During the Edible Archaeology panel at Foodprint NYC, Bill Grimes, former restaurant critic and current obituary writer for The New York Times, briefly referred to “one of the great mysteries for all culinary historians — what did it taste like?”

What did the vegetables that they sold at Washington Market back in 1880 and 1890 taste like? You just go nuts thinking about it because you can’t know.

The issue is that the challenge of flavour reconstruction is not simply biological — combining particular varietals with the appropriate growing conditions — but also contextual.

IMAGE: The ubiquitous Wine Aroma Wheel, developed by Ann C. Noble of UC Davis, which both describes and shapes California wines today.

Historical agricultural technologies, processing, storage practices, and preparation styles can, for the most part, be reconstructed, but the sensory and analytical framework through which we taste food, on both a personal and cultural level, shifts over time in ways that we don’t even have the language to describe, let alone recreate.

Nonetheless, two interesting experiments in bio-reconstruction, each with a claim to recreate historical flavour, recently popped up in my reading list. The first comes via architectural historian and wine cartographer David Gissen’s blog, HTC Experiments, and concerns franc de pied wines.

IMAGE: Vineyards in France, Bibliothèque nationale de France, via HTC Experiments.

In the 1840s, a third of the population of France derived a living from wine — the nation’s second most valuable export after textiles, despite the fact that indigenous consumption was an already impressive fifty litres per head (and rising) each year.

“French viticulture,” writes Christy Campbell in The Botanist and the Vintner, had “entered a golden age,” with improved machinery and methods of cultivation as well as the invention of “a convenient glue that fixed paper to glass” and thus allowed producer and place-specific labeling. “Every owner, it seemed, had to have a ‘chateau,’” as wealthy investors created a speculative boom in vineyards and the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy began to acquire the characteristics we still value today.

In other words, the stage was set for disaster.

IMAGE: 1882 map showing the advance of phlloxera in France, via Wikimedia.

In 1863, a small wine merchant with a back garden vineyard in Roquemaure, on the right bank of the Rhone, planted some clippings of American vines sent as a gift from a friend. The following summer, his native Grenache and Alicante vines turned yellow, shriveled up, and died. By the 1870s, almost fifty percent of France’s vineyards were destroyed — a scene that would appear “to our contemporary eyes,” Gissen writes, as if “vast stretches of French wine country” had been “chemically attacked or industrially poisoned.”

IMAGE: The lifecycle of phylloxera, via.

The culprit was a tiny aphid-like insect, native to North America and innocently imported on the gifted vine clippings. Called phylloxera vastatrix, the microscopic pest sucked sap from vine roots. The resulting root galls were not fatal to American vines, due to biochemical responses developed over years of co-evolution — but French vines had no such defenses, and succumbed en masse.

The impact on wine culture and French society was enormous, and Campbell’s book (to which I plan to return in a future post) details the enormous lengths — research commissions, quarantine zones, and the invention of chain-mail vine gloves and giant cast-iron syringes for injecting explosive pesticides into the soil — that France’s desperate wine-growers, government officials, and botanists went to in their search for a cure.

IMAGE: Vine grafting instructions from Charles Baltet’s Arboriculture fruitière et viticulture handbook of 1870, via the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

To make a long story short, however, by the end of the nineteenth century, agricultural officials and scientists had determined that the best way for French viticulture to overcome the phylloxera plague was by grafting French vines onto already resistant American rootstock. The process was called “reconstitution” and, as Gissen points out, it was not without challenges of its own.

Planting such a hybrid, almost Frankenstein-like plant must have been torturous for a nineteenth-century French wine maker. They experienced a panic twice-over: the initial loss of their vineyards and their replacement with “American” root stock. American vines produced notoriously strange-tasting grapes. And French wine-makers must have wondered if the typical (and odd) flavors of American vines would transmit into the French grape.

Many had their fears assuaged when, in spring 1894, white Burgundy from a three-year-old grafted vine won a gold medal at the Paris wine concours. For most, “a grand cru on American roots was still a grand cru,” writes Campbell. But some disagreed, arguing that “wines from grafted plants have by no means the constitution of the old wines,” that they became ready to drink more quickly, but went off more quickly too, and even that certain crus had lost their distinctive characteristics and had taken on a distinctively American “taste of fox.”

IMAGE: Advertisement for resistant American rootstock, Pacific Rural Press, 1883, via.

If you buy a bottle of wine today, it is almost without exception made from grapes grown on grafted vines.* Almost, because, as Gissen explains, “a small number of French winemakers have attempted to reconstruct nineteenth-century vineyards with new and small plots of ungrafted vines. These latter vines, planted in historically important French wine regions, are called franc de pied.”

The resulting wines are an attempt to recreate the long-lost flavour of pre-phylloxera French wine. These experimental winemakers, and other franc de pied enthusiasts, believe that “French wine lost something when it was forced to graft all of its vines over to American rootstock” — a certain flavour, texture, and even purity.

IMAGE: Pre-phylloxera vines growing in the Benanti vineyard, via the Asia Wine Society.

