Another Reason Not to Get a Tattoo of Your Local Liquor Store

By Nicola | Published: April 21, 2011

IMAGE: Anthony Garcia, photographed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, via the Los Angeles Times.

25-year-old gang member Anthony Garcia spent years adding detail to the drawing of a Pico Rivera liquor store on his chest, including a loop of Christmas fairy lights strung along the ceiling and the bowed street lamp and sign across the way. But this is no body art homage to a favoured alcohol purveyor.

Instead, Garcia’s drawing commemorates a murder scene, complete with a prone Mr. Peanut-figure, riddled with bullets. According to Robert Faturechi, who covered the bizarre story in the Los Angeles Times, “in gang slang, the word ‘peanut’ is used to derisively describe a rival gang member.”

Unfortunately for Garcia, after he was taken back to a Los Angeles police station on suspicion of driving on a suspended license, a routine photograph of his tattoos helped convict him of the unsolved murder of 23-year-old John Juarez — the “peanut” he had permanently inked onto his upper body.

Faturechi reports that “suspected gang members typically are asked to remove their shirts and have their tattoos photographed by graffiti team deputies,” as they often use the same tags on their bodies as they do on walls and buses around the city. Garcia’s tattoo made it into that collection, where it was eventually seen by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide investigator, Kevin Lloyd. Every single detail of the tattoo, down to the angle of the dead man’s body and the shop signage, precisely matched the scene of a 2004 liquor store killing of Juarez, a crime that stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

You can read how Garcia’s tattoo was used to extract a confession over at the L.A. Times. Meanwhile, as unlikely as it undoubtedly is, I can’t help but imagine this Pico Rivera liquor store as just one example of an entire cartography of unremarkable fried chicken restaurants, taco stands, and corner shops commemorated in this way — a gallery of otherwise anonymous sites, without web sites or Facebook fan pages, that are celebrated nonetheless on the illuminated skin of America’s gangs.

Thanks to the L.A. Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, for the link.

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Strange and Beautiful Seeds From the Atom

By Nicola | Published: April 21, 2011

IMAGE: Garden show display advertising “super atomic energized seeds,” photo by Frank Scherschel for Life, 1961, via Pruned

At her blog, Garden History Girl, Paige Johnson (by day, a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa), describes the inception of the Atomic Gardening Society:

In March 1959, an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x,’ ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations. The irradiated peanuts were unusually large — big as almonds, according to those in attendance, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside — and had reached the dining table through the generosity of their inventor Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, who sent them as a gift to Mrs. Muriel Howorth, Eastbourne, enthusiast for all things atomic.

Disappointed with the reaction of her guests, who were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards “began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all … I had the idea to … pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.” The “Muriel Howorth” peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon two feet high. She called the newspapers.

Shortly thereafter, in a blaze of enthusiasm, Muriel formed the Atomic Gardening Society (with herself as president) and even published a how-to-guide, Atomic Gardening, in order to “co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation.”

As Johnson explains, this interest in using nuclear radiation in plant breeding to induce helpful mutations “grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture. ‘Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads….”

IMAGE: An atomic seed packet, provided by Paige Johnson, via Pruned.

IMAGE: Atomic seeds on sale, photo by Frank Scherschel for Life, provided by Paige Johnson, via Pruned.

Following from his own week of atomic tourism, tracing the ruins and erasures of Nike missile sites that encircle Chicago, Alexander Trevi of Pruned has posted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Johnson, on her continuing efforts to research this neglected piece of nuclear history. In it, Johnson explains that, aside from its obvious retro-futuristic appeal, the story of the Atomic Gardens is particularly compelling for its citizen science component, as well as its potential to offer a historical perspective on the inflated claims of GM-boosters today.

As she points out, “It’s clear from reading the primary sources that most people involved were deeply sincere. They really thought their efforts would eradicate hunger, end famine, prevent another war.” These are eerily similar claims to those we hear from the Gates Foundation, for example, as they pour millions into the development and propagation of transgenic Golden Rice and BioCassava Plus.

IMAGE: “Normal” dwarf tomatoes growing alongside “atomic energized” dwarf tomatoes, photo by Frank Scherschel for Life, via Pruned.

In addition to encouraging a necessary scepticism in our contemporary debate, the story of the atomic gardens also provides a positive example of the value of transparency and public engagement in the debate over altered crops. As Johnson explains to Pruned:

I think one way that science has failed the public is by not making its results accessible, often with the implicit — even explicit — excuse that non-scientists somehow aren’t smart enough to understand them, which is self-serving tosh. It’s interesting that public engagement was desired, and sought out, during the Atoms for Peace program of which the atomic gardens were a part. It was a time when the atomic scientists who had been sequestered during the war began to speak strongly into the public sphere about their science and its implications, to enter the cultural discussion in the way that these atomic experiments — which are still ongoing — should now.

The story of these citizen-pioneers of mutagenesis (the technical term for creating genetic change through the application of chemical, physical, and biological agents) is full of fantastic details, from Muriel Howorth’s propagandising ballet-mime, Isotopia, which involved a cast of Knowledge, Electron, Proton, Neutron, Rat, and Cow, as well as a working geiger counter, to Tennessee-based atomic entrepreneur C.J. Speas irradiating trays of seedlings into his backyard bunker.

IMAGE: C.J. Speas giving a tour of his radioactive bunker to high school students, photo by Grey Villet for Life, via Pruned.

IMAGE: Speas with a tray of irradiated seedlings, photo by Grey Villet for Life, via Pruned.

Perhaps the most bizarre detail in the interview, however, is the news that these gamma gardens are still in operation, relatively unchanged in design since the 50s, in the grounds of national laboratories today. Their circular form, which, as Johnson notes, bears more than a passing resemblance to the atomic danger symbol, “was simply based upon the need to arrange the plants in concentric circles around the radiation source which stood like a totem in the center of the field.”

It was basically a slug of radioactive material within a pole; when workers needed to enter the field it was lowered below ground into a lead lined chamber. There were a series of fences and alarms to keep people from entering the field when the source was above ground. The amount of radiation received by the plants naturally varied according to how close they were to the pole.

So usually a single variety would be arranged as a ‘wedge’ leading away from the pole, so that the effects of a range of radiation levels could be evaluated. Most of the plants close to the pole simply died. A little further away, they would be so genetically altered that they were riddled with tumors and other growth abnormalities. It was generally the rows where the plants ‘looked’ normal, but still had genetic alterations, that were of the most interest, that were ‘just right’ as far as mutation breeding was concerned!

Over at GOOD, Peter Smith recently described a similar layout at the still-active Institute of Radiation Breeding, in Hitachiohmiya, Japan, which has “has a 88.8 Terabecquerel Cobalt-60 source, ringed by a 3,608-foot radius Gamma field (the world’s largest), and a 28-foot high shield dike around the perimeter.”

IMAGE: A gamma garden at Brookhaven National Labs, New York, c. 1958; image provided by Paige Johnson, via Pruned.

IMAGE: Aerial view of the Institute of Radiation Breeding, Hitachiohmiya, Japan.

As it turns out, far from being a fantastic fossil from the future that never was, along with jetpacks and flying cars, atomic gardening is alive and well today. According to a 2007 New York Times story, which quotes Dr. Pierre Lagoda, head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency, radiation breeding is actually experiencing a renaissance, due to the introduction of “new methods that speed up the identification of mutants.”

IMAGE: Mutant crop varieties mapped by The New York Times.

What’s more, the Times adds, nearly 2,000 gamma radiation-induced mutant crop varieties have been registered around the world, including Calrose 76, a dwarf varietal that accounts for about half the rice grown in California, and the popular Star Ruby and Rio Red grapefruits, whose deep colour is a mutation produced through radiation breeding in the 1970s. Similarly, Johnson tells Pruned that “most of the global production of mint oil,” with an annual market value estimated at $930 million, is extracted from the “wilt-resistant ‘Todd’s Mitcham’ cultivar, a product of thermal neutron irradiation.” She adds that “the exact nature of the genetic changes that cause it to be wilt-resistant remain unknown.”

IMAGE: “Pierre Lagoda, the head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency, showing mutated plants at a greenhouse in Austria,” photo by Herwig Prammer for The New York Times.

What’s so intriguing about all of this, in terms of the current debate on “Frankenfoods,” is that mutagenesis helps add some much-needed shades of gray to the idea of genetic manipulation. Speaking to The New York Times, Dr. Lagoda is quick to point out that unlike Monsanto’s biotechnologists with their insertion of primrose genes into soybean DNA, he is “not doing anything different from what nature does.” Meanwhile, as Zackery Denfeld of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy pointed out to me over email, “partisan pro-GM advocates rely on the rhetorical stance that mutagenesis is non-directed and thus much more dangerous than transgenesis.” And, just for context, it’s always worth remembering that our orange-coloured carrots and leafy kale are already the result of intentional genetic design, carried out through centuries of selective breeding.

