Author Archives: Nicola

IMAGE: Peak Pegasus. Photo by Jackie Pritchard, Marine Traffic. Peak Pegasus is a bulk cargo ship, built in 2013, and, like so many commercial vessels, flagged in Liberia. At 229 metres long and 32.26 metres broad, she is Panamax-sized (the maximum width that can squeak through the canal is 32.31 metres), and she can carry […]

The year I moved to New York, Sockerbit, a Scandinavian pick-and-mix sweet shop, opened in the West Village. I went once, and never again in the six years I lived in the city. The problem was not that I did not enjoy the fragrant, soft pink Smultronmatta (rippled squares of wild strawberry licorice) or the […]

IMAGE: The classic Ferrero Rocher “Ambassador’s Party” ad. “To put a hazelnut into every bonbon, Ferrero buys about a third of the world’s hazelnut supply.” A third! That’s just one of the fascinating details in this Forbes profile of the Ferrero family, which also includes the business’s origins in ersatz wartime “chocolate.”* Founder Pietro’s first […]

As allergy season gears up in the northern hemisphere, yesterday brought news that even leaving the planet will bring no relief. A press release announcing the publication of a new paper in the journal GeoHealth warned that future astronauts may well suffer from “lunar hay fever,” complete with the characteristic sneezing, watery eyes, and sore […]

IMAGE: Innocent wackaging via. If you’ve bought juice, crisps, cereal bars, soups, “breakfast pots” (porridge, as was), or any number of other ready-to-eat packaged foods in the U.K. this millennium, you may have noticed that your snack fancies a chat. “British food packaging now has a matey, at worst babyish, tone that simply didn’t used […]

An egg, it turns out, is not just the best thing to put on top of almost any dish. For starters, artists have been using eggs as a canvas for centuries; the International Egg Art Guild showcases some fine examples of “eggery,” from delicate laser-cut eggshells to traditional Ukranian wax-resist methods. The photo galleries from […]

IMAGE: Websters is one of only six dairies that is allowed to make Stilton cheese. Photograph by Martin Parr/Magnum, via The New Republic. I am both stunned and heartbroken by the UK’s Brexit vote, as well as selfishly angry that my future as a European seems to have been taken away* by a disastrous combination […]

I wrote a short essay for the “Field Test” exhibition catalogue, reprinted below. You can find essays by the exhibition’s other advisers—Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, Jane Stout of Trinity College Dublin, Charles Spillane, head of the Plant & Agrobiosciences Centre at the National University of […]

IMAGE: Screenshot from the Science Gallery’s Field Test video—watch it in full here. In Dublin, my smog meringue collaborators at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy have been busy curating an exhibition all about the future of farming. Called “Field Test,” the interactive installation is on display at the Science Gallery until June 5, and, if […]