There is no way to compare the taste of this “bio-historical reconstruction,” as Gissen terms it, to its lost original. Perhaps the closest we can come is a pre-phylloxera Chateau Latour, made in 1863 and sampled by Wine Spectator in 2000. It was described as astonishing in terms of its “purity and clarity on the nose and palate,” with the “texture of finest silk,” aromas of “tobacco, cigar box, leather, berries, plums, and wet earth,” and flavors that “remained on the palate for minutes after each sip.”

IMAGE: Cellars at Chateau Latour, via the Wine Cellar Insider.

“Extraordinary silkiness” seems to be a common characteristic of today’s franc de pied wines, too — but comparing a wine made in 2011 with one that has been aged for more than a century is hardly apples to apples.

More interestingly, Gissen, while acknowledging that we can’t taste history, proposes tasting the difference instead — an experiment that I would also love to try:

I hope to taste a few of these franc de pied wines. But I want to taste them alongside wines made from grafted vines from the same vineyard. Arranging this is not easy. To taste the difference, everything must be identical – soils, vintage, and the techniques used to transform grapes into wine.

 •••

IMAGE: Oostvaardersplassen in 2008. Photograph by EM Kintzel, I Van Stokkum.

A few days later, with Gissen’s post fresh in my mind, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Recall of the Wild” in the New Yorker. The article, which is well worth reading in full, tells the fascinating story of Dutch efforts to recreate Europe’s paleolithic ecosystem in a fifteen-thousand acre park built on reclaimed land half an hour east of Amsterdam, within the larger context of the “rewilding” movement.

Oostvaardersplassen, as the Dutch reserve is known, was originally drained in the 1950s and was intended for industrial use until “a handful of biologists convinced the Dutch government that they had a better idea.” They stocked the landscape “with the sorts of animals that would have inhabited the region in prehistoric times — had it not at that point been underwater.”

IMAGE: Heck bull in Germany. Photograph by Walter Frisch.

The fact that, in some cases, those animals were now extinct did not deter the biologists. “For example,” writes Kolbert, “in place of the aurochs, a large and now extinct bovine, they brought in Heck cattle, a variety specially bred by Nazi scientists.”

Later in the article, Kolbert visits the nearby TaurOs Programme, a contemporary, de-Nazified attempt to backbreed a more authentic aurochs. The basic idea, she writes, is that:

If different breeds of primitive cattle preserve different stretches of the aurochs’ genetics material then reassembling those stretches should produce something close to — thought not exactly like — the original.

IMAGE: Aurochs, illustrated by Sigismund von Herberstein in 1556, via Wikipedia.

The four-year-old programme expects to generate herds of its new aurochs (which it plans to call a “tauros”) by 2025, at which point, they “expect that large tracts of Europe will have been rewilded and the animals will be allowed to roam across them.” Already, however, they are supporting their research by renting proto-tauroses to nature parks, and — most interestingly, from my perspective — butchering them. To quote Kolbert again:

The meat is marketed as “wild beef,” and it commands a premium in Amsterdam, where it is available only to customers who sign up for delivery in advance.

This gastronomic aspect of rewilding has caught on in recent years, as ecconomically depressed areas across Europe join the movement: Kolbert writes that “it is expected that visitors to the continent’s rewilded regions will be able to enjoy not just the safari-like tours but also the local cuisine.” The chance to eat man-made recreations of a long-lost ecosystem, Diego Benito, who runs a thirteen-hundred acre nature preserve in far western Spain, tells Kolbert, is exactly the kind of story that will sell.

Once again, the authenticity of these historical flavours — and of the new wildernesses they come from — is both a key part of their attraction and an acknowledged impossibility. No one is claiming to be able to recreate an originary wine or an extinct animal — but they are appealing to a powerful nostalgia for a lost pre-modern landscape nonetheless.

In the end, Wouter Helmer, a co-founder of Rewilding Europe, explains to Kolbert that they are “not looking backward but forward,” and that, in the end, whether the landscape they created is a wilderness or not, “it will be wilder than it was, and that’s what matters.”

•••

While acknowledging its appeal, Kolbert concludes her article unconvinced of rewilding’s ultimate viability. Meanwhile, Gissen points out that franc de pied vines, by their very nature, frequently succumb to phylloxera and have to be replanted again, and again. And, as William Grimes (and I) assert at the start of this post, tasting historical flavour is impossible, if only on the level of our own perceptual framework.

Nonetheless — and despite the fact that these kinds of biological reconstructions are all-too-frequently hijacked in the name of pseudoscience or, worse, racists and eugenicists in search of a mythic lost purity — these experiments are important, as much for what they can’t do as what they can.

As Gissen writes, franc de pied wines “dare history as much as they rebuild it.” They and the tauros are what he calls elsewhere an “agitational reconstruction” —  a form of historical reflection on contemporary issues.

By proposing an alternate history, this expensive “wild beef” and obscure, extremely silky wine can provoke us to reconsider our own assumptions as to what wine, or the landscape, can and should be. It is historical reconstruction as a method for critiquing the present and re-imagining the future, rather than recapturing the past.