IMAGE: A new classification system for various types of genetically modified organisms proposed by scientist Kaare M. Nielson, via.

In fact, attempts to classify degrees of genetic mutation, from conventional breeding all the way to the creation and insertion of artificially synthesised genes, are the subject of continuing debate, which is heightened by the significance of particular labels in consumers’ minds and the resulting economic impact.

For example, a mutagenic Ruby Red grapefruit grown without the use of pesticides can be labeled as organic and thus be sold for a premium, despite the fact that organic foods by definition cannot be genetically modified. Meanwhile, in Europe, where genetically modified crops are banned, some researchers have argued that disease-resistant strawberries produced through cisgenesis (in which new varietals are created by artificially transferring genes between organisms that could — but haven’t — bred “naturally”) should be allowed to enter market in the same way as conventional crops, as opposed to being regulated as GMOs.

IMAGE: Cisgenesis Volume 1: The Social Life of Scientific Nomenclature, edited by Zachery Denfeld and designed by Tara Kelton and Lauren Francescone, available for purchase at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

Denfeld has actually created a remarkable book that documents “every change on the Wikipedia page for Cisgenesis from when it was first created at 22:48 on February 22, 2009, until 16:31 on November 4, 2010,” as a way to explore the shifting ground between “natural” and “artificial” that lies at the heart of this debate.

With his Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Denfeld also creates provenance maps and recipes for transgenic foods; meanwhile, fellow biohackers at Genspace, the world’s first government-compliant community biotech lab, have been inserting jellyfish genes into yogurt using nothing more than a plastic salad spinner and Ziploc bags. These noble efforts, perhaps, are the twenty-first century version of Paige Johnson’s backyard atomic gardeners: solo enthusiasts whose work attempts to draw the conversation around advances in plant breeding technology out from behind the closed doors of private enterprise and into the public realm, where it belongs.

NOTE: I highly recommend visiting Pruned to read Trevi’s interview with Johnson in full — there are many more amazing images and details. Thanks also to Peter Smith and Zackery Denfeld for the email conversation. And if you’re in London, don’t miss Paige Johnson’s talk at the lovely Garden Museum on June 7th.

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Designing a Restaurant for Plants: An Interview with Jonathon Keats

By Nicola | Published: April 19, 2011

IMAGE: The Photosynthetic Restaurant at the Crocker Museum of Art, photo by Jonathon Keats.

On Saturday, April 16, the world’s first photosynthetic restaurant for plants opened for business. Located outside the Crocker Museum for Art in downtown Sacramento, the new dining establishment is a project of experimental philosopher and artist, Jonathon Keats. This is not a restaurant for humans to eat plants; rather, it is an exercise in creating a dining experience for the plants themselves, with a menu of enhanced sunlight that is designed to appeal to their sophisticated sensory apparatus, providing them with not only energy, but also a satisifying, piquant, and delightful experience.

“Honestly I’m surprised that nobody else has done this,” declared Mr. Keats in the accompanying press release, tongue firmly in cheek. “For nearly a half billion years, plants have subsisted on a diet of photons haphazardly served up by the sun and indiscriminately consumed, without the least thought given to culinary enjoyment.”

If cooking did indeed make us human, then Chef Keats’ plant cuisine might represent a giant leap forward for plantkind. Be that as it may, at the very least, this speculative exercise in solar gastronomy offers its human observers an intriguing opportunity to re-imagine the edible universe from a botanical perspective.

Curious, I called Keats to find out how he went about designing a restaurant for plants and what kinds of dishes are on offer. In our conversation, below, we discuss everything from the plant equivalent of habañero chilies and TV dinners to the possible outcomes of a bacterial education programme.

•••

IMAGE: The Photosynthetic Restaurant sign, photo by Jonathon Keats.

Edible Geography: What goes into designing the look and experience of a restaurant for plants?

Jonathon Keats: Of course, the look of a restaurant depends on who’s doing the looking. From the standpoint of the plants, I don’t think they’re really going to be too bothered about the architectural elements. In fact, that’s how I feel as a human diner, although a lot of restaurateurs seem to disagree and create restaurants where the staging is more prominent than the culinary experience.

What I’m trying to do with the design of the restaurant is to make the experience of different frequencies of light served over the course of the day as seamless as possible for the plants. If you happen to be a human looking at how it all works, what you would see would be coloured acrylic filters mounted on copper poles that are planted on the ground. As the sun arcs across the sky, the light pours through the different colour filters, one after another. The physiological effect of different frequencies of light on the plants will form different courses of the meal and, ideally, will bring some sort of culinary enjoyment to the plants.

The whole thing is based on working with nature, as any good chef and restaurateur does. It’s classic California cuisine, showcasing fantastic ingredients — in this case, photons, freshly delivered from the sun — to their best advantage.

IMAGE: The Photosynthetic Restaurant, photo by Jonathon Keats.

The patrons will be out in front of the museum, in the garden. They’re elderly — they’re rosebushes that, I’m told, are more than 100 years old. Over the course of three months, my restaurant will be serving two different menus. Of course, each will be modulated ever so slightly every day because of the tilt of earth’s axis as it orbits around the sun. Working with seasonality is, I think, the essence of great cuisine, and I think the plants will appreciate this. At least, I hope that they do!

One of the menus will be what I kind of think of as hearty, healthy, well-balanced cuisine. In human cuisine, a hearty, healthy meal is a dish that serves up, in an enhanced and refined form, exactly what we need nutritionally speaking. You take the basic proteins and carbohydrates that Cro-Magnon man or Neanderthals would probably crave anyway, and then, because we have these incredible resources available that they didn’t, you can present each element in more forceful terms than they might occur in the wild.

The other menu is an avant-garde recipe. In that case, what I’m doing is playing against the expectations of the organisms that are my patrons. Just as in the case of human cuisine, when it becomes avant-garde, there’s an element of surprise and disrupted expectations, and what comes naturally is put out of order.

IMAGE: Menu Three in The Photosynthetic Restaurant Recipe Book “syncopates plants’ circadian rhythm by teasing their cryptochromes with a course of evening violet in the middle of the afternoon,” according to its creator, Jonathon Keats.

The pleasure in the hearty meal comes out of the fact that our expectations are fulfilled, only more so than they might be in the wild, whereas in the case of the avant-garde cuisine, which perhaps is a little bit more advanced in terms of what it requires of the patron, the pleasure comes from the element of surprise.

To create each menu, I’ve drawn on research into the physiology of plants. A lot of it was done by NASA, who were looking into farming on Mars, and some came from the Siberian Academy of Sciences, out of their practical need to try to feed people in the winter. The other big source of information was probably the most advanced people in the world as far as thinking about everything to do with cultivating plants: pot growers. They’re incredibly adept at these sort of things.

Of course, pot growers, Siberian scientists, and potential Martian farmers all share a common goal, which is to put plants even more in our service than they already are. They are giving plants meals that are meant to fatten them up in order for us then to consume them. It isn’t about the plants’ enjoyment at all. It’s about cramming in the calories, to use a human or animal equivalent, whereas what I’m looking to do is to give my patrons the sort of culinary experience that we enjoy when we go to a restaurant.

IMAGE: Cover of the The Photosynthetic Restaurant Recipe Book, by Jonathon Keats.

Edible Geography: You’ve also produced an accompanying recipe book, which showcases the healthy menu that “artfully accentuates qualities of unfiltered daylight,” and the more experimental menu, which, for example, will confound plants’ expectations by serving up evening violet in the afternoon. You also have an exciting-sounding third menu, which adds spice in the form of a hint of far-red light. Can you discuss these different colour ingredients and their sensory effects on plants? And did you have to translate the colours on your menu to make them visible to the human eye, which can only detect a narrow spectrum of light frequencies?

Keats: A plant perceives far-red light as a signal that there are other plants nearby, because the far-red part of the spectrum reflects off the leaves of plants. If you’re a plant, you don’t want others getting too close because then your sunlight is occluded, and so plants have a sort of fear response to the far-red part of the spectrum.

If you think about about habañero peppers or jalapeños or those sort of spicy ingredients, we get an enjoyment out of eating them, in spite of the physiological panic that they cause, because spicy cuisine brings about that sort of panic in a controlled way. It’s equivalent to catharsis in terms of theatre.

So, without anthropomorphising the plants, I’m trying to figure out what part of the spectrum I can use that will give them the sort of rush that we get from spicy food. And that far-red light is outside the reach of anything that we humans know that we are experiencing. It’s at the very end of the spectrum, where red shades into infra-red. In the recipe book, I’ve used inks that are the deepest of deep reds, in order to imperfectly, I will be the first to admit, express that part of the spicy menu.

IMAGE: Menu Two from The Photosynthetic Restaurant Recipe Book, showing the spicy far-red element of the meal.

