “improved” with honey, maize, chilli, annatto, and vanilla. It was apparently served with a thick head of foam, in vessels designed so that “one had the option to inhale the foam or drink directly from the mouth of the vessel.”

IMAGE: A chocolate-containing “teapot” from Puerto Escondido, photography by John S. Henderson. According to McGovern, “Conceivably, the awkward-looking teapots might have been used in an earlier period to create a foam by blowing air through the spout or stirring the beverage vigorously through the main opening. As the foam rose through the spout, one had the option to inhale the foam or drink directly from the mouth of the vessel.”

Not satisfied with simply gathering biomolecular evidence, McGovern then wondered what such a drink might have tasted like. As he admits early on in his book, we can never be sure how close to reality any reconstruction is, since “ancient fossils tell us nothing about the easily degradable sensory-organ tissues,” and thus “early hominids might have had much more acute senses than ours, like the macaque, which has exquisite sensitivity to alcohol and other smells.”

Nonetheless, in a section of his book titled “Theobroma for the Masses,” McGovern describes his collaboration with Dogfish Head craft brewers Sam Calagione and Bryan Selders to create a beer based on the core ingredients of early New World alcohol: chocolate beans (in nib form, as the cacao pods are too perishable to transport from Honduras to Delaware), honey, corn, ancho chillis, and annatto. McGovern adds:

We might also have tossed in peppery “ear flower” or a hallucinogenic mushroom if they had been available. The fermentation was carried out with a German ale yeast, which is not obtrusive and brings out the flavours of the other ingredients.

The result? Cloudy and quite strong (9% A.B.V.), but more refreshing than you would think: the chocolate is savoury rather than sweet, and the chilli is just a very subtle, almost herbal, aftertaste. There is almost no head, which is just as well, as I’ve already packed my special froth-inhalation equipment, and so far, no ritual human sacrifice has been required (that may change as the night wears on).

Seriously, though, I love the idea of speculative archaeo-brewing. Of course, ancient flavours are undoubtedly completely lost to us today: the ingredients, our sensory receptors, and our palates have changed beyond recognition. But trying to recreate long-lost beverages not only helps you form scenarios about how they might originally have been made, it also prompts you to think in interesting ways about ingredients, geography, and the evanescence of taste.

And it helps you avoid packing.

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Sixty-Six Percent Natural

By Nicola | Published: May 14, 2010

IMAGE: Screen grab showing global agricultural land-use in 1700, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.

At Bill Rankin’s fantastic Radical Cartography site you can see an animation that shows the intensification and spread of agricultural land-use around the world over the past three hundred years.


IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1750 and 1800, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.

I could spend hours with these maps: for example, it’s amazing to see that agricultural activity in India in 1700 is as intensive, if not more so, than in the traditional bread-baskets of the Caucasus or the densely populated areas of Northern Europe. The persistent un-farmed patch of France’s Massif Central is also interesting: even the Alps appear to have more agricultural activity.


IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1850 and 1900, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.

Rankin notes that the major trend of the past three hundred years is simply the intensification of farming practices on land that was already agricultural, “punctuated by several episodes of rapid expansion into previously untapped areas: the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, Argentina in the early twentieth century, and in last few decades, Brazil and central India.” He also points out rare but occasional declines in agricultural density: in the “central Amazon, northern Patagonia, or the Appalachian Piedmont after World War II.”


IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1950 and 1992, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009.

You might be wondering how Rankin knows what percentage of land was used for growing crops in 1700, before much of the world had even been charted, let alone systematically analysed in terms of land-use.

The dataset on which Rankin’s animation is based was developed by Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley, whose methodology relied on an assessment of global agricultural land in 1992, at “5 min spatial resolution” (about 10 km at the equator), by “calibrating a remotely sensed land cover classification data set against cropland inventory data.” They then compiled an “extensive database of historical cropland inventory data, at the national and subnational level, from a variety of sources,” and processed that information through their 1992 land cover/inventory algorithm, in order to arrive at a historical reconstruction.

As Ramankutty and Foley freely acknowledge, the resulting map is a guess, albeit an extremely educated one that also matches what we know of “the history of human settlement and patterns of economic development.”

As always, much of the interest in maps like these lies in thinking about what is or isn’t measured—and why. Personally, I’m intrigued by the intensification metric, and the visual implication, as Bill Rankin puts it, that “many agricultural areas are at close to 100% exploitation.” This doesn’t seem quite right: Ramankutty and Foley are measuring agricultural land use (and only at a resolution of about 10 km at the equator), not productive potential. After all, surely an area of land could be solely devoted to agriculture and yet produce wildly differing yields depending on the crops sown and the farming techniques used?

IMAGE: Map showing the suitability of land for agriculture. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere.

Elsewhere, Ramankutty and Foley have also collaborated to map agricultural potential, based on “the temperature and soil conditions of each grid cell.” Somewhat implausibly, since agriculture both shapes and is shaped by human civilisation, the suitability rating ignores human inputs—urban sprawl, artificial irrigation, topsoil creation—altogether.

Stepping even further away from plausibility (and human intervention), Ramankutty and Foley subsequently produced a fascinating map of potential vegetation, showing “the vegetation that would exist at a given location had human forms of land use never existed.”

IMAGE: Map of potential vegetation. The map (larger view here) is derived from more data sets developed by Ramankutty and Foley, available at the Atlas of the Biosphere.

It is an alternate surface of the earth, carefully surveyed and classified by a human civilization that could not have existed in order for it to be a reality.

On a similar note, Colorado State University researcher David Theobald has designed a new system for evaluating and mapping the “naturalness” of a landscape. In his review, Rob Goldstein describes Theobald’s methodology thus:

Specifically, Theobald used existing land use data to apply scores at a scale of 30 metres. Urban/built-up areas, roads and cropland were assigned a score of “0.” Natural areas (i.e. forests, grassland, wetlands, etc.) were assigned a score of “1.” Roads and rural development negatively impacted the scores of adjacent areas.

Using this technique, Theobald arrived at “a natural landscape score of .6621 for the conterminous United States in 2001.” In other words, the lower forty-eight states are sixty-six percent “natural,” and only one-third human-designed, or “unnatural.”

The project seems flawed on several levels (it is somewhat incredible that Owens Valley, with its hijacked river and poisonous lake-bed, could receive the “highest naturalness” scores under any rubric), but the paradox of its premise is fascinating—that a pure form of nature can be carefully located and recognised as such by humans whose activity otherwise renders impossible its very existence.

Theobald suggests that his system is a useful tool for conservationists seeking to prioritise their efforts. To me, however, it is more interesting as a geographic expression of impossible nostalgia—the land-use database equivalent of medieval monks calculating how many angels could dance on a pin.

[NOTE: Thanks to @agrobiodiverse for the link to Rob Goldstein's piece on David Theobald's system.]

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