* Curiously, due to its geography and climate, French vines imported into Chile never succumbed to the pest. Christy Campbell, in The Botanist and the Vintner, reports that many Chilean wines take great pride in the fact that they are still grown on “original” French rootstock — but, of course, not on French terroir.

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

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One cover and inside cover.

We’ve put video recordings of each event online in our media archive, but, given the quality of the content and the fact that Sarah and I are both writers and bibliophiles, we got excited about publishing them as edited and illustrated transcripts, too.

The Foodprint Papers were initially created as rewards for our wonderful Kickstarter supporters, whose generosity helped make Foodprint LA possible. But, after seeing Volume One: Foodprint NYC, laid out by our graphic designer, Dylan C. Lathrop, we decided we wanted to make it available as a print-on-demand pamphlet too.

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One Zoning Diet spread.

It’s just $10 for a slim, perfect-bound and beautifully designed 70-odd pages, and, even though Lulu’s print quality can often leave something to be desired, the test copy I ordered looks and feels really quite good, even if I do say so myself. What’s more, by buying it, you will be supporting future Foodprint Project events and publications!

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One in print.

The conversations at Foodprint NYC ranged from skyscraper snail farming and food in utopian urban design to the decline of the Jewish deli and the role of the Croton aqueduct in New York City’s nineteenth-century brewing explosion.

On a Saturday afternoon in February 2010, panelists Amale Androus, Sean Basinski, Joel Berg, Jonathan Bogarín, Nevin Cohen, Marcelo Coelho, Makalé Faber Cullen, Rebecca Federman, Stanley Fleishman, William Grimes, David Haskell, Annie Hauck-Lawson, Natalie Jeremijenko, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, David Sax, and Beverly Tepper, in conversation with myself, Sarah Rich, and guest moderator Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, managed to cover bodega cartography, food stamp fingerprinting, bitter blockers, and the need for regional abattoirs — and much else besides.

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One Culinary Cartography spread.

I’ve pulled out one quote and some spreads from each panel, just to give you a taste:

You mentioned these ads they’re running where they’re going to tax “sugary sodas,” as they call them. It’s the biggest load of crap. They should be taxing every soda. If you think diet soda’s that healthy for you, you’ve got to be nuts. Every soda should be taxed, and stop jerking around. But all that will happen if only New York does it is that we’ll send the business to New Jersey. Stanley Fleischman on soda taxes, Zoning Diet.

One thing that was interesting — and it took us a while to get this out of the bodega owners — but one guy finally told us, “Look, alright, we make our money from beer. There’s beer, and then there’s the rest of the stuff.” Jonathan Bogarín on geographic variations in bodega inventory, Culinary Cartography.

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One in print.

There were very special structures in the late 1800s and early 20th-century called oyster barges, where oysters were brokered. They were two-storey boats that were docked along the East River [...]. The boats would supply from the waterside and the merchants would conduct business from the quay side. Annie Hauck-Lawson on that once quintessential indigenous New York food, the oyster, Edible Archaeology.

When you think about the kinds of things you can do on your computer in terms of design — simple things, like a Photoshop blur filter, for instance — it makes you wonder what a blur filter for food would be? What would it do and taste like? I think there’s a really exciting opportunity to give people the same sort of one-button design tools they have on their computer, but for food. Marcelo Coelho on his prototype 3D food printer, Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios.

IMAGE: Foodprint Papers: Volume One Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios spread.

You can get your copy online here (thank you!). Coming soon: Volume Two: Foodprint Toronto!

Thanks again to our panelists, our guest moderator, Geoff Manaugh, our host, Studio-X NYC, and in-kind sponsors, City Bakery and Izze, our logo designer, Nikki Hiatt, our photographers, Ho Kyung Lee and Rachel Hillery, our Kickstarter supporters, and our graphic designer, Dylan C. Lathrop.

Dogs still occupy a variety of roles in the human food system, from sheep herding to barbecued delicacy. What is less well known is that before the advent of gas or electric ovens, dogs also provided a convenient power source for kitchen appliances.

IMAGE: A doggy treadmill, yours for only $639, via Rachel Laudan.

Inspired by a contemporary advertisement for a doggy treadmill, food historian Rachel Laudan has posted some fantastic historical images of dog-powered butter churns (offered in the Sears catalogue as recently as the early twentieth-century), as well as the special, now extinct, breed of dog employed to turn meat in front of the fire in kitchens from Tudor to Victorian times.

IMAGE: “If you keep a dog, make him ‘work his passage.’” A dog-powered butter churn advertised in a Sears catalogue from the early twentieth-century, via Rachel Laudan.

According to Ivan Day, whose collection of antique British cooking equipment is unsurpassed, spit-roasting beef in front of an open hearth is “the finest technique ever devised for cooking meat.” Bee Wilson, describing the process in her excellent new book, Consider the Fork, explains that a true roast cooks slowly over several hours:

The food cooks at a significant distance from the embers, rotating all the while. The rotation means that the heat cannot accumulate too much on any single spot: no scorching. [...] Both the flavours and textures were out-of-this-world superb.