Ultraviolet light is also part of plants’ everyday experience and an ingredient that I’m using in my cuisine. That deep-blue-into-violet-into-ultraviolet light, for instance, is a way in which plants seem to be able to perceive the end of the day. In the case of the hearty cuisine, I’m using it at the end of the day, almost in the way that a digestif works for us, perhaps. And, in the case of the avant-garde cuisine, I’m juxtaposing it with orange mid-day light. I’m playing a little bit of a sensory trick on the plants, in the same way that chefs preparing haute-cuisine throughout history have played tricks on their human diners.

Of course, humans are sensitive to these invisible parts of the spectrum too — for example, when we get sunburn. It’s just that we tend to think about light frequencies and color in terms of something that we see, whereas plants are used to detecting it through their entire bodies.

Edible Geography: In an interview with Wired, you said that “Cuisine is a form of communication, and mine won’t be complete until plants evolve a mechanism for food criticism.” I’m curious as to what extent you’re interested in measuring the plants’ reactions to the dining experience?

Keats: This is a gourmet restaurant. The last thing that I would want if I were in Chez Panisse would be for the waiter to come round with a stethoscope at the end of the meal. I do believe that there may, in the future, be fast-food chains devoted to plants, and they will probably hire scientists who will do all sorts of research to optimise their menus in order to entice plants.

In my case, though, I’m trying to work within the artistic tradition of gourmet cuisine. I’m attempting simply to offer the most enjoyable meal that I can.

I would also argue that even when those fast-food chains for plants come along, they are going to have a very hard time measuring the essential qualities of cuisine, which, for me, are qualities of enjoyment. You could argue that an fMRI could be used inside a restaurant. It would be loud but it could, eventually, be used as a way to measure our enjoyment of foie-gras or an eclair or whatever, so that you could start to build a data set of physiological responses to food. But fMRIs are really no better than stethoscopes, in that they are only an external view of enjoyment and the problem is that I don’t think that we really know what enjoyment is, ultimately. I don’t think that we know what pleasure is, in any quantifiable way.

And that’s part of what interests me in this project as an experimental philosopher, which, for lack of a better term, is what I am.

That is to say that, aside from being a restaurateur for plants, which I am, first and foremost in this project, what I am also attempting to do with my human patrons is to think about the world. A classic way to do that is through the thought experiment, where you posit an alternate reality as a way of then reflecting back on our world. My idea is not to do this on paper, as philosophers tend to, because nobody will read it except for a few academics. I’m trying to do what I believe philosophy was meant to do, and what I always hoped that it would do, and that, for me, entails trying to do a thought experiment in public and for real.

IMAGE: Menu One, the more traditional, hearty cuisine that simply accentuates the plants’ pre-cuisine diet, from The Photosynthetic Restaurant Recipe Book by Jonathon Keats.

So, in a sense, the Photosynthetic Restaurant is also a thought experiment, done with everybody who is interested and wants to be involved in it. By observing plants doing something that we do everyday — enjoying a good meal — it becomes a way of reflecting on a very strange thing that we do, which is to indulge in a variety of cuisines that, if you think about it, hardly conform to any rational ideas about how to get in a daily calorie count in the most efficient manner.

At one level, this restaurant is, I hope, a way of reflecting on this whole business of cuisine as a cultural phenomenon in opposition to food as sustenance — while at the same time thinking about how perhaps cuisine is actually the very essence of food as sustenance, both in terms of this practice of heightening and distilling the qualities of food as found in nature, and also in terms of how the social aspect of dining is what makes this sort of sustenance sustainable in its own right at a broader societal level.

All of these ideas are ideally in play, and at the same time, so too are broader questions, such as the nature of pleasure and the nature of what we are as a species and how we are different from all other species. Every benchmark of that difference that is currently in play is suspect for various reasons — crows use tools as well, dolphins recognise themselves in mirrors, elephants are altruistic, and so on. But there’s this idea that we have certain objective experiences such as elaborate cuisines and culinary enjoyment that seem to be special to us and our civillised state, and by exploring what that might be in a plant, it becomes a way of trying to figure out what do we mean when we speak about pleasure, and what is it that is special about us, if anything?

I don’t have any answers, of course, to any of this, but I think that they are fascinating questions, if people chose to engage with them.

Edible Geography: It’s also an intriguing framework to consider our commonalities, as well as what makes us different. In some ways, your restaurant for plants is an opportunity to think about the shared menu of light that we and plants are transforming into sustenance in different ways.

Keats: I hadn’t thought about it in that way, but you’re absolutely right — it’s interesting to think about what happens when we start to think about nature not in terms of a chain, or even a web, but in these aesthetically holistic terms.

IMAGE: Houseplants enjoying their TV dinners. Photo by Jonathon Keats.

Edible Geography: In terms of the future of plant dining and fast-food franchises, do you have any idea what junk food for plants might be?

Keats: I have to confess that I’ve already moved into that territory a little bit. I’ve made a TV dinner for plants. It’s a meal that can be served to your houseplants on television. I filmed the sky through different colour filters and then made an hour-long movie that plants are able to consume. I’ll be exporting to Italy first — in a couple of months my TV dinners for plants will be available at an art centre called PaRDes in Venice.

IMAGE: These filtered skyscapes, filmed by Jonathon Keats, are the key ingredients in a houseplant’s TV dinner.

Edible Geography: That makes sense as a convenience food. I’m still wondering whether it’s possible for plants to deliberately eat as unhealthily as humans sometimes do. Do plants above the Arctic Circle, where they binge on sunlight for twenty-four hours a day in summer and then starve all winter, have the vegetable equivalent of anorexia?

Keats: The word “deliberately” in your question is the most interesting aspect of it. Plants do grow and “move” according to their “will,” such as it is. There is already something “deliberate,” as far as I understand the word “deliberate,” in the way in which the plants move, and so I think that perhaps the cuisine of the future for plants could be less imperious, and that chefs in the future will perhaps be a little bit less extreme than I am in terms of imposing my own artistic will on my patrons.

That might be a very interesting route to go, to create more of a photosynthetic cafeteria, where the plants, by virtue of their movement, are able to customize their dish as they wish. I’m sure you’ll then find some sort of behavior that is not going to be up to the standards of what nutritionists believe plants should eat. I don’t know exactly what they’ll choose, but it will be very interesting to see.

VIDEO: A short (three minute) version of the hour-long plant TV dinner that will be on offer at PaRDes this summer.

Edible Geography: One thing that is perhaps missing from the idea of cuisine in your restaurant for plants is the ritual around dining.  Obviously, a restaurant for plants cannot and should not draw direct parallels from every aspect of a restaurant for humans, but, from the point of view of your thought experiment, were there elements of the dining experience that were untranslatable?

Keats: Things frequently transpose in curious and unexpected ways. I hadn’t thought about it in this way before, but there’s a sense in which our planet becomes the waiter, or a Lazy Susan, perhaps, in the Photosynthetic Restaurant.

There’s also a sense in which the ritual of dining becomes even more extreme in the case of the Photosynthetic Restaurant, because every day, it’s the same routine and there’s no other routine. There’s nothing else but the experience of having this meal. That can perhaps also serve as a part of the thought experiment, as a way for us to recognize the degree to which the ritual of dining is incredibly central to our lives. Even though in the human case, most of us are also doing other things, our breakfast, lunch, and dinner are somewhat analogous to the way that these plants are going through the same sequence, day after day.

I have to emphasise that that is inadvertent, which is interesting in itself. Perhaps it suggests something about how ritual is inevitable in the case of cuisine. Even in my attempt to get out of certain aspects of human cuisine, such as getting too involved in the architecture and staging, there are nevertheless certain qualities that are somehow essential to the dining experience that have worked their way into my restaurant.

IMAGE: LASA, sending cacti into space since 2010, via Wired.

Edible Geography: With your alternative space agency, LASA, you turned potatoes and other plants into astronauts by growing them in water mineralised with lunar anorthosite and Martian shergottite. That project relied on a alternative mechanism of nourishment for plants. As far as I understand, plants can prioritise foraging for minerals in the soil or for light, depending on which is the most nutritious to them. In other words, they can send down deeper roots or grow more leaves, depending on which source is offering them the best diet. So, while your restaurant is serving light rather than soil, I could imagine an alternative restaurant that played with various menus of soil-borne minerals…

Keats: Which I hope you’ll open. They can be across the street from each other. We’ll let the plants decide.

Edible Geography: Alright! I was also curious, thinking about your previous plant work, which has included a porn theatre for zinnias, as well as some travel documentaries for house plants, as to whether you are intending to develop other genres of plant entertainment in the future — perhaps comedy for plants, or self-help for plants?

