New York is known for being a dense, fast-paced kind of place: its pedestrians move more quickly than anywhere else in the country, its apartments are the same size as most suburban garages, and it is, after all, the city that never sleeps.

So, if you were looking to make miso that was truly local — that somehow embodied its Manhattan terroir — it makes sense that you would try to make it in record time. Traditional miso undergoes a lengthy fermentation — between six months to three years is normal — but in New York’s East Village, in the culinary R&D lab attached to chef David Chang’s innovative Momofuku restaurant group, a new miso is born as often as every four or five days.

IMAGE: Momofuku misos, photo via wildfermentation.com.

Earlier this week, Dan Felder, head of R&D at the lab, spent a couple of hours introducing the Experimental Cuisine Collective to Momofuku’s microbial adventures. Following a research trip to Japan, and extensive help from Rachel Dutton, Harvard University microbiologist to the restaurant stars, Felder explained that the Momofuku team had gained sufficient understanding to transform a recipe into a technique — the miso mechanism.

In other words, for Felder and Momofuku founder David Chang, the microbial metabolism at the heart of miso’s double fermentation process is now just another versatile piece of kitchen equipment, like a food processor or whisk.

Felder actually described the team’s initial miso brainstorming session as “a Pacojet moment,” referring to a device that was originally introduced as an ice-cream maker but has since been appropriated by chefs to foam, whip, puree, and mince almost every ingredient under the sun.

IMAGE: Pistachio and pine-nut miso in NYU’s centrifuge. Photo by Dan Felder.

Giddy with excitement at their “new” tool, and its powerful potential to create genuinely original flavours and textures, the Momofuku team have “miso-ed” pine nuts, pistachios, chickpeas, corn, cranberry beans, and more, with quite delicious results. (We sampled several, and the pine nut, in particular, had a luscious caramel undertone to its salty, savory taste.)

IMAGE: Pistachio miso, with a layer of fermented pistachio oil and pistachio tamari separated out. Photo by Dan Felder.

Beyond the thrill of experimentation, however, Felder and Momofuku are fascinated by the possibility of developing a new local terroir — foods and flavours that express something their place of origin in twenty-first century New York City, but aren’t necessarily traditional to the region.

Thus, in addition to making miso under cramped conditions and really fast, in an apparently unintentional reflection of the pace of life in the city, they’re also trying to recruit local microbes to replace the traditional Aspergillus Oryzae that is native to Japan and China. That bacteria occurs naturally on rice hulls in Asia, and so Momofuku is planning to send some of next season’s harvest from New York City’s only, tiny rice paddy, on Randall’s Island, off to Harvard for microbial analysis.

IMAGE: The Randall’s Island rice paddy, via its blog.

In the meantime, Felder left out cooked grains around his East Village lab to “catch” local microbes, from which Rachel Dutton managed to isolate a strain of Neurospora mould, which is widely used in genetics research because it is hardy and hyper-dominant (a New York microbe indeed).

IMAGE: Neurospora. Credit: Dr. Matt Springer and the FGSC.

Despite a series of failures thus far, Felder believes that it is possible to make miso from Neurospora, which has a fruitier aroma than Aspergillus Oryzae (it apparently “smells like a cross between cider vinegar and bubblegum”) and has only one traditional culinary application, producing Javan oncom, a tempeh-like food made from the by-products of peanut or cassava processing.

IMAGE: Oncom cakes, via.

In the meantime, however, some more successful experiments are gradually making their way into Momofuku’s restaurant kitchens — diners at Seibo in Sydney are sometimes treated to macadamia miso, while Felder’s team found that, dehydrated, blitzed, toasted, and mixed with flakes of Maldon sea salt, their Aspergillus (koji) base makes an excellent finishing rub for dry-aged beef at Ko.

IMAGE: Aspergillus Oryzae at 40x magnification, by Jose Herrera.

Ultimately, as NYU chemist and Experimental Cuisine Collective co-founder Kent Kirschenbaum speculated, it’s possible that “misofication” could expand the range of the edible, transforming overlooked or otherwise discarded ingredients and byproducts into delicacies, complete with added health benefits.

For now, however, leaving both twenty-first century terroir and future superfoods aside, the Momofuku R&D team simply functions as a wonderfully Wonka-esque flavour factory, risking their lives and expanding our palates with experiments designed to see what happens when you ferment olives and whether katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes used to make dashi, or stock) can be made with pork instead. (Stay tuned, and yes, but they can’t work out how to replicate it, respectively.)

