Thanks to the laws of economics and physics, I seem to miss more interesting exhibitions and events than I can attend. Here are two recent misses: one which will, I hope, be accessible as part of a larger exhibition in the future; and one that you can still catch if you’re in London this month. […]

IMAGE: Smithsonian scientists Dolores Piperno (right) and Irene Holst (left) growing teosinte under modern (chamber on the left) and past (chamber on the right) climate conditions. Photo: STRI photographer Sean Mattson. Equipped with only a pair of garden shed-sized, perfectly ordinary-looking glass greenhouses at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno and […]

IMAGE: Bompas & Parr’s Parabolic Sherry is available for purchase at the Pop Rock Moon Shop. If you’re in London on Sunday, don’t miss “A Brief History of Drinking in Space” with Sam Bompas of Bompas & Parr and David Lane of The Gourmand: To date, there has been relatively little consumption of alcohol in […]

IMAGE: A wind-dried sausage curtain, Zhengzhou, China. Last spring, I applied for the inaugural UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. I was very happy when I got the email saying I was one of six Fellows chosen for 2013—but, as it turns out, not nearly as happy as I should have been. The […]

IMAGE: “A Temperance of Cooks,” WOOP Studios. One of the more delightful eccentricities of the English language is its arcane arsenal of collective nouns, or particular terms for a group of a particular person, place, thing, animal, or idea. Some of these—a pride of lions, a bevy of ladies—date back to the fifteenth century or beyond, […]

IMAGE: “Beiti” (detail from a 2011 installation at CAPC in Bordeaux, France), Laurent Mareschal. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marie Cini. Photo by Tami Notsani. IMAGE: “Beiti,” Laurent Mareschal, installation shot at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Laurent Mareschal’s “Beiti” is a carpet made of spice, carefully sieved through stencils into tiled patterns […]

IMAGE: GPS patterns of a cropdusting aeroplane, via Mapbox. Among the public GPS tracks uploaded to OpenStreetMaps is this cropduster spirograph: swirls of pesticide or fertiliser application traced over the landscape in a rhythmic choreography that balances nozzle flow and wind conditions to “paint” the fields below.

Fatbergs, another recurring theme here on Edible Geography, are sewer-blocking lumps of congealed cooking oil and wet wipes that can grow to the size of a double decker bus beneath the streets of London, with disastrous consequences for local drainage. IMAGE: London sewer flusher Danny Brackley shovels out a fatberg under Leicester Square. Photo via […]

As regular readers will know, Edible Geography has been on the cow tunnel beat, on and off, for some years now. IMAGE: From “The Manhattan abattoir,” an engraving by V. L. Kingsbury, 1877, published in Harper’s Weekly, via the New York Public Library. Note the rather tiny cowboy: another unsolved mystery. Quick refresher: the semi-mythical […]