Until recently, the question of whether an apple was truly ripe could only be answered by destroying it. The human mouth, with its variety of multi-functional sensory detection mechanisms, provides the traditional—and, until recently, the most reliable—guide. But once an apple has been bitten, there is, as Eve reminds us, no going back. For eaters, […]
Author Archives: Nicola
100 Shades of French Fry
For just two days this weekend, a gallery on New York’s Lower East Side hosted a pop-up French fry exhibition. IMAGE: A French fry on the Bowery. All photos in this post by Nicola Twilley. It was a PR stunt put together by craft condiment contender Sir Kensington, but, as someone who has never successfully […]
Gastropod: What America *Could* Taste Like
And we’re back! It’s time for your fortnightly dose of Gastropod. This is our first sound “bite”—a mini-programme to tide you over between our monthly in-depth episodes. In it, my co-host, Cynthia Graber, and I discuss two of the most interesting food history and science stories we’ve come across recently. This week is all about […]
Gastropod: The Golden Spoon
Meet Gastropod, the brand new, podcast-shaped lovechild of Edible Geography and award-winning science journalist Cynthia Graber. Each month, we’ll be releasing a new full-length episode looking at food through the lens of science and history, as well as a shorter, bite-sized interlude to tide you over in between. Our very first episode launches today. It’s […]
Proustian Greengrocers
IMAGE: Memory Lane, courtesy Grove Care, Ltd. Among the facilities at the Blossom Fields care home near Bristol is “Memory Lane”: a reconstructed 1950s street where residents, many of whom suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia, can mail letters in a George VI Post Box, make calls from a restored phone box, enjoy a pint (or, […]
The Photosynthetic Habits of Highly Effective Plants
As far as we know, the plant kingdom has not developed its own genre of productivity literature. There is no plant equivalent of Six Sigma, GTD, or Lifehacker — an absence made all the more alarming by the recent discovery of the existence of a subterranean plant “internet.” The result? Despite being the main thing […]
Ten Landmarks of the Chinese Cryosphere
“The Price of Cold” — the story of my recent adventures exploring China’s artificial cryosphere — is now online in The New York Times Magazine. In it, I visit the world’s first and only frozen dumpling billionaire, hang out with the chef leading a one-man refrigeration resistance movement, and visit refrigerated warehouses and R&D labs […]
Bike-Powered Rice
I was first introduced to the Randall’s Island rice paddies in miso form, as part of former Momofuku R&D chef Dan Felder’s experiments to develop a truly local terroir for the restaurant’s New York City iteration of Asian cuisine. IMAGE: 2014’s rice seedlings germinating inside the greenhouse at Randall’s Island Urban Farm. All photographs by Nicola […]
From Paris, With Smell
The first telegraph sent across the Atlantic, on 16 August, 1858, read: “Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men.” The contents of the first transatlantic telephone call, placed by AT&T President Walter S. Gifford on 7 January, 1927, were more mundane: a report the next day in The […]
Vanilla Is The Old Black
The words “vanilla” and “chocolate” are used with equal frequency as both flavour and colour descriptors — but, curiously, the particular shades they describe have not always been the off-white and brown they signify today. Instead, according to anthropologist Kathryn Sampeck, one of the earliest appearances of “chocolate”-colour, in Abraham Werner’s 1821 Nomenclature of Colours, […]