Keats: Absolutely — although I don’t want to impose myself so that people think that the only person for the job when it comes to keeping plants entertained or edified is me. I guess that, in some sense, I will have actually succeeded in my work if I’m put out of business by others doing much more interesting work for plants, and much more interesting thought experiments generally.

The reason that I have worked with plants as much as I have is that they have the enviable quality of being obviously different from us while at the same time being completely familiar. In terms of setting up a thought experiment, the plants are doing most of the work for me just by their very nature. That’s been the big draw in using plants as species with which to explore the world.

That said, I definitely don’t want to be entirely and only in the plant team. In the past, I’ve worked with honeybees to choreograph a ballet, and I’ve started developing textbooks for bacteria. Bacteria are a little more difficult because they are invisible to the naked eye, but they are so incredibly present in our lives that working with them also presents fantastic opportunities.

My current textbook project came out of the realization that, if you’re a bacterium, killing your host is not smart. I started thinking that superbugs are really bacteria that have gone rogue, and maybe — and this is really just a maybe — that might be for reasons that are similar to those claimed for crime levels in cities, i.e., for want of education. So I decided that I would try to educate bacteria, to see whether they might subsequently be more inclined to work with us rather than against us.

I’m making these textbooks as practical as I can for them. The first two are devoted to subjects that I think they will find as interesting as we do, namely general relativity and quantum mechanics. I’m using the phenomenon of chemotaxis, which allows many bacteria to sense the difference between salts and sugars. By using chemical gradients of salts and sugars on a piece of paper and engineering pathways with insoluble wax, I can deliver a curriculum to bacteria through capillary action.

VIDEO: Keats demonstrates the technology behind his textbooks for bacteria to Discovery Canada.

Edible Geography: That’s awesome. I’m guessing the next step will be mentoring these troubled bacteria, and finding them positive role models?

Keats: I believe the next step is that they’ll actually start to teach us, if only we are willing to learn. If you start to think about quantum mechanics, for instance, bacteria are at a small-enough scale that quantum phenomena are everyday occurrences for them. So what is so strange for us may not be at all peculiar for them, and they may be able to help us figure out a context to understand quantum events that is more intuitive.

Thanks to Andrew Price for passing along Keats’ press release. The Photosynthetic Restaurant will be open to plant patrons and curious humans until July 17; the accompanying recipe book (reproduced in part above) must serve, in Keats’ words, to “bring photosynthetic cuisine to the masses.”

Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Sprawl / Growth

By Nicola | Published: April 3, 2011

IMAGE: Matthew Moore’s farm being eaten by sprawl. All images via Matthew Moore.

Over at GOOD, I published a story by Thomas Gorman, a Berkeley News21 Fellow, about farmer and artist Matthew Moore’s Lifecycles project. Moore is a sculptor and fourth-generation family farmer whose property is destined to be swallowed by sprawl from the city of Surprise, Arizona, itself part of the fast-growing greater Phoenix boomburbs. As Gorman explains,

In 2007, the city of Surprise, Arizona, released development projections for the area surrounding Moore’s farm. By 2030, his stretch of farmland is forecast to consist almost exclusively of mixed-use and medium density residential plots. Moore says he gets daily calls from speculators looking to snap up the property while the market is soft. “Every forecaster around here predicts that in 5 years, the market will be back,” he says. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re zoned out of existence.”

In fact, as early as October 2004, Moore’s grandfather sold the first portion of the family’s land to Taylor Woodrow to build a 253-home suburban community. While the re-zoning negotiations were going on, Moore began a series of large-scale earthworks that explored the evolution of land use in the West.

Rotations: The Craftsman Bungalow was an installation of 70 Navel orange trees planted according to the floor plan of the first Craftsman bungalow—the “tract” home of its time. Its site in Pasadena, on Sierra Madre Boulevard, was a citrus grove prior to the 1920s building boom that saw the city’s population quadruple in 20 years.

“Citrus density translated into lot density,” wrote Moore, and yet now, the bungalows themselves “have become an endangered species,” threatened by big box stores and retail development, and “worthy of commemoration” in their own right.

IMAGE: Rotations: The Craftsman Bungalow.

To create Rotations: Single Family Residence, Moore rented a 20-acre barley field south of his family’s farm (so as not to damage his grandfather’s negotiations with Taylor Woodrow and the city’s planning department) and spent four months carving out the enlarged floor plan of a standard single-family home with a hoe.

For Moore, the essence of the piece lies in the way it captures the back-breaking and futile toil of a farmer clearing their land for development—a bitter harvest that sustains their livelihood in the short term while abetting its eventual extinction. He documented his painstaking labour in a single-shot, 45-minute-long timelapse video called Hoe Cam.

IMAGE: Rotations: Single Family Residence.

To me, the result is as interesting as the process: Moore has inscribed a kind of reverse archaeology on the land, in which the site’s suburban future is printed by its agricultural present. I’m reminded of an anecdote I read on BLDGBLOG, which was itself culled from historian Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain, a book about the invention of aerial archaeology by O. G. S. Crawford. The former World War I pilot specialised in the discovery of “shadow sites,” in which the walls of lost buildings and the boundaries of ancient fields are revealed through their effect on the growth of contemporary vegetation. BLDGBLOG quotes Hauser:

Field archaeologists know that vegetation grows differently on soil that has been disturbed, even if that disturbance happened centuries ago. [...] The site of a Roman villa might go unnoticed until a field of wheat grows and ripens, to reveal most strangely the outlines of buried masonry, only to disappear again at harvest.

Coincidentally (or not), barley, the crop in which Moore chose to outline his Single Family Residence, is, according to Hauser, “a more sensitive ‘developer,’ for example, than oats, wheat, or grass.”

IMAGE: Rotations: Moore Estates.

The third in Moore’s Rotations series, Moore Estates, is perhaps the most visually impressive. Once his grandfather’s sale was complete, Moore obtained the plans for the new development and grew their outlines at one-third scale on the farmland still remaining. With sorghum marking the houses and black-bearded wheat tracing the asphalt roads and driveways, from above Moore Estates resembles California City’s anticipatory, abandoned “geoglyphs of nowhere.”

All three pieces also make literal an interesting equivalence between agriculture and sprawl as forms of growth; Moore is adamant that the works are not protest pieces, explaining to Metropolis that:

If I’m against development, then I’m a hypocrite. As farmers we created the model for this type of growth. We came here, ripped apart the native desert landscape, and continually tried to increase our yield per acreage. It’s essentially the business model for any suburban development.

The transmutation of land into personal profit—the core of the American Dream—continues apace, in other words, even if its form has changed.

IMAGE: Rotations: Moore Estates.

But if the Rotations series inserts suburban sprawl into agrarian landscapes as a premonitory memorial to the 23 million acres (and counting) of farmland swallowed up by urban development in the United States during the last twenty-five years, Moore’s more recent work moves on to address the consequences of that shift: the loss of agricultural knowledge and any sense of connection to our food. According to Thomas Gorman,

Moore says he packs around 110,000 pounds of carrots a day, yet he’s never seen his produce in his area’s supermarkets. “It’s much like the art market,” he said. “I don’t know the buyers and the brokers don’t tell me.”

As a response to the opacity of today’s food system as well as the extinction of his own cohort of fourth or fifth-generation family farmers, Moore has created several works that aim both to archive agricultural techniques and to reconnect consumers with growers.

His Urban Transplanter, built in 2009, is a modular, solar-powered, shiny metallic contraption that can be installed in any vacant lot, and which, over the course of two weeks, will germinate seedlings on its 75-foot conveyor belt, before dispensing them through a cyclone fence for adoption by passersby. Moore explains that “the elaborate mechanized system is a representation of the complex food distribution system.”

IMAGE: Urban Transplanter.

Meanwhile, for Lifecycles, Moore filmed the entire process of growing a crop of radishes, kale, broccoli, and crookneck squash, from seed to harvest, and then installed the resulting timelapse videos directly above the produce shelves at a Park City supermarket during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

VIDEO: Lifecycles: Broccoli, by Matthew Moore

IMAGE: Lifecycles installed.

Watching broccoli seeds germinate and their leaves, which begin life fragile and almost arugula-like, turn hardy and dark green as the first tiny flowers bud—105 days of hard-won growth in five minutes—is quite amazing. Watching it as you pick out a head of broccoli to put in your basket can’t help but change your relationship to the oversized flower you are about to buy and eat.

In Rotations, real estate development encroached on farmland; in, Lifecycles, the agricultural pops up in the commercial heart of urban and suburban lifestyles—and with that, the emphasis of Matthew Moore’s work has shifted from elegiac documentation to activism:

If you knew that it took 140 days to grow just one single carrot, could that change the way that you think about the produce that you eat? And could knowing the stories—the trials and tribulations—of the individual farmer that grew that food for you, could that somehow be enough to shift the global food system as a whole?

IMAGE: Lifecycles installed.

