Listening to What the Tongue Feels

IMAGE: Acoustic tribology diagram via NIZO. First, drink some black coffee. Next, rub your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It should feel a little rough, like very fine sandpaper: the tiny bumps on your tongue, called papillae, are raised just enough to create...

The Last Places

IMAGE: Ministry of Defence Main Building, photograph by JoanneB via Wikipedia. Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more...

An Omnivorous Perspective on the Jurassic

As a fun footnote to my last post: Last month, Popular Science offered an entirely speculative guide to eating dinosaur meat. IMAGE: Struthiomimus altus, an ornithomimid from the Late Cretaceous, as illustrated by Nobu Tamura. In consultation with David Varricchio, a...

The Impossibility of Historical Flavour

During the Edible Archaeology panel at Foodprint NYC, Bill Grimes, former restaurant critic and current obituary writer for The New York Times, briefly referred to “one of the great mysteries for all culinary historians — what did it taste like?” What did...

Foodprint in Print

Foodprint Project, the roving event series I co-curate with Sarah Rich, is more than two years and four cities old, and, entirely thanks to our fantastic panelists and guest moderators, the conversations we’ve had in each city have been surprising, funny,...

Hot Dog

Dogs still occupy a variety of roles in the human food system, from sheep herding to barbecued delicacy. What is less well known is that before the advent of gas or electric ovens, dogs also provided a convenient power source for kitchen appliances. IMAGE: A doggy...