Salt, despite its long and distinguished history, not to mention its biochemical importance, is usually seen as a threat. Public health agencies across the developed world urge us to cut down our salt consumption, mounting campaigns warning of hidden salts, and high blood pressure. However, it seems that in architectural form, salt may have medicinal properties.

Back in August, Edible Geography tried to imagine what other shapes meat might take, if it were freed from the deeply ingrained socio-cultural traditions of meat preparation. The ensuing comments expressed a nostalgia for lost meat diagrams, and also directed me to this article, from Science Daily, which reports on ancient butchering practices extrapolated from […]

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Or, “Consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods and beverages within and among the basic food groups while choosing foods that limit the intake of saturated and transfats, cholesterol, added sugars, salt, and alcohol.” Or, “Don’t eat egg salad from a vending machine.” IMAGE: “Don’t eat egg salad from […]

The other week, Pia Ednie-Brown, editor of the recently released book Plastic Green: Designing Bio-spatial Futures, sent in a copy of Consumables, a pamphlet by artist Boo Chapple that imagines a world in which mobile phones are edible.

Truffles, I once read, used to be abundant and cheap enough to appear on almost every page in a cookbook intended for the lower and middle classes. In nineteenth-century France, truffles were regarded as an everyday food, rather than an elusive, expensive, and unquestionably elite treat. However, the trenches, tanks, and shrapnel of World War […]