IMAGE: Sirloin of beef roasting in front of a contemporary hearth, via Food History Jottings.

To roast effectively, a cook needed to find the sweet spot — the optimum distance from the fire for roasting without charring — and make sure the food was firmly attached in order to rotate with the spit. Beyond those concerns, Wilson writes, “there was one more challenge facing the roaster, and it was the trickiest by far: how to keep a hulking piece of meat in perpetual motion for the hours it needed to cook.”

Originally, Wilson writes, the job of turnspit was usually assigned to a luckless boy, occasionally as young as five years old, who frequently worked naked or semi-clothed due to the heat. She gives the example of John Macdonald, a Scottish orphan who was demoted from his first job rocking a baby’s cradle to become a turnspit in a gentleman’s home, before rising up through the ranks to become a footman.

However, “over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain,”  Wilson notes that boys had gradually been replaced by animals — primarily dogs, although apparently some cooks preferred to use geese, crediting them with greater stamina and less (troublesome) intelligence.

IMAGE: The Turnspit dog, from Reverend J. G. Wood’s Illustrated Natural History, published in 1853, via Wikipedia.

The existence of a special dog bred for kitchen service was mentioned as early as 1576, in an English book on dogs. According to the BBC, the turnspit was recognised by taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus as a separate breed in 1756. Based on contemporary references, it was a terrier of some sort, developed from badger-hunting dogs.

Turnspits were long in the body, like a sausage dog, with droopy ears and short, strong legs that Darwin remarked upon as an example of a desirable genetic trait nurtured through selective breeding.

IMAGE: A turnspit dog at work, in an illustration from c. 1800, via Wikipedia.

“Stuck in a wheel around 2.5 feet in diameter, suspended high up against a wall near the fireplace,” writes Wilson, turnspit dogs “were forced to trundle round and round. The treadmill was connected to the spit via a pulley.”

Abergavenny Museum claims to have “the last surviving specimen of a turnspit dog, albeit stuffed,” in its collection. However, Wilson reports that “dog wheels were still being used in American restaurant kitchens well into the nineteenth century,” when, in the face of early animal rights lobbying, they were often replaced with young black children.

IMAGE: Whiskey, the last turnspit dog, is item A.193.0 in the Abergavenny Museum collection.

IMAGE: Abergavenny Museum’s collection also includes this example of an eighteenth-century turnspit dog wheel, from Coed Cernyw, Monmouthshire.

“In the end,” she writes, “it was not kindness that ended the era of the turnspit dog but mechanisation.” Clockwork, steam, and dynamo-driven spit-jacks were “the gleaming espresso machines of their day: the single kitchen product on which the most complex engineering was lavished.”

Over the years, then, technological advances led to the turnspit breed dying out, and the spit and range itself eventually became obsolete, replaced by the electric or gas oven of today. “The small electric motor,” concludes Rachel Laudan, “is a much better way to dispose of all those time-consuming, tedious, and tiring kitchen chores assigned to women, servants, or dogs in the past.”

IMAGE: Another fantastic illustration from Rachel Laudan’s post: Nicholas Potter’s “Enterprise Dog Power” Treadmill (1881) for powering butter churns.

But, given the United States’ current canine obesity epidemic, a carbon-neutral, Brooklyn-based, artisanal, raw milk butter-churning co-op, running entirely on pet power, surely cannot be far away…

[NOTE: Apologies and thanks are due to Patrick M. James, who first alerted me to the existence of turnspit dogs a couple of years ago — and who I didn't believe, even after Wikipedia corroborated his story!]

The BBC, reporting from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, summarises an interesting presentation on the significance of traditional Maori ovens, or hangi pits, in paleomagnetic research.

IMAGE: Turner’s proof-of-concept hangi pit. Photo by Gillian Turner via the BBC.

The story begins earlier this year, in June, when Dr. Gillian Turner, a physicist at Victoria University in Wellington, worked with an archaeologist at the university’s school of Maori studies as well as some local indigenous people to build an experimental hangi using traditional techniques.

A hangi is essentially an earth- and rock-based version of a low-pressure, steam-assisted slow-cooker, with meat and vegetables placed in a pit for four hours, on top of superheated rocks and water-doused ferns, and under a layer of earth. The results are apparently delicious: meat is fall-off-the-bone tender, and infused with the subtle fragrance of the leaves and minerals that surround it.

IMAGE: Turner used a pyramid of cypress logs to heat her stones. Photo via Genuine Maori Cuisine.

IMAGE: A contemporary hangi under construction, using sacking to cover the food and protect it from the earth. The rocks have been heated, the leaves sprinkled with water, and the food placed on top; all that remains is to cover the whole thing with earth and leave it for four hours. Photo via Genuine Maori Cuisine.

Today, many Maori use wire baskets, cloth rather than leaves, or even “hangi machines,” but the best stones, including volcanic andesites, greywackes, and quartzites, are still passed down through generations as family heirlooms.