Inspired by the results of this marketplace design intervention, Moore has launched a new, expanded version called the Digital Farm Collective, which aims to collect “footage of every cultivated plant in the world,” accompanied by interviews with their growers. The result will be a “living seed vault,” as well as an online repository of knowledge about farming, in terms of both practical techniques and philosophical approaches.

Moore explains that not only will this living library be useful as growing zones shift due to climate change, it will also “give a voice to the plants and to the farmers that grow them.” By recording that voice, and inserting it back into urban and suburban consciousness, Moore hopes that the Digital Farm Collective will re-centre the conversation about food, both on the individual and systemic level.

As cities and their corresponding agricultural hinterland grow both ever larger and ever more disconnected, interventions such as the Digital Farm Collective (and, for that matter, Joseph Grima and Jeffrey Johnson’s Landgrab City!, which I covered a few months ago) are fascinating and vital attempts to make the scale of the effort and resources require to feed them visible to otherwise oblivious urban consumers.

IMAGE: Four time-lapse images installed, documenting the growth of kale, Swiss chard, red cabbage, and cauliflower.

Moore is currently fundraising to equip his first cohort with solar-powered video equipment—you can support his efforts here.

He’s also hoping for your feedback on the plant lifecycles you are most curious about. For him, he says, it’s pineapple. “I have no idea how that thing grows!” he admits. “I know it takes, like, a year, but I want to see that.”

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The Architecture of Opium Production

By Nicola | Published: April 1, 2011


These colour lithographs were originally made in 1850 at the request of Walter S. Sherwill, an army officer who served as a British “boundary commissioner” in Bengal. According to Ptak Science Books, these particular reproductions were taken from an article exploring the economic and infrastructural marvels of the Indian opium trade in an 1882 supplement to Scientific American.

They show the main opium receiving, production, and distribution center of the East India Company in Patna, a town in the north-western Bihar province of India. From these vast mixing rooms and examining halls, the Company claimed to produce roughly 13,000,000 pounds of opium annually, which was then shipped down the Ganges to Calcutta, and from there to China.

The image above shows the Examining Hall of the opium factory, where, Scientific American reports, “the consistency of the crude opium as brought from the country in earthen pans is simply tested, either by the touch, or by thrusting a scoop into the mass. A sample from each pot (the pots being numbered and labelled) is further examined for consistency and purity in the chemical test room.”

In the Mixing Room (above), which otherwise looks like a somewhat spartan bathhouse, “the contents of the earthen pans are thrown into vats and stirred with blind rakes until the whole mass becomes a homogeneous paste.” Next stop, according to Scientific American, is the high-ceilinged Balling Room, where the opium paste is shaped into small spheres:

Each ball-maker is furnished with a small table, a stool, and a brass cup to shape the ball in a certain quantity of opium and water called ‘Lewa,’ and an allowance of poppy petals, in which the opium balls are rolled. Every man is required to make a certain number of balls, all weighing alike. An expert workman will turn out upwards of a hundred balls a day.


After this, the balls are taking to the Drying Room, where each is placed in an individual earthenware cup. The image below shows “men examining the balls, and puncturing with a sharp style those in which gas, arising from fermentation, may be forming.”


The finished opium balls are stored before shipping in the Stacking Room, where “a number of boys are constantly engaged in stacking, turning, airing, and examining the balls. To clear them of mildew, moths or insects, they are rubbed with dried and crushed poppy petal dust.” Finally, the balls are transferred into cardboard boxes and loaded into ships bound for Calcutta.


This factory — “the architecture of 13,000,000 pounds of opium production,” as Ptak Science Books calls it — is part of a larger British colonial landgrab fueled, at least in part, by pursuit of the immense profits to be earned from an unrestricted drug trade. As Amitav Ghosh, in an interview about his novel, Sea of Poppies, explains, “The Ghazipur and Patna opium factories between them produced the wealth of Britain. It is astonishing to think of it but the Empire was really founded on opium.”

While the buildings at Patna now house a government printing press, the Ghazipur opium factory to which Ghosh refers both was and still is the largest opium factory in the world. It has remained pretty much unchanged since Rudyard Kipling described it in 1888, according to a report in the Bihar Times, and has generated a profit every year since it was founded in 1820. The USA and Japan are the largest opium importers, apparently, having inherited the crown from the Soviet Union following its collapse.

In any case, both factories, as well as the fields of poppies that surrounded them, and even the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, form a living archaeology of the incredible economic influence, infrastructural legacy, and spatial impact of the opium trade. Curiously, in Afghanistan today, one of the reasons why opium is more economically attractive to farmers is infrastructural and architectural: drug traffickers pick up the poppies at the farms, whereas growing a food crop would require farmers to build storage facilities and transport their produce to market.

It’s also interesting to consider these grand, temple-like opium factories alongside contemporary spaces of drug production: the foreclosed tract homes that house America’s meth labs, or the tunnels carved out as part of the U.S.-Mexico border smuggling wars. Perhaps a more accurate analogy is Jeff Wilcox’s “vision” for an industrial-scale marijuana farm and processing facility on a 7.4 acre business park in Oakland (already rewired by PG & E to supply banks of power-hungry grow lamps), as opposed to the unregulated encampments of barbed wire, plastic tubing, and leaky generators currently hidden in Mendocino and Humboldt County’s redwood forests.

Thanks to the PLoS Neuroanthropology blog for the link to the Ptak Science Books post.

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Mapping Gangs and Cupcakes

By Nicola | Published: March 9, 2011

IMAGE: Mission: Gangs and Cupcakes, by Danya Al-Saleh.

This map, created by UC Berkeley undergrad Danya Al-Saleh, overlays bakeries in The Mission district of San Francisco with Norteño and Sureño gang territory (for a larger PDF version, click here).

As Al-Saleh writes, cupcakes and gangs, violence and sugar, “are perceived to exist in separate worlds.” And yet, as the Mission Local blog reports, a recent homicide, followed swiftly by a lunchtime gunfight, “offered Mission District residents a reminder that the hip neighbourhood where they feast on everything from the latest doughnut recipe to cupcakes and artisan pork rinds is also a place where gang violence still exists, and where a 2007 gang injunction is still in place.”

The insights to be gained from a spatial analysis of cupcake proliferation have been examined on Edible Geography before, in a post inspired by Rutgers Urban Policy lecturer Dr. Kathe Newman’s theory that “cupcake shops can provide a more accurate and timely guide to the frontiers of urban gentrification than traditional demographic and real estate data sets.”

But whereas Dr. Newman’s students mapped cupcakes to track the flow of capital investment into previously depressed parts of the city, Al-Sayeh’s map is designed to draw awareness to the uncomfortable socio-cultural overlaps that occur in such transitional neighbourhoods.

“Next time you bite into your cinnamon horchata cupcake,” concludes Al-Sayeh, “reinterpret your surroundings.”

Thanks to @subtopes for the link.

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Land, Language, and Wine Labels: An Interview with William L. Fox

By Nicola | Published: March 4, 2011

William L. Fox (Bill) is a writer and the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. His ongoing interest, whether writing about Antarctica, the Great Basin, or Los Angeles, is in the ways in which people make sense of landscape. To that end, he has accompanied NASA astronauts to Devon Island, where they practice Martian exploration, driven for miles on the dirt roads of the Nevada desert with earthworks sculptor Michael Heizer, and hung out with Hollywood special effects expert Bob Hurrie as he builds and then blows up a model French village.

IMAGE: A half-dozen examples of Fox’s prolific and excellent output: Aeriality: On the World from Above, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles, The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin, Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada, and  Driving to Mars.

He has also, I discovered recently, spent some time moonlighting as a wine label writer.

Food writing and its various subgenres, from Japanese sushi manga to beer bottle fiction, are a source of endless fascination to me, shedding equal light on the way we think about both food and language. In the world of wine, descriptors are particularly loaded, as the vagaries of sensory perception meet the marketing language of value attribution.

In an understandable reaction to the flowery bouquet of anise, graphite, and persimmon often conjured up on the same label, a recent New York Times article by Eric Asimov suggested that wine descriptions should be limited to two words, sweet and savoury. Meanwhile, just last week, Slate ran a fantastic article by Coco Krumme that correlated words and cost, finding, for example, that expensive wines are described using singular flavour analogies such as “tobacco” or “chocolate,” whereas a cheap wine tends to get abstract terms such as “fruity” or “clean.” “Armed with this information,” Krumme writes:

We could, for example, create the most expensive-sounding review in the world: A velvety chocolate texture and enticingly layered, yet creamy, nose, this wine abounds with focused cassis and a silky ruby finish. Lush, elegant, and nuanced. Pair with pork and shellfish.

And then there is terroir. In their Food for Thinkers post, Smudge Studio quoted geologist Terry Wright saying that “A label without reference to soils types and roles is leaving one half of the story of the wine in the dust.” The idea that place affects the taste of food, so that in turn, wine or chocolate or coffee made from berries or beans from a unique geographical location can be interpreted as an expression of the land is, of course, an endless source of interest for a site called Edible Geography.