IMAGE: The East River and United Nations building. Photo by Flickr user mksfly.

In a 2004 article, the New York Times describes the somewhat alarming dilapidation of the UN headquarters building, which is currently undergoing an extensive (and expensive) refurbishment.

In addition to lead paint, asbestos, and the absence of sprinkler systems on all but the lower floors, the building’s foreman, Tony Raymond, shows the Times the building’s in-house machine shop, used to jury-rig replacement parts for the mechanical systems whose 1950s manufacturers have since gone out of business.

Structural and infrastructural flaws aside, however, the building does have some intriguing edible benefits. The Times reports that “East River water is pumped into the building as a coolant, and Mr. Raymond said workers had collected eels, blue claw crabs and bluefish from the basement filters to take home to cook.”

In other words, the building’s HVAC system inadvertently doubles as a fishing technology — implying, in the process, the rather intriguing possibility of an intentional architecture that actually hunts wild food, rather than simply hosting domesticated plants.

When I read last Friday evening that most, if not all, of the global strategic maple syrup reserve had been stolen, my first response was not to fear for North America’s waffles or pancakes, but rather to wonder at the very existence of such a reserve. After all, the terms “global,” “strategic,” and “reserve,” are more often used with respect to petroleum, currency, or the smallpox vaccine than waffle-toppers.

IMAGE: Maple tapping in Quebec, via.

And, indeed, the Quebecois warehouses that formerly housed 10 million pounds, or 30 million Canadian dollars’ worth, of maple syrup, is not some kind of U.N. stockpile held in the common good against future trans-national breakfast catastrophes. In fact, as The Atlantic helpfully explained, it is a global and strategic reserve purely by virtue of the fact that “Quebec taps 75 percent of the world’s supply, and its producers have been attempting to grow their market abroad.”

IMAGE: The International Strategic Syrup Reserve, photographed in 2011 by Francis Vachon for The Globe and Mail.

Because of the risk that short supply and price hikes would pose to that market expansion, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers skims off the surplus in good years, to stockpile against a weak harvest. After all, as maple expert Michael Farrell explained to The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman, “If you are trying to develop a market for something, you don’t want to create a demand and not be able to supply it.”

In other words, Canada’s (former) syrup stockpile is maintained for the benefit of maple tappers, rather than as a global breakfast insurance policy. In that respect, it is more like the EU’s legendary, and recurring, wine lakes and butter mountains — the result of surplus production, deliberately held back to prevent market volatility.

IMAGE: A symbolic EEC surplus butter mountain photographed at a British Labour Party Gala Morning in 1984, via.

(To my mind at least, it’s also similarly evocative, by which I mean that it’s hard not to imagine skiing down the butter mountain, floating lazily in syrup tank, or merrily boating across the wine lake. Sadly, in reality, the wine lake is usually re-purposed as industrial alcohol through “crisis distillation,” the butter mountain, which is apparently “more of a butter molehill” these days, consists of bulk blocks held in cold storage warehouses across the continent, and the stolen syrup reserve was stored in steel oil drums stacked five high.)

IMAGE: Alex James floating on culinary magicians’ Bompas & Parr’s lake of punch, via.

But while the EU’s amusingly-named surplus storage is the outgrowth of a protectionist quota system, and Quebec’s rather endearing maple syrup stocks form part of an industry-sponsored strategic growth strategy, globally, a growing number of policy experts are calling for the establishment of food reserves as a vital safety net for the hungry consumer.

As Foodprint Toronto panelist Evan Fraser explained in his 2010 book, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, co-authored with Andrew Rimas, food reserves are actually one of the oldest food security strategies in the book. He is fond of reminding policymakers of the Old Testament story of Joseph, the Pharoah, and the seven skinny cows eating the seven fat cows, as a demonstration of the value of saving food in years of plenty, in order to sustain the populace during the inevitable lean ones.

IMAGE: Steel silos in China, used for oil and grain storage, via.

These kinds of reserves — a national stockpile held to ensure food security in the event of an emergency — used to be commonplace, but have largely disappeared in the last twenty years. The U.S. eliminated its last grain reserves in the 1996 “Freedom to Farm” Act, while a U.N.-led effort to establish a network of grain reserves in developing nations following food price spikes in the 1970s fizzled out a decade later in an embarrassing combination of corruption, price fixing, and pest damage, as well as the new orthodoxy of free market efficiency.