And it is the stones rather than the food that Dr. Turner is interested in: her experiment was designed to see whether the rocks in a traditional Maori oven reach the Curie temperature, the point at which magnetic minerals become demagnetised.

IMAGE: Measuring hangi rocks. Photo by Gillian Turner via the BBC.

Using thermocouples buried in her reconstructed oven, Turner found that the stones did indeed reach up to 1,100°C, and the rocks’ original magnetic polarisation was wiped clean. As the oven cooled down, however, the rocks became remagnetised in alignment with the current orientation and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field.

Every time a Maori oven is lit, in other words, its materials are rearranged to form a record of that particular moment’s geomagnetic conditions.

Taylor is now combing through records of archaeological digs across New Zealand to find abandoned hangi ovens, whose stones, combined with radiocarbon dating of the associated charcoal, will help her plot shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field over time.

IMAGE: Earth’s magnetic field, as represented in an illustration by Tasa Graphic Arts.

In response to geodynamic forces that scientists still don’t fully understand, Earth’s North and South poles have reversed polarity several times, at varying intervals, even over the course of human existence. In fact, according to the British Geological Survey, we may be in the early stages of a reversal (or a less drastic “excursion”) right now, as the strength of the magnetic field appears to have declined by half since Roman times.

Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what happens during a reversal, or how fast, although we do know that the resulting increase in exposure to atmospheric radiation would pose a serious problem for GPS and other communications satellites, not to mention the birds, fish, and turtles who use geomagnetic sensing to migrate over long distances.

IMAGE: Stills from an animation showing a 1995 model of geomagnetic reversal created by Gary Glatzmaier and Paul Roberts and published in Nature, via Wikipedia.

To that end, geophysicists are developing mathematical models of geodynamic variation that they then test against historical readings gathered from pottery, magnetic mineral-rich rock, and even ships’ records, from points all over the Earth’s surface. As the BBC reports, however, “crucial data from the southwest Pacific is missing,” and New Zealand’s Maori settlers were neither a compass-bearing nor a pottery-using people.

Fortunately, as Gillian Taylor’s experiment shows, their cooking technology can fill the gap. Just as the fossilised remains of the human diet allow paleontologists to construct climate and ecological histories, abandoned Maori kitchen appliances turn out to provide a record of geomagnetic history — an edible archaeology whose invisible markings add planetary significance to its cultural importance.

I could not be more excited to announce the next episode of Foodprint Project, the roving conversation series about food and the city that I co-curate with Sarah Rich. On December 9, 2012, we’ll be bringing Foodprint to LA, one of my favourite cities in the world, thanks to our generous hosts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and our wonderfully patient Kickstarter supporters.

IMAGE: The Foodprint LA logo was designed by Nikki Hiatt.

For Foodprint LA, the fourth in our international series, we’ll be following the same basic recipe as at Foodprint NYC and Foodprint Toronto — four panels that explore the forces that shape the city’s food and speculate on how to feed Los Angeles in the future — which has the added benefit of allowing us to draw comparisons and conclusions across three very different cities.

And, as at our previous events, we have a fantastic line-up of panelists and guest moderators. Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG will kick off the day at 12:30 p.m. in LACMA’s Brown Auditorium with a conversation between Paula Daniels, Mayor Villaraigosa’s Senior Adviser on Food Policy and Special Water Projects, Hadley Arnold, co-director of the Arid Lands Institute, journalist Nate Berg, RAND researcher Dr. Deborah Cohen, and urban investment expert Rudy Espinoza.

IMAGE: As documented by Ted Kane on Polar Inertia, an estimated 4,000 registered mobile restaurants, “or what the LA county department of health services calls Mobile Food Preparation Units (MFPU),” can be found on the streets of Los Angeles every day, where they are accompanied by at least 2,000 more unregistered, illegal mobile food vendors. Photo: Polar Inertia.

From the ways in which designers can help rethink the endless water wars between California’s farmland and cities, to the relative merits of fruit cart micro-loans and junk food regulation in combating obesity, this Zoning Diet panel will explore the ways infrastructure, policy, and economics shape the city’s food systems.

IMAGE: Crowds watch as the LA aqueduct is opened on November 5, 1913. Photo via Water and Power Associates.

I’ll be moderating our second panel, Culinary Cartography, and I’m looking forward to learning about how the city’s sprawl has translated into delicious pockets of regional ethnic cuisine, how citizen-led food and bike mapping efforts are taking shape in South LA, and what we can learn when we analyse the geography of the city’s community gardens, diet-related diseases, and food deserts.

To that end, I’ll be joined by legendary food critic Jonathan Gold, civic media strategist and participatory mapper Benjamin Stokes, Mary Lee of social equity research and action institute PolicyLink, and Teague Weybright, current board president of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council.

IMAGE: Community-created Healthy Food Map for South LA, via Benjamin Stokes. Download a larger PDF here.

