Category Archives: Day Out

Harvesting Winter

By Nicola | Published: March 12, 2014

IMAGE: A block of Thompson Lake Ice, hauled onto the surface with tongs. All photographs by Nicola Twilley. In 1805, a twenty-three year-old Bostonian called Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade. Over the next fifty years, he and the men he worked with developed specialised ice harvesting tools, a global network […]

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Food Cart Factory

By Nicola | Published: February 10, 2012

IMAGE: A city on a trike, Worksman Cycles, Queens, New York (all photos by Nicola Twilley unless otherwise noted). The oldest bike manufacturer in the U.S., Worksman Cycles, also happens to be the home of two American food vending icons: the Good Humor ice cream tricycle and the New York City hot dog cart. What’s […]

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Spaces of Banana Control

By Nicola | Published: November 29, 2011

When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says “Bananas!” IMAGE: All photos from our visit to the Banana Distributors of New York were taken by me, unless otherwise noted. Rosenblatt ships a million boxes of bananas every year from the Banana Distributors of New York facility on Drake Street, in the Hunt’s Point section of […]

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Eating the Street

By Nicola | Published: July 15, 2010

IMAGE: 2:30 p.m. in Mexico City…. time for a snack! All photos by Nicola Twilley, unless labelled otherwise. Mexico City’s streets are dense with food vendors. Statistics are hard to come by, since the industry is largely unregulated, but in her 2007 Survey of Street Foods in Mexico City, anthropologist Janet Long quotes a survey […]

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The Axis of Food

By Nicola | Published: June 28, 2010

La Central de Abasto de la Ciudad de México is enormous. It sprawls across a 327 hectare site on the eastern edge of the D.F., dwarfing fellow wholesale food markets such as Hunt’s Point (24 hectares), Tsukiji (23 hectares), or even the massive Rungis, outside Paris (232 hectares).

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Day Out | Sugar in the Raw

By Nicola | Published: September 27, 2009

Last month, BLDGBLOG and I joined a small group (consisting mostly of wheat farmers on a busman’s holiday) to visit Mossman mill, which is just up the road from Cairns.

As it happens, we are apparently on the brink of a sugar crisis, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Americans might face an autumn without sugar

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Day Out | The Mushroom Tunnel

By Nicola | Published: September 9, 2009

As Geoff has already mentioned on BLDGBLOG, we spent our last full day in Australia touring the Li-Sun Exotic Mushroom Farm with its founder and owner, Dr. Noel Arrold. Three weeks earlier at a Sydney farmers’ market, we were buying handfuls of his delicious shimeji and chestnut mushrooms to make a risotto, when the vendor told us that they had been grown in a disused railway tunnel in Mittagong.

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