Since then, the reigning assumption has been that global trade can distribute harvests more efficiently than human design. This may be, but we still live in a world where one billion people are hungry and an equal number are overweight or obese, while more than a billion tons of food are wasted each year.

What’s more, reserves are expensive to maintain, and countries that could afford them can usually import their way out of shortages instead. Poor countries, on the other hand, can’t afford either, leaving them extremely vulnerable when harvests fail and food prices rise.

For example, a 2011 Food and Agriculture Organization report on the world food crisis of 2007 and 2008, in which a shortfall was caused by a combination of droughts and high oil prices (and exacerbated by a host of other hotly disputed factors, including the rise of biofuels), noted that the resulting price spikes caused an 8 percent increase in the number of malnourished people in Africa.

IMAGE: Food price index charted from 1990 to the present, via.

In an era of climate change, which means disruptive weather and increasingly variable harvests, food prices are predicted to remain volatile and high. In addition to all the aspects of a balanced food security strategy (reducing waste, increasing harvests, improving water storage and transportation infrastructure, and so on), a growing chorus of think tank papers and op-eds are arguing in favour of re-establishing some kind of food reserve system.

This presents a fascinating design challenge, in terms of physical infrastructure and architecture, as well as operations, economics, and geopolitics.

IMAGE: Grain elevator cutaway, via the Canadian Plains Research Center.

Current reserve plans and proposals come in all shapes and sizes. For example, in 2010, Joachim von Braun and Maximo Torero of the International Food Policy Research Institute outlined an anti-food price speculation device they called a “virtual reserve.”

In their proposal, the U.N., World Bank, or similar international institution would be responsible for managing a “fund,” consisting of dollar commitments from grain-producing countries that together add up to between 30 to 50 percent of normal grain trade volume. If grain prices started to rise above a certain agreed-upon point, the fund could call in those commitments in order to execute a series of short sales on the futures market, which would, in theory, bring spot prices down and drive speculators out.

IMAGE: Grain bunker built over grain reclaim tunnels, via Hanson Silo.

Meanwhile, in a 2011 report, grain industry consultant David McKee inventoried physical reserve infrastructure and building initiatives from around the world, from Jordan’s new 100,000-tonne-capacity concrete grain elevator to Qatari plans for “a huge underground grain storage bunker that would protect a wheat reserve from radioactive fallout in case of a nuclear catastrophe in nearby Iran,” and from China’s shiny steel silos full of wheat (thought to hold 60 million tonnes, although the exact total is a state secret) to India’s “jute bags piled on raised earthen platforms called plinths and covered with tarpaulins.”

Siting a national food reserve is also not straightforward, depending on internal transportation infrastructure and how the country is connected to either local or global markets. Regional reserves, such as East Asia’s Emergency Rice Reserve, are almost inevitably distributed in their member country’s national storage facilities for political reasons as well as efficiency.

But perhaps the most challenging aspect of food reserve design is managing it: preventing loss from pests, heat, theft, or mould, rotating stock to keep it fresh, maintaining volume, and planning for distribution.

IMAGE: Grain elevators, Bernd and Hiller Becher, via.

The infrastructure of bulk food storage has hardly evolved from the concrete cylinders so admired by Le Corbusier at the start of the twentieth-century; the time thus seems right to imagine a new networked architecture, both functional and monumental, circulating, cooling, and protecting its contents through a series of suction aeration fans, gravity-fed conveyor belts, temperature and moisture sensors, pneumatic dust suppression systems, floor perforations, partitions, chutes, pressurised seals, and more.

IMAGE: Svalbard Global Seed Vault, photographed by Mari Tefre, via.

IMAGE: Svalbard Global Seed Vault, drawing by The Directorate of Public Construction and Property, via.

Local dietary production and preferences, as well as theft and corruption controls, could be built into storage unit design, which would stretch far beyond the form of physical units to include paved roads and trade agreements, not to mention meteorological and market intelligence units. The design of Svalbard’s International Seed Vault captured architectural imaginations around the world: perhaps it’s time to apply that creativity to imagining the future of food reserves…

London’s wholesale food markets are of such venerable antiquity that New Spitalfields, a fruit and vegetable market that “started life in the thirteenth century in a field next to St Mary Spittel on the edge of the Square Mile,” can be casually described as “one of the City’s younger markets.”

