Monthly Archives: May 2010

With just a few hours left in this apartment, and much yet to be packed, it’s time to crack open the bottle of Dogfish Head’s Theobroma beer that has been lingering in the fridge, futilely awaiting an occasion when my taste buds and typing fingers feel — simultaneously — ready to do it justice.

IMAGE: Screen grab showing global agricultural land-use in 1700, from World Cropland, Bill Rankin, 2009. At Bill Rankin’s fantastic Radical Cartography site you can see an animation that shows the intensification and spread of agricultural land-use around the world over the past three hundred years. IMAGES: Screen grabs showing global agricultural land-use in 1750 and […]

IMAGE: Reversed Volumes by Mischer’Traxler, via Dezeen. Viennese designers Mischer’Traxler showed these gorgeous bowls at this year’s Milan Design Week. The series is called Reversed Volumes, and each bowl is created by moulding ceramic powder around a vegetable until it hardens—no firing necessary. IMAGE: Reversed Volumes by Mischer’Traxler, via Dezeen. IMAGE: Reversed Volumes by Mischer’Traxler, […]

I’m a big fan of the Invisible Library, which catalogues books “that exist only between the covers of other books—as descriptions, occasionally as brief excerpts, often simply as titles.” The list includes several items of potential interest to Edible Geographers, such as Cooking the Captain: The Colonialist as Yorkshire Pudding by Stanley Tulafale (from James Hynes’s Publish and Perish) and Offal, by Stultitia Bodwin (from P.G. Wodehouse’s “Best Seller,” in Mulliner Nights).

IMAGE: “Possible routes of development from Hunting-Collecting to other systems,” from Deforesting The Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis by Michael Williams, via Social Fiction. Click here for larger size. An important factor in the domestication process was defecation. The seeds of sweet-corn, tomatoes, lemons, cucumbers, and many more edible plants, as well as fruits […]

Over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an Edible Geography favourite, Jeremy links to a fascinating post about transgenic pea aphids. The pea aphid has been the focus of quite a bit of biological excitement lately as the findings of the Aphid Genome Project are gradually released: the tiny insects can change their shape in response to food supply and environmental conditions, with the option to become wingless, winged, sexual, asexual, or “morphs that are specialized to resist desiccation or to defend the colony.”