So you can imagine my delight when Bill, BLDGBLOG, and I had the chance to sit down and talk about all of these things recently. Our conversation is below, and in it, Bill describes his education as a wine label writer, the history of the blurb, the influence of minimalist poetry on the language of advertising, and much more.

•••

Edible Geography: How and why did you get into writing wine labels?

William L. Fox: Here’s the story: I’m in Portland, Oregon, and I’m working as an independent writer. I’m writing catalog essays for people, I’m working on books, and I’m going to the Antarctic. And I’m completely broke.

Then Robert Beckmann, a painter from Nevada, calls me. His high school buddy from Pennsylvania has moved to Oregon and started a winery. This guy, Dave Grooters, is an ex-software engineer — really smart and a wonderful guy. Winemaking is his new life, so he’s moved to Oregon.

So Dave Grooters hires his buddy Beckmann to paint the wine label for the first release, a high-end Pinot Noir called Roads End. The winemaker is a man named Ken Wright, who’s a god of pinot makers in North America.

IMAGE: Robert Beckmann’s painting on the label of Carlton Cellars’ Pinot Noir.

While they’re talking about the label, Dave says to Beckmann, “God, I wish I knew someone who knew how to write about wine.” Beckmann replies, “Well, you should talk to Bill Fox. He’s never written about wine, but he’s a writer. And he’s in Portland.”

Dave Grooters calls me, and I immediately call my friend David Abel, who’s a professional book editor and an all-around genius, and tell him, “David, I’ve got to drag you into this because I’m not going to do this by myself. We’ve got to do this together.” So the two of us go and meet with Dave Grooters and his wife Robin.

David and I are sitting in Dave and Robin’s living room, at their coffee table, across which is spread a phenomenal array of some of the world’s great pinots. Dave says to us, “I want you to taste these pinots. We’re going to walk through these so you understand the terroir from which each of these wines comes.”

From the start, there was nothing about blackberries and chocolate and all that nonsense. It was all about where the berries are grown, how the vines are treated, how the berries are picked, and so on. It was really about terroir: land, place, and our connection to it. Dave explained that the first release was going to be called Roads End, because that’s a particular beach he and Robin went to that for them represented Oregon and the aspiration they had for the wine.

In that first conversation, it was clear that we had to write about place and climate, and that our label would have nothing to do with all of these California affectations about how we describe taste in terms of other foods. We weren’t going to go there. We weren’t going to become this analogue wine. We wanted to be true to where the wine is produced and where the berries are grown.

That’s how I learned how to describe wine: writing the back labels of wine for Carlton Cellars. They have their own vineyard now, and it’s an exquisite site. It reminds me of Wallace Stevens’s “jar upon a hill” around which the landscape is ordered — there is a tree around which this vineyard is ordered.

Their wines show a sensitivity, in both the wine-making and, hopefully, also the writing, to the soil and the climate. We thought about it in terms of the clay to sand to volcanic mixtures and how that affects what the berries express, what direction the wind comes from, and the temperatures at certain times of the year — in particular, how close can you get to freezing to intensify the sugars at that crucial moment when the fruit is coming to a state of ripeness.

BLDGBLOG: So when it comes to describing the wine, it’s almost like you’re treating each wine like a Weather Channel report on the exact climate that exists on a certain hilltop during a certain month?

Fox: You could combine a Weather Channel report with a USGS geologist’s field report with a geomorphologist’s soil analysis, and you still wouldn’t quite have it.

So many vineyards are archaeological sites, for example — maybe they are post-agricultural of some other output, or maybe Native Americans burned the site as part of their landscape management. There are people who pretend that if apricots, for example, were once grown on a plot of land, they can still taste them in the wine. I think that’s possibly the silliest thing I’ve ever heard — but it is true that you can tell the difference between major soil regimes and how the soil has been treated.

IMAGE: Soil map of the Willamette Valley, via.

Edible Geography: Did you taste the soil?

Fox: No. I walked the land, but I don’t eat dirt. [laughs] That said, I have spent a fair amount of time with geologists in the field, and they love to taste rocks. It’s one way that they can tell how the world has acted upon materials. They can also tell a little bit about the composition by taste.

It’s like when I’m working with NASA on Devon Island and everyone is in pressure suits, wandering around trying to figure out how we would do geology on Mars. There are several complaints that geologists have about working in a pressure suit. The vision — and that’s where eighty percent of your information comes from every day — is actually not so bad in a suit, because the bubble’s pretty big. One problem is that you can’t touch anything — you can’t actually feel anything on your skin, because you have gloves in the way. That makes it hard to tell the texture of rocks, which would tell you how hydrology has acted on it. What’s worse for the geologists, though, is that you can’t taste the bloody thing. On Devon Island, for example, if you put rocks in your mouth, you’ll often taste hydrocarbons. When you’re in a suit, you can’t do that.

I will occasionally taste coarse materials — with small rocks in the Southwest, for example, I can sometimes use taste to figure out what’s going on in terms of stream action. But I wouldn’t have a clue where to start in terms of tasting dirt in the Willamette Valley. People who really know their wines don’t even have to taste the soil. They can walk onto a piece of property and smell it. Of course, wine growers always hire a scientist to come in and do the soil analyses, because you don’t spend a lot of money planting a vineyard without knowing everything about the soil and the drainage and so on.

IMAGE: The K1 robot exploring Battle Herc Ridge, near the Haughton Mars Project research station on Devon Island, in August 2010. Photo by Dr Trey Smith (NASA Ames), NASA/Mars Institute/Haughton-Mars Project.

Edible Geography: What effect do inputs — organic fertiliser versus non-organic, or pesticide sprays — have on the flavor?

Fox: Most people that I know who make high-end wines put as few chemicals as possible in the soil because it distorts everything. On the other hand, you can’t afford to be wiped out, you know? It’s a balance.

Edible Geography: I’ve come across something called the UC Davis Wine Aroma Wheel for describing wine. Is that something you drew on, or not at all?

Fox: UC Davis does great work and they’re amazing research scientists, but the school has a very particular and highly financialised relationship to the California wine industry. I’m talking about Oregon wines. Utterly different.

Edible Geography: And descriptors are one of the ways you would set them apart, as well?

Fox: Yes, absolutely. California wines are defined by flavour analogy; Oregon wines are framed in terms of the land.

IMAGE: UC Davis Wine Aroma Wheel by Ann Noble

Edible Geography: How long did you write wine labels for?

Fox: I only did it for a short time — about a year. It was one of the most intimate and inclusive and intelligent introductions I’ve ever had to a landscape. There was the geology and meteorology, but also the wine culture of the Willamette Valley — the entire terrain, not just the terroir, and how that translates into territory.

As a result, I’ve come to appreciate wines that are produced out of grapes grown upon hills, rather than in valleys. Duckhorn Cabernet, which is grown on Howell Mountain in Napa, is a great example. A Howell Mountain Cab isn’t that typically sweet California Cab where it’s almost got too much sunshine—it’s almost too benign a climate. Howell is just big enough of a mountain that the vines get stressed a bit more, and that gives the wine more complexity.

IMAGE: A USGS isostatic gravity map (measuring rock density) of the Willamette Valley.

Edible Geography: So you can taste the difference between grapes from a hill and grapes from a valley?

Fox: Absolutely. You can tell that the micro-climate is different. It can get very confusing, because there are ways of making the wine that will structure it differently, so you can change one thing into another. But in general, if it’s a pretty honest wine — in other words, if you’re not trying to change the character of the wine through the way in which you make it, but instead you’re trying to express the terroir — you sure can tell the difference. The valley has a less vivid taste in your mouth. It’s not going to have the highs and lows — the depth — that a wine produced from grapes on a hill has the potential to produce.

But it is entirely possible to fool people, to a certain extent. There are so many things that you can do in a vat that will change the nature of how things are tasted — where the wine comes alive on the tongue, for example, whether it be in the front or in the back, or almost in the throat, it’s so deep. I’m nowhere near clever enough to straighten out all that stuff.

But in a true blind tasting, what you taste and what you appreciate is founded on things that are so much more fey than that.

Edible Geography: Your personal infrastructure of analogies takes over.

Fox: Exactly. For true blind testing, you have to do a really large sampling of both people who know about wine and people who don’t. I find most blind testing competitions sort of silly, because they’re so unscientific. It’s just an extremely selective group of people with predetermined tastes and ways that they understand wine.

Look, what you ate the night before affects how you taste the wine the next day. What time of the month it is, if you’re a woman, will affect how you taste wine. How hungry you are, what perfume you’re wearing or laundry detergent you used — basically, everything else that is going on in your olfactory system will affect it.

