The Pickle Index

IMAGE: Two heads of whole zha cai with chilli paste; photograph by Sjschen via Wikipedia. Chinese officials, charged with moving 250 million rural farmers into cities over the next decade under the central government’s sweeping “National Plan for Promoting...

Stuff

IMAGE: Front cover of Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, by Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs. Between 2001 and 2005, an anthropologist, two archaeologists, and one photographer conducted a...

Tutti Frutti

Bompas & Parr, the culinary magicians behind aerosolised gin-and-tonics, cake-obstacled miniature golf, and architectural punchbowls, have published a new book exploring the olfactory, aesthetic, historical, and spectacular implications of fruit salad: Tutti...

Ecology a la Carte

Hot on the heels of my menu donation to the New York Public Library comes this intriguing news story about a team of ecologists using Hawaiian restaurant menus to reconstruct long-term changes in local marine populations. The menus provided the evidence needed to...

Sewer Watch

The past week has brought two intriguing updates from London’s subterranean infrastructure of excretion. In a triumphant press release, Thames Water announced the removal of the world’s largest fatberg — a sewer-blocking, bus-sized lump of congealed...