Our third panel, Edible Archaeology, looks at the way the past has shaped LA’s current foodscape — and might inspire its future. As recently as the 1950s, Los Angeles county was the largest agricultural producer in the nation, but a boom kickstarted by wartime military production and postwar migration replaced the city’s orchards and wheat fields with the nation’s first drive-through market and countless mini-mall restaurants boasting the unbeatable combination of Chinese food and donuts.

IMAGE: Tweedy Panda Chinese Food and Donuts on Washington Boulevard in LA. Photo by Katie Robbins, to accompany her article exploring the mysterious pairing.

Judith Gerber, better known as “LA Farm Girl,” Willy Blackmore, the Los Angeles editor of Tasting Table, Matt Novak of Paleofuture, artist Jessica Rath, and taco historian Gustavo Arellano will help Sarah Rich uncover overlooked traces and contemporary revivals of Los Angeles’ agricultural past, explore some of the ways that sci-fi movies of the past have imagined the food of the future, and even examine backyard fruit trees as a bridge to the history of human apple design and preservation.

IMAGE: Soylent Green poster (1973).

IMAGE: PI 588933.12 (unnamed cluster), sculpture by Jessica Rath.

Finally, we’ll be ending the day’s discussion with a speculative look at the future of food: Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal will be gathering a uniquely Angeleno perspective onto the opportunities — and challenges — of technologies such as synthetic biology, robotic harvesting, and vertical farming.

IMAGE: Verti-Gro system at Erik Cutter’s Alegría Fresh (the same system is used at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center).

His panelists include Christina Agapakis, a scientist whose research looks at the structure, evolution and design of the microbial communities that help us to produce and digest our food, Erik Cutter, the entrepreneur behind a new vertical farming start-up in Laguna Beach, Allison Carruth, a scholar of food culture and art-science collaboration, and Joseph Wickham, who has recently developed a prototype self-navigating strawberry harvesting robot.

IMAGE: Robotic Strawberry Harvester, via Robotic Harvesting, LLC.

In other words, I’m quietly confident that it will be an absolutely fantastic afternoon of conversation and ideas, and it’s also completely free (although seating is limited, so I’d advise arriving promptly). You can find more details at our website, but to stay up-to-date as we release details about additional program elements (such as the foodscape walking tour we’re partnering with the awesome Alissa Walker to put together on Saturday, December 8), please join the Foodprint Project mailing list and follow us on Twitter.

If you have ideas, suggestions, questions, or offers of help and/or sponsorship, feel free to leave a comment or email me directly — I’d be more than happy to hear from you. You can also download our press release here: we’d love your help in spreading the word. See you in LA!

We owe a huge thanks to LACMA, our host for the afternoon, and to Jose Blondet, LACMA’s curator of special initiatives, who has been incredibly helpful in coordinating the day’s events. We’re also extremely appreciative of the time our panelists and guest moderators are generously sharing with us, and for all of our Kickstarter supporters, whose pledges kept us motivated to put Foodprint LA together.

Within a delightful slideshow of images from the Poultry Club’s 2012 National Show I found this gem, showing Judge Malcolm Thompson inspecting the UK’s finest eggs.

IMAGE: Judge Malcolm Thompson inspecting eggs. Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

A quick look at the Poultry Club’s website reveals that the art of egg showing is more nuanced than one might expect. For whole eggs, “the egg to show” must approach perfection in “shape, shell texture, colour, and size with a fresh appearance and bloom.” Pointy ends, overlarge pores, “muscle indentations, lime pimples, and bulges” are just a few of the flaws that can put an otherwise perfectly attractive egg out of the running altogether.

Achieving success with a shell-less entry is even more challenging, as, for obvious reasons, exhibitors cannot inspect their specimen before it is put on display at the show. The Poultry Club recommends “opening up a few eggs prior to the show, noting the particular egg with the contents somewhere near the mark, and noting the bird which produces it,” in order to be able to send an egg with a chance of success.

Eggs with pale yolks will be rejected, as will orange and red yolks: instead, “the standard calls for a rich golden yellow.”

See also that the contents stands up well and shows a nice rounded yolk situated as near as possible in the centre of the thick albumen, which should be clear and have a definite outline. At each end of the yolk, the chalazae cords should be visible, as will the blastoderm or germ spot to be found at one side of the centre of the yolk.

With these aesthetic guidelines clearly laid out, the Poultry Club adds a final, useful note on judging freshness (always a slippery attribute). As an egg ages, its water content evaporates through its porous shell, which causes “the contents to ‘flop’ within the shell when the egg is shaken sharply.” Judges will thus “jerk an egg past their ear when judging, listening for a telltale ‘flip’.”

However, even a fresh egg can be made to rattle if shaken too vigorously, the Poultry Club warns, with disastrous consequences for competitive egg exhibitors:

At shows where no barriers are placed between the exhibits and the public, winning eggs can be shaken by all who pass with the result that the end of the day they too will ‘rattle’ and the judge’s reputation is held in dispute. Fresh eggs, when sent to a show by rail or parcel post, also tend to end up rattling on the show bench.

