Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Art and Reward of Penguin Charming

By Nicola | Published: January 23, 2012

IMAGE: “Penguin Interviews,” from Frederick Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1896-1899, via Peter Smith, Food & Think. Very good news: my former colleague at GOOD, Peter Smith, has joined the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog as a regular contributor. Among his early posts is this one, on a highly effective scurvy prevention technique pioneered […]

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P. O. Bread Box

By Nicola | Published: January 22, 2012

IMAGE: Damien Petit and his “Boîte A Pain,” photo by La Dépêche du Midi. Both natives and non-natives alike tend to agree that bread is central to French cuisine, history, and national identity. Indeed, Steven Kaplan, a Cornell University professor who has spent the past forty years studying French society through its bread, argues that, […]

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How to Clone Mineral Water

By Nicola | Published: January 7, 2012

Although the secret recipe for Coca-Cola is known to fewer people than the U.S. nuclear arsenal’s launch codes, there are other, more expensive fizzy drinks whose exact ingredient ratios are proudly revealed on every label. Helpfully, several websites have aggregated this information into searchable databases, so that you can easily find the total dissolved solids in […]

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Sensory Maps

By Nicola | Published: January 6, 2012

IMAGE: Smell Edinburgh by Kate McLean (view larger) Victoria Henshaw, whose own urban smell research formed the subject of my last post, recently introduced me to Edinburgh-based designer Kate McLean’s Sensory Maps series. Since moving to the city two years ago, McLean has spent hours exploring it on foot and noting down both her own […]

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Smell-designing Sheffield

By Nicola | Published: January 3, 2012

IMAGE: Victoria Henshaw’s Sheffield smell walk, mapped. Regular Edible Geography readers will know that smellscapes are a recurring subplot of this blog — a diversion that I justify on the basis that roughly ninety percent of what we perceive as taste is actually smell. For the most part, the built environment consists of accidental and […]

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