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%). […]
Monthly Archives: January 2010
The Farm City of Tomorrow: Apply Today!
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?
Save the Date! Foodprint NYC
I am incredibly pleased to announce that Edible Geography is poised to make its first foray into the physical world, by co-organising Foodprint NYC, which is itself the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city. The event will take place one month from today, on Saturday, February 27, from 1 […]
Publishing Food #2
On a recent excursion to The Morgan Library & Museum (to see their gorgeous William Blake exhibition), I spent some time in the gift shop leafing through a big book about miniature books. Based on a 2007 exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures contains such curiosities as “thumb bibles,” a truly tiny copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, and a two-by-three inch autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, inventor of the liquid-propellant rocket, which accompanied the astronauts on their Apollo 11 mission and thus became the first book on the moon.
The Self-Consuming Barbecue Pavilion
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.
Digest | Feeding the Bronx
The Center for Urban Pedagogy has created an awesome new video that explores some of the economic and consumer forces that combine to create the South Bronx foodscape. It’s called Bodega Down Bronx, and you can watch it in full (a half hour well spent) over over at Design Observer, where it premiered earlier this […]
Vegetable Tourism
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 […]
The Importance of Acoustics in Food Storage
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 […]
The Wax Chamber
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.