If I bring a bottle of Roads End down to Reno, I have to let it sit for at least three months before the molecular structure settles down enough for it to taste like what it tasted like in Portland. A wine gets shaken up a bit just by driving down a road from Portland to Reno, and it’s not quite the same wine until it’s had the chance to settle down. So that’s a variable affecting taste: from how far away did the wines come, and how long did they sit before you tasted them?

There are some objective standards. You can really tell whether a wine has one, two, or three dimensions, to use a whiskey metaphor. You can tell when a wine is large and has rooms to walk into versus something that’s more like a closet — you taste it and it’s done.

You can also taste the amount of money that was spent to buy the care to make the wine. Actually, if you wanted to say what’s more apparent in taste than anything else, it’s probably money. You can taste the level of care that was taken in making the wine, and care costs money.

In a way, oddly enough, the terroir becomes financial, not necessarily geographical or geological. Of course, in reality, it’s always a mixture. The money will just enhance and take the best advantage of each terroir. But, if you’re willing to only take the very best berries as they’re moving along the belt, and only berries from vineyards that this year had a really good week at the end of a particular month, so they have a specific profile in terms of tannins and sugars, and so on — you can taste that level of care.

That said, you can be the most scientific and experienced vintner in the world and still blow it. Some guy next door who’s a tyro can make a better wine than you that year, just because of how things come together.

Edible Geography: How did your experience affect the way you read wine labels? Is there an element of competition for you, still?

Fox: I do still go to the store and read the back labels. I chortle sometimes, and other times I’m in awe. I’m the same way with books, as an author. That’s what a wine label is — a small book.

IMAGE: Although he was reluctant to name names, Fox later cited Duckhorn Vineyards as an example of a label he admires, noting that “The wines are so good that they can afford to make puns.”

BLDGBLOG: What are some of the best labels you’ve read? What do you look for in a label?

Fox: I’m not going to name names, but there are some I really admire. Of course, you can tell a lot from the front label. In the store, the really high-end wines are on the top shelf, and the really bottom-end are on the lowest shelf — in that respect, wine is just like toilet paper. The stuff everyone’s going to buy is in the middle, and you try to distinguish yourself in that range if you want to sell a lot of wine. So there are the catchy names and vivid labels, which are designed to appeal primarily to women because they do more of the shopping than men, and they sell better than labels that are dry or stern and forbidding, and don’t give you a lot of information on the front.

Edible Geography: Are there any words that are particularly meaningless on a wine label, the way “natural” on food packaging means nothing at all.

Fox: You’ve hit on a key issue. It’s interesting: olive oil is in a similar state of linguist confusion right now. I’ve spoken with guys in Australia who are making absolutely spectacular olive oils, and they were scratching their heads and cursing at what the Americans and the Europeans have done to the olive oil trade. These Australians are making really incredible olive oil, but they have no nomenclature by which they can explain and defend the virtue of what they do.

What we’ve done in the highest consuming nations, in a peculiar kind of way, is that we’ve valorised a certain kind of vocabulary that is shared in common with high-end wine, chocolate, olive oil, coffee — all things that you don’t have to have but you really want. These foodstuffs have adopted a particular vocabulary to make a hierarchy of value in their industries, and, of course, that is subject to corruption the minute enough consumers believe that A means something better than B.

I think wine started the process. Chocolate and coffee and so on are all are imitating wine. It’s a Pandora’s Box sort of situation — it’s actually quite interesting to watch how the vocabulary filters through into how all of these other luxuries are described. Wine labels are sort of a telling document in this process of how we establish and then co-opt hierarchies of value.

IMAGE: Google N-gram showing the frequency of usage of the word “terroir” in books published between 1980 and 2008 in American English.

Edible Geography: And yet French wine labels, from the most exclusive to your standard table wine, say nothing.

Fox: Exactly. You have to know something about the region, which is to say, either the geology and geomorphology and climate where the wine was produced, or you have to know the reputation of the wine-makers themselves or that a particular village is known for a particular balance. Which is to say, you have to know the terroir. French wine labels don’t even list the grape — it’s all about the terroir. And the terroir is not just a region — it’s a style that’s evolved to take advantage of the conditions in that region.

And Americans are a loquacious people.

BLDGBLOG: I wonder if you can find parallels to that in the different ways novels are packaged in Europe and the US. In France, novels never say anything on the back, whereas I want to know what it’s about before I buy it.

Fox: I think the British can actually take credit for that. There was a period after the Second World War where the British were beginning to mass import continental products — from cheese to literature — and the art of the blurb was invented.

Penguin was publishing French novels, for example, and they were trying to describe the sophisticated cultural pleasures of Europe to a relatively inexperienced population. Of course, England has spectacular novels and fantastic cheese. But in order to commodify products coming from Europe, in order to build up a market where there wasn’t one before, and in order to ratchet up national economies after the war, you get the deployment of the blurb.

Obviously, there had been advertising before World War II — but I’m willing to argue that the blurb came into its own as a literary form in Britain in the Fifties. Of course, no one can own the blurb — it’s a pretty large genre, and Americans have certainly embraced it. It actually works the same way for us — the Brits know more than we do, the French know more than the Brits, and so on.

There’s a whole history of blurbism that allows us to become more sophisticated and experienced as a culture. It’s all about how you sell stuff — you have to educate the consumer.

A back wine label is the ultimate in the blurbing business. If you think Stephen King’s blurbs have to be a paragon of precision, think about how compact the back label of a wine bottle is. You have so few words — eighty would be lengthy.

I started out as a minimalist poet, and that served me well. My friend David Abel is also a trained poet, and he used to run the best avant-garde bookstore in New York City — The Bridge. He edits down to the quantum level. He really can take a screwdriver to anything anybody ever wrote and simply get the fuel mixture very lean. The wine labels on those early Roads End vintages are, I think, quite clean.

BLDGBLOG: Are there anthologies? The 150 Best Wine Labels Ever Written?

Fox: No, but I think it’s a book we should do! I think it’s a great idea.

BLDGBLOG: There’s an anecdote I remember about the minimalist poet Aram Saroyan. He also worked in advertising, and he’s the author of one of those catchphrases that most Americans will know, which is that “Raid kills bugs dead.”

Fox: It’s like James Dickey — he wrote “The pause that refreshes!” for Coca-Cola. Wallace Stevens, to go back to the “jar on the hill” I mentioned earlier, worked in advertising too. That kind of concision in American language: you find it in advertising, minimalist poetry, and the best wine labels.

Edible Geography: Do you know what the wine label writing industry looks like now?

Fox: I have no idea. But I do know that there’s a real self-consciousness among high-end winemakers about not being flowery — not trying to take your wine and hook it to a cake, you know? There’s a real notion of trying to be honest about here’s how and where we make the wine.

But the bottom line is that language is a great deceiver. You’ve just got to taste stuff yourself, whether it’s a cheese or a wine or a restaurant, to know if it’s any good.

BLDGBLOG: What’s the wine label editorial experience like? Did wine-makers come back to you and ask you to use or not use certain words?

Fox: Absolutely. Someone will say, for example, “I just don’t want our geology to be identified with that of the Willamette Valley. I want to make sure we’re distinct from that, because we’re not actually in the valley, and it makes a difference.” To make that distinction, at the level of language, means there are words you just can’t use.

When you look at a vineyard, it’s a really small piece of property. Compared to a wheat field, it’s tiny. Everyone’s trying to parse out the finest level of distinction that they can draw, so that the mind of the consumer has a hook to put their product on. It’s never not a sell. Even the most serious, honest, committed wine-maker is aware of the fact that if he or she cannot sell the wine, then they can’t continue to make wine or keep the land.

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The Mutato Archive

By Nicola | Published: March 1, 2011

IMAGE: Mutatoes by Uli Westphal.

Since 2006, artist Uli Westphal has been collecting, documenting, and eating Berlin’s Mutatoes—the non-standard fruits, roots, and vegetables that can be found at the city’s farmers’ markets. His photographs form an archive of “these last survivors of agricultural diversity,” revealing an incredible variety of colours, curves, and contours.

IMAGE: Mutatoes by Uli Westphal.

For Westphal, these Mutatoes bear witness to “the suppression of mutation and polymorphism in our industrial food system.”

The complete absence of botanical anomalies in our supermarkets has caused us to regard the consistency of produce presented there as natural. Produce has become a highly designed, monotonous product. We have forgotten, and in many cases never experienced, the way fruits, roots, and vegetables can actually look (and taste).

I first came across Westphal’s photographs thanks to a reader comment on “The Fruit Standard,” a post I wrote on the one-year anniversary of the partial repeal of the European Union’s fruit and vegetable standards.

