Pie Multi-Tools

Behold the missing link between Martha Stewart and Moby Dick: the scrimshaw pie multi-tool. IMAGE: Scrimshaw pie-crimping multi-tools from the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum; photograph by Nicola Twilley. IMAGE: Scrimshaw pie-crimping multi-tools from...

Redesigning the Wine Bottle: An Interview with Luke Jerram

IMAGE: Bordeaux-style wine bottles, available from Silver Spur Corporation. A couple of weeks ago, one of my favourite artists, Luke Jerram, tweeted: “Just commissioned to design a new red wine bottle. Fun and challenging. Any ideas?” Well, yes. My idea...

The Shape of Cheese and Chicken McNuggets

IMAGE: McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets; photograph by Kim Bhasin for Business Insider. On a sponsored media trip to McDonald’s US headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Barbara J. Booth, the company’s director of sensory science, told Kim Bhasin of...

Five-Cent Redemption

Among the five documentary shorts nominated for an Oscar this year is Redemption, a thirty-five minute film about New York City’s “canners”: the men, women, and children who collect bottles and cans from the city’s streets for their five-cent...

Solar Peach Walls

As a coda to my previous post, I should note that before their adoption of apple ensachage and photographic tattoos, the nineteenth-century fruit growers of Montreuil had already adopted innovative peach growing techniques to produce the most coveted stone fruits in...

The Tree with the Apple Tattoo

IMAGE: A random mutation caused this Golden Delicious apple to turn half-red, half-green. According to Susan Brown, she can breed apples with a stable variation of this mutation that creates candy-cane red stripes on a pale yellow-skinned apple. Photo ARCHANT via The...