In this instance, there is nothing for it but for the judge to break the egg open, “as empowered to do by Poultry Club Rules,” in order to look for “a large air sac, runny white, and a flat yolk with wrinkled membrane” that would indicate age.

IMAGE: Judge Malcolm Thompson breaks an egg open for inspection. Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

This year, the Powell Owen Cup for Champion Egg Exhibit was awarded to T. McNeight for his “3 Large Cream,” with T. D. Hannam earning the Max Butler Memorial Trophy for Best Egg Contents. Sadly, there are no reports as to whether these ovular beauties made a nice omelette afterward…

As New York City cleans up post-Sandy (and a huge thanks goes out to those who are out doing the cleaning!), the storm has revealed the city’s topography and infrastructure, its former marshes, power networks, and rat population, in ways that are easy to overlook when things are running smoothly.

IMAGE: The queue to get into Trader Joe’s in Chelsea on Sunday. PHOTO CREDIT: DNAinfo/Serena Solomon.

Of particular interest to edible geographers were the insights the storm offered into the city’s food supply chain. As New Yorkers prepared for the storm, they all went grocery shopping at once, emptying the shelves of bread in Park Slope, of peanut butter at Trader Joe’s, and of kale at the Fairway in Red Hook. Milk and bottled water were also popular, but not nearly as in demand as alcohol, with beer “doing surprisingly well,” according to the owner of Concord Market in downtown Brooklyn.

IMAGE: Stocking up on the essentials, pre-Sandy. PHOTO CREDIT: DNAinfo/Jill Colvin.

As they sat at home and waited for the storm to hit on Monday, many New Yorkers dealt with their cabin fever by ordering takeaway and watching films: The New York Times reported that “Netflix said it saw about 20 percent more traffic than last week on its streaming movie service, with many of the customers on the East Coast,” while, “Seamless, an online food delivery service, reported more orders and higher checks than usual.”

The immediate post-storm foodscape has varied widely based on neighbourhood impact. For restaurants, warehouses, supermarkets, and factories that were flooded, the clean up will be lengthy and expensive. For food service and storage facilities that lost power, thousands of dollars-worth of food will have to be thrown away. However, restaurants and bars that were undamaged and able to open on Tuesday, the day after the storm, did a roaring trade — Smith & Wollensky steakhouse reportedly sold every single piece of meat in their inventory before closing.

IMAGE: Shopping carts filled with perishable food in front of the Red Hook Fairway. Photo by @wookietv, via Gothamist.

Perhaps the most interesting reports came from the field of food distribution. In Lower Manhattan, food trucks demonstrated the responsive advantage of mobile urban infrastructure as they made their way through the congested, debris-strewn streets to sell gourmet grilled cheese, waffles, and coffee to residents of the black-out zone.*

IMAGE: Queuing for coffee from the Mudtruck on Tuesday. Photo by @sarahbellummmm, via Gothamist.

Meanwhile, as supermarkets in areas that weren’t hit by floods or electricity cuts re-opened yesterday, most still had noticeable gaps on their shelves (eggs and salad greens were in short supply in my neighbourhood), prompting the question of how quickly delivery trucks would be able to start making the rounds again.

Despite today’s “just-in-time” supply chain, which leaves the city with no more than “two to three days of food on hand at normal consumption levels,” The New York Post reported that widespread food shortages were unlikely. Instead, John Catsimatidis, owner of the local Gristedes supermarket chain, told the Post that “We are doing it hour by hour, trying to get trucks from our warehouses,” but that “customers might notice a few things missing. [...] Bread and milk. We might be running a day behind.”

IMAGE: Empty bread shelves. PHOTO CREDIT: DNAinfo/Alan Neuhauser.

Both warehouse power outages and large-scale road closures have caused disruption to the entire region’s food distribution networks. Earlier today, Ed Chouinard, President of Perishable Distribution Solutions, a refrigerated fleet based in Chicago, told The Huffington Post:

I’ve got thousands of trucks that are sitting on the East Coast. For our clients, it’s almost entirely a question of whether or not they have power, and right now we’re calling around everywhere [in New York and New Jersey] and no one’s open.

For foodservice giants Sysco, The Huffington Post reported that “dangerous road conditions, not power outages, were the biggest hindrance to deliveries in the tri-state area on Tuesday.” Western Growers, whose members supply half the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables, reported that they were anticipating a seven-to-ten-day “ripple effect” of “closed roads, delays at receivers due to power outages, slowdown in loading capacity and higher rates due to limited available capacity.”

Reassuringly, food supply is treated with the same level of concern as the city’s electricity, transportation, and communications systems. The New York Post reported that “representatives from major food suppliers have a seat in the command centers of the city’s and state’s Office of Emergency Management,” and that “food trucks can convoy with police escorts along roads and bridges closed to the public” in order to restock the city’s shelves, though that hasn’t been necessary yet.

It seems that for a storm of such catastrophic proportions, the city’s food supply system has proven, for the most part, to be sufficiently resilient to keep its citizens fed. The interesting question, if, as it seems, these kinds of natural disasters are to become more common, is how it, and we, will adjust to meet the challenge.