The European Economic Community (the EU’s precursor) was set up in 1958 to create a common market, and one of the first issues to be addressed was the need for shared produce grading standards, to facilitate cross-border trade and guarantee consumer quality. Twenty-six fruits and vegetables were subject to “uniform standardisation parameters,” which prescribed that, to be recognised as such, “cucumbers must not bend at a gradient of more than 1/10, an onion could ‘only be sold if two thirds is covered in skin,’ and the white part of the leek had to ‘represent at least one-third of the total length or half the sheathed part.’”
 

IMAGE: Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88, laying down quality standards for cucumbers, from Journeys, ed. Giovanna Borasi.

As I wrote in 2009, the rules, however well-intentioned, were a disaster in practice, resulting in one-fifth of fruit and vegetables harvested in the EU being discarded and destroyed, unable even to be given away. Nonetheless, national marketing standards provide a charming illustration of the methodological assumptions and absurdities of classification.

In their own way, the EU standards are a masterpiece of natural history writing: an extended initiative by Europe’s finest legal minds to define, through its range of permissible deviation, the ur-cucumber. What better way to know a strawberry than by the moments at which it becomes not a strawberry?

IMAGE: Mutatoes by Uli Westphal.

The other interesting thing, of course, is that EU bureaucrats and USDA officials alike measure whether cucumbers are cucumbers based purely on visual qualities — appearance and form — rather than taste.

This raises a larger question about how we perceive food. Although human taste and smell evolved to evaluate our edible environment, our sensory cognition and attendant quantification and classification systems are largely dominated by sight.

In fact, various studies have demonstrated the ways in which taste perception can be distorted by visual cues, with professional wine critics led astray by drops of Mega Purple in a Chardonnay and diners sickened when their steak was revealed to be dyed blue. No matter how deformed Westphal’s tomatoes are, cut up in a salad, they would undoubtedly taste as much (or more) like a tomato as their spherical supermarket peers. But, if served whole, would their irregular shapes, colours, and textures affect our perception of their taste?

IMAGE: Mutatoes by Uli Westphal.

Meanwhile, Westphal’s use of a visual medium, photography, and an identical, clinical white backdrop to present each strawberry or potato as an equal and individual example of its genre forces us to reconsider the very idea of evaluating fruits and vegetables. How should we define and grade food? And what do the standards we consciously or unconsciously impose on produce tell us about ourselves, particularly given the fact that today’s fruit and vegetables are a human-designed artifact, the result of centuries of domestication and breeding.

Today, only those varieties capable of providing high yields, consistent symmetry, and the resilience to emerge relatively unscathed after traveling through global supply chains are grown commercially. Even Westphal’s most deviant cucumbers are all from the same eight modern varieties bred to reduce bitterness and increase size:

At a certain point I started to realize that it is not only the natural occurrence of morphological irregularities in the growth of single plant varieties that is being suppressed and filtered out by the industrial food system. In fact, only a tiny fraction of high yielding, good looking varieties are being grown and distributed today, even though there are literally thousands of varieties of any domesticated fruit or vegetable.

Since the green revolution agriculture has experienced a mass extinction. A vast majority of plant varieties that humans have bred over the past 10,000 years has vanished within the last 50 years. The ever increasing amount of processed foods and food imports also contributed to the illusion that the diversity of our food supply was increasing, not declining.

The qualities by which we assess our fruits and vegetables, whether encoded in EU standards or simply in the purchasing choices of supermarkets, thus serve as an implicit guide to the landscape of industrial food, with its agricultural intensification, monocultural cultivation, and extended supply chains.

But the perfect, regular fruit and vegetables in our supermarkets also tell us as much about our shared aesthetic ideals as, for example, an art museum or beauty pageant. In his book, Mutants, Armand Marie Leroi writes about the diverse spectrum of human form (we are each, on average, born with three hundred genetic “mutations”) and our species preference for symmetry, and concludes that, perhaps, “the true meaning of beauty is the relative absence of genetic error.”

IMAGE: Mutatoes by Uli Westphal.

That may be, but I can’t help but hope that Westphal’s photos will help us extend our appreciation for the formal inventiveness of fallible plant life.

[NOTE:Thanks to Ramona Ranchera for the introduction to Uli Westphal's work, and PSFK for the reminder. For more on similar subjects, check out these earlier posts: "The Fruit Standard" and "The Opposite of a Vegetable".]

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The Harvests of War

By Nicola | Published: February 17, 2011

IMAGE: A bomb crater in a rice field in Vietnam, photo via.

The impact of military manoeuvres on the agricultural landscape is often not positive, from the herbicidal ravages of Agent Orange to the truffle-decimating trenches of Picardy. Bombs, mines, and other explosive munitions carve new three-dimensional spaces into the landscape, digging holes in perfectly graded fields and demolishing buildings in densely packed cities.

In Europe, many of these battle scars have been more or less erased: filled in and reabsorbed into the environmental fabric, visible only through tell-tale shadows on satellite imagery or side-by-side comparison with old city views. Some still exist, either as deliberately preserved holes in the ground or as ad-hoc ponds (which, in turn, have formed inadvertent aquatic nature reserves).

IMAGE: Lochnagar Crater, photo by Richard Dunning. Lochnagar is a crater created on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and bought by Dunning to ensure it would be preserved rather than filled in.

IMAGE: This small round pond in the Hackney Marshes was created by a World War II bomb. Satellite view via Google Earth.

Recently, fellow Future Plural site Pruned has curated some examples of more productive uses of bomb sites, or what we might call crater cultivation. During the Second World War, for example, a Mr. Haynes planted and tended this tidy victory garden in a bomb crater near Westminster Cathedral.

IMAGE: Bomb crater victory garden (sadly long gone) near Westminster Cathedral, image from Pathé Films footage via City Farmer News.

IMAGE: Bomb crater victory garden, photo courtesy the Imperial War Museum, via Pruned.

During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped three times as many bombs on the Vietcong as were dropped anywhere during all of World War II. Indeed, Pruned writes that Xiengkhouang Province in Laos, after being on the receiving end of more than 580,000 bombing raids over nine years, or the equivalent of “one bombing mission every eight minutes around the clock,” is “considered the most heavily bombed place on earth.”

The result is a landscape pockmarked with craters and littered with bomb debris, as well as unexploded ordnance, which still kills several hundred Laotians each year. Some of the craters are dry, others have filled up with a combination of groundwater and rainwater to create what Pruned calls “an aberrant hydrology of micro-lakes.”

IMAGE: Photo of bomb crater ponds in Vietnam by Carsten Peter for National Geographic, via Pruned

One of the craters was turned into a kidney-shaped swimming pool by the future President of Laos (Pruned has photos). Of particular interest to Edible Geographers, however, is the way that both the bomb casings and the craters themselves have been made to yield an alternative harvest, in an ingenious replacement of the rice fields they otherwise disrupt.

According to journalist Ben Hills, locals in Xiengkhouang Province eat a lot of swallows, which they net when the birds fly into the dry bomb craters for a dust-bath. They also use bomb casings to “support rice granaries, form fences, and make pig-troughs and planter-boxes.”

IMAGE: A 61-metre-wide dry bomb crater in Laos, photo by Ross Lee Tabak.

IMAGE: Bomb casing planter in Laos, photo by Ross Lee Tabak.

Perhaps most intriguing are the craters that have become fish farms. Writing for Places [pdf], Thomas Campanella observes that in next-door Vietnam:

Bomb craters are favored sites for houses, with a replenishable source of protein at the doorstep. These relics have become part of the agrarian landscape, transformed from a symbol of death into one of life.

IMAGE: Mr. Mee’s bomb crater fish hatchery “in the uplands near the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” photo from Rural Aquaculture, via Pruned.

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El Pollo Local

By Nicola | Published: February 11, 2011

IMAGE: “El Pollo Local,” designed by Evan Allen — click here to see a larger version.

Another little treat from the New City Reader Food issue, “El Pollo Local” is a more light-hearted take on the idea of tracing New York City’s urban ecology of information.

Fried chicken is ubiquitous in inner-cities, but is also geographically differentiated. At street-level, through blinking neon signage and vinyl banners, it seemed to me that culinary variations in fried chicken must also map the global origins and palates of New York City’s residents onto the urban grid.

So, to make this imaginary atlas of New York chicken geography, I gathered the names and addresses of the city’s crispy chicken vendors. Designer Evan Allen then carefully plotted each one onto a map, using business names supplemented with Google Street View visits to redistrict neighborhoods according to their dominant regional cooking style and associated signage.

The urban fried chicken is a migratory bird: Evan’s map is a twitcher’s guide to spotting its more popular incarnations, as well as an alternative way of understanding and navigating the edible city.

[NOTE: The initial concept, data mining, and words for "El Pollo Local"  were by me; the concept was then fully developed by designer Evan Allen, who also created the map and drawings, and conducted the signage analysis. "El Pollo Local" was originally published in the New City Reader food issue, edited in collaboration with Will Prince and Krista Ninivaggi. You can now read the issue in full online.]

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