Monthly Archives: January 2010

Three short stories of food and the city: 1. An analysis of food remains at three sites in Lower Manhattan showed that the kinds of fish eighteenth-century New Yorkers ate changed significantly over time: social archaeologist Nan Rothschild found that “early New Yorkers consumed sheepshead (71% of all fish bones), with striped bass second (24%). […]

Non-profit, for-profit, or community-supported? Allotment, front lawn, traffic island, or vacant lot? Distributed, vertical, or rooftop? Jobs, education, health, taste, or environmental sustainability? Farmer’s markets, veg box, or food co-ops?

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

The logical offspring of two recent food trends – gastro-tourism and heirloom fruit and veg – is clearly vegetable tourism. After all, if people will travel to Melton Mowbray for an authentic pork pie and pay extra for a Brandywine tomato, why not make a pilgrimage to the site where “one of the fastest growing […]

Deep in the archives of San Francisco-based Aquarius Records, buried between several days’ worth of “laptop glitchery” and “brutal industro-crunch,” lies this gem: Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs, (INRA, 2000, CD, 19:98). IMAGE: Common stored grain pests, not shown to scale. Left to right, top to bottom: Rice weevil, Indian meal moth, Granary weevil and […]

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