*UPDATE: As many have noted, the storm has also revealed existing inequality in a particularly stark light. For residents of the black-out zone who rely on food stamp EBT cards, grocery shopping has become even more difficult as even those stores that are open are without electricity and can only accept cash. For the elderly, sick, or otherwise immobile, the storm has stretched existing care even thinner, as the family members, case workers, and meals-on-wheels volunteers they would normally rely on for food are themselves stuck without access to public transit, petrol, bridges, tunnels, clear streets, or even, in some cases, their washed-away car.

Impressively, it seems as though a self-organising network of government agencies, citizens, restaurants, food trucks, and non-profits has emerged to set up distribution hubs and serve meals in stricken areas, with volunteers even climbing the darkened stairwells of high-rises to deliver food parcels and bottled water to people who cannot leave their homes.

Just in time for those of you planning to head out trick-or-treating tonight, architect and planner Paul L. Knight and his colleague Kevin Clark have conducted a series of analyses of the impact of urban design on your sugar haul.

IMAGE: Conley Creek Subdivision, Conley, GA, analysed by Paul L. Knight and Kevin Clark in terms of Halloween-onomics.

Knight and Clark’s metrics include “Potential Candy Score” (based on the acreage of your target neighbourhood multiplied by the number of houses per acre, families per house, and an informed estimate of both candy-giving families and candy-pieces per family), “Candy Density” (potential candy score divided by acreage of target neighbourhood), and “Trick-or-Treating Time” (a straightforward calculation of the route length in terms of a child’s average walking speed in feet per minute).

After all, as they point out, “time is candy!”

Candy lovers know that all you need is a costume and a bucket to satisfy your sweet tooth, but in order to maximize a Halloween outing one must focus on the numbers including route efficiency, candy distributors per block (typically dwelling units), and “candy density” (candy pieces per acre).

Equipped with these formulae, Type-A parents and sugar-obsessed juvenile maths geeks still have time to data-crunch their city in order to find those neighbourhoods whose layout offers the most sugar for the least investment in terms of time and energy.

But, for those of us who are greedy but lazy, Knight and Clark have provided a meta-analysis of their findings, which confirm that, in terms of Halloween happiness as for other, more commonly surveyed indices, “the quantitative metrics fall in favor of the walkable, mixed-use communities.”

Traditional neighborhood design promotes a number of positive attributes for a higher quality of life including physical health, economic and social opportunities, and more candy. That’s right, traditional neighborhood design is also better for trick-or-treating. For those looking to score big on Halloween night, you may want to by-pass the suburbs and head straight for your nearest new urbanist communities.

IMAGE: Glenwood Park, Atlanta, GA, analysed by Paul L. Knight and Kevin Clark in terms of Halloween-onomics.

In short, by favouring gridded streets over cul-de-sacs, and townhouses or multi-family buildings over single-family homes, especially those that are set back from the street, urban ghouls and witches could earn triple the treats their suburban cousins do in the same amount of time. Though some may quibble, citing apartment buildings’ time-sucking doormen or less-likely-to-be-at-home inhabitants, it seems as though, when it comes to opportunity maximisation, urban density wins on calories and cavities as well as careers.

Visit Knight’s entertaining post for the full analysis, which I found via @sarahrich.

IMAGE: The Marshall strawberry, via Leah Gauthier’s pop-up shop.

It is “the finest eating strawberry in America.” It is “exceedingly handsome, splendidly flavored, pleasantly sprightly, aromatic and juicy.” In fact, it was once “the standard of excellence for the entire northern strawberry industry.”

In 1939, it was served to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at a special royal luncheon in Vancouver, and it was one of only two kinds of strawberry allowed into the house by the young James Beard’s mother. But, by 2004, it was named one of the ten most endangered foods in the USA by the RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) coalition, reduced by its susceptibility to imported viruses and its short shelf life to a single clone held in the USDA’s Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon.

IMAGE: The Marshall strawberry, via Leah Gauthier’s pop-up shop.

Now, in 2012, the Marshall strawberry is not only extremely rare and exceedingly delicious, it is also a work of art, released in a limited edition of 600 by artist Leah Gauthier, who has grown the plants from a single runner that the USDA kindly overnighted to her in 2007.

For just $65, while supplies last, collectors can acquire their very own “baby Marshall strawberry plant (size varies, but most are around 3-4″ tall),” complete with “hand-sewn fabric container with a metal tag designating its number in the series and care instructions.”

Through the addition of water and some sunshine, the owner of each genetically identical but artistically unique Marshall will be able to experience a flavour on the verge of extinction, while contributing to its ongoing survival, and to a revival in local food cultivation.

IMAGE: 1/600, Marshall strawberry, Leah Gauthier, 2012.

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone,” declared Marcel Duchamp, the artist famous for showing a urinal, a snow shovel, and 50 cc of Parisian air as “readymade” artworks. Gauthier cannot preserve the Marshall strawberry — her own readymade fruit — simply by growing it on her own, but perhaps, by purchasing it as an artist’s edition, her audience can.