IMAGE: Traders at New Spitalfields Market, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

Things have changed, however, since the days when every joint of beef, fillet of plaice, potato for the accompanying chips, and any other perishable foods on Londoners’ plates would have passed through New Spitalfields and its elder siblings on its way from farm to table. As food producers and food vendors have grown, and industrial growers increasingly deal directly with Sainsbury’s, the role of the wholesale market in the middle has shrunk.

IMAGE: Smithfield meat market, as depicted in The Queen’s London: a Pictorial and Descriptive Record of the Streets, Buildings, Parks and Scenery of the Great Metropolis, 1896, via.

IMAGE: Smithfield Market today, via the Association of London Markets.

This summer, BBC Two produced an excellent mini-series of three hour-long documentaries looking at the ways in which traders at New Spitalfields, Billingsgate fish market, and Smithfield meat market have adapted — or not — to changes in London’s foodscape.

Despite the fact that each of the markets has experienced a steep decline in the volume of food that passes through its gates — a 2002 report by the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs estimated that, within the past decade, the tonnage of fish sold at Billingsgate had shrunk by approximately fifteen percent, and the tonnage of meat at Smithfield was down by an even more significant twenty-six percent — I was surprised to learn how large a role they still play in London’s food supply.

IMAGE: Billingsgate market, photograph by Hema.

The food that Londoners eat at home does indeed come, for the most part, from supermarkets, but the wholesale markets still account for twenty percent of the city’s food supply, with brokers up before dawn each day to buy fresh fish, meat, fruit, and vegetables for hotels, restaurants, pubs, schools, street market stalls, and even prisons. Like all good markets, London’s wholesale markets are still vast, busy, and slightly overwhelming, filled with an extraordinary diversity of both people and produce, colourful language and arcane ritual, and a sense of controlled chaos.

Billingsgate, the first wholesale market profiled in the BBC series, seemed to be the most optimistic of the three, despite the fact that it was recommended for closure in the 2002 DEFRA report and, at the time the BBC was filming, was grappling with a controversial plan to change its historic bylaws to allow fish to be carried by anyone, rather than the traditional licensed porters.

IMAGE: Billingsgate fish market, via the blog of the former Master Draper of the Worshipful Company of Drapers of London.

Traditionally, the fish porters had a job for life — and one that, for many, had been handed down several generations: as the BBC’s narrator intoned above images of a white-coated army pushing trolleys piled high with styrofoam boxes, “Men like this have been moving fish since Elizabethan times.” Or, as Geoff, who had been portering alongside his father for eighteen years, said, “I’d’ve got less for murder.”

IMAGE: Billingsgate fish market, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

Although trading at the market starts at 2am, fish cannot be moved until the bell sounds at 5am, at which point the porters cover up to thirteen miles in just a few hours, receiving a fixed retainer and supplemental “bobbin” payments based on the amount of fish they carry. The term “bobbin,” the BBC explained, refers to the particular leather hats that porters used to wear to carry the fish on their heads, which featured a deep brim to catch the run-off from the wooden crates.

IMAGE: Billingsgate fish market, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

Meanwhile, inside the market’s deep-freeze — Britain’s largest — the men work in pairs in case one develops hypothermia. Outside, cart minders work for tips and cups of tea, guarding customers’ purchases until they can be moved.

The humour and haggling skills on display were remarkable: Roger Barton, who has sold fish at the market for fifty-one years, compared pollock to someone “sitting at home in a tracksuit watching Jeremy Kyle and eating a burger,” and dismissed a supplier’s excuses briskly, noting that “when they were coming over from Dunkirk, they never worried about the weather.”

IMAGE: Roger Barton with two of his employees at Billingsgate fish market, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

However, we also learned that Billingsgate has just a few women in its 300-strong workforce, and that, today, up to seventy percent of its customer base is Chinese. “If it wasn’t for them, it wouldn’t be worth opening,” according to Barton.

IMAGE: Queer gear at New Spitalfields market, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

These themes recurred at Smithfield and New Spitalfields, the second and third markets in the BBC series. At New Spitalfields, Kevin, an exotic fruit expert, surveyed his array of rambutans and pitayas, noting that “years ago, they used to call it queer gear, but it’s all everyday stuff now.” Meanwhile, after a lifetime in the celery trade, Bill had decided to sell his stall to Polish mushroom importers rather than try to adapt to Britons’ changing tastes.

IMAGE: A vintage celery poster left on the wall by the departing stall owner, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

At Smithfield, too, everyone acknowledged the importance of “the Muslims and the ethnics” who made up the majority of their customers, but the market seemed to be stuck in a time warp (or, in the words of one trader, “an oasis from the PC world outside”), with men sharing naked cell phone photos amidst racist banter.

The BBC followed Dee, a single mum who was the first woman to try working the 2 to 8am shift among the meat-cutters at the back. By the end of an hour of gripping TV that included a horrifying initiation ceremony involving blood, eggs, and offal, she’d given up. Her boss, asked about the harassment, shrugged and admitted, “That’s Smithfield market, unfortunately.”

IMAGE: Biffo, one of the Smithfield meat market’s colourful characters, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

Given the anachronisms and pervasive sense of faded glory, it was hard not to fear for the markets’ continued survival. However, this wouldn’t be the first time London’s markets have been prematurely condemned.

A quick look at George Dodd’s The Food of London, a survey of the means by which the city was fed in 1856, is instructive: barely a sentence after noting that “SMITHFIELD will ever remain a great landmark in the history of London,” he describes “its decline and fall,” detailing “complaints against Smithfield as a spot unsuitable for a cattle-market” and the alleged “roguery of the cutting-butchers,” while still marveling at the “exciting and even savagely picturesque” nature of the proceedings.

IMAGE: Exterior of New Spitalfields market after trading is finished for the day, from BBC Two’s Markets series.

Ultimately, the 2002 DEFRA report recommended that Smithfield and Billingsgate be closed, and the now-valuable land “be released for alternative uses.” Meanwhile, the report concluded that, as “catering has become the engine of the London markets,” the remaining wholesale markets (New Spitalfields, New Covent Garden, and Western International) should abandon their specialities to serve as one-stop shops for the hospitality trade:

Caterers will increasingly seek to improve their efficiency and that means that consolidation of supplies will need to take place at some stage earlier in the supply chain than their kitchens. They will seek to collect their supplies from sites that offer a full product range or require their supplies be delivered in consolidated loads. […] It is recommended that London should be serviced by three composite markets for meat, fish, fruit and vegetables based at the sites of Nine Elms, Spitalfields and Western International.

IMAGE: London’s wholesale markets, potato depots, and exchanges in 1930, from Markets and Fairs of England and Wales Part VI, London, by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, HMSO, London, 1930, via. Billingsgate is obscured at the bottom right, and Spitalfields is still in its former, more central location, as is Covent Garden.

This conclusion seems reasonable, but also short-sighted. First of all, it diminishes the markets’ role in price formation, by which I mean the way that Billingsgate, for example, allows a large enough proportion of the city’s supply and demand for different kinds of seafood to converge to establish a “fair” price (at least in market terms).

The BBC focused on the exotic fruits and Kosher meats increasingly demanded by the markets’ customers, which, I think, points to a more promising future direction for specialised markets that can concentrate small-scale production and catering custom to create economies of scale.

IMAGE: Artisanal pickles, via.

In a foodscape that seems increasingly hospitable to boutique producers and niche markets (as evidenced by the rash of artisanal pickles, gluten-free goods, and goat milk desserts for sale in London), what if New Spitalfields took the lead in sourcing wild-foraged foods, heirloom varietals, and artisanal chutneys, alongside its sacks of potatoes, apples, and onions?

This would certainly help small-scale producers reach new markets, but restaurants, catering companies, and ethnic shops would surely also appreciate the convenience and added value of being able to offer their customers unusual or regional specialities in reasonable quantities, without the hassle of tracking them down themselves.

As an example, in the New York City region, mid-size farmers are currently arguing that Hunt’s Point, the city’s wholesale market, should use its forthcoming renovation to begin aggregating regional produce, which would help New York State apples achieve the distribution and economies of scale required to become as common in New York City’s grocery stores as apples from Washington State or New Zealand.

IMAGE: Susan Ho’s company, Tea Aura Inc., developed its tea-infused cookie business at the Toronto Food Business Incubator, a city initiative run by Foodprint Toronto panelist Michael Wolfson. Photo by Brett Gundlock/National Post.

Meanