Author Archives: Nicola

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 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 […]

2009 has really not been the year of the pig. Despite the best efforts of the USDA and the EU’s Health Commissioner, the first pandemic of the twenty-first century is commonly known as swine flu – a negative association that hasn’t helped pork sales at all. IMAGE: Pigs on a farm, via Still, at least […]

Beer enthusiasts, myself among them, were upset to read this week that our pints of pilsner lager might be the latest casualty of climate change. New Scientist reported the depressing news: it seems that the quality of Eastern European Saaz hops is going downhill each year. According to brewing suppliers Seven Bridges Cooperative, “Saaz hops […]

Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff speculates on the agricultural possibilities of “Endothelium“, an organic, automated geotextile designed by architect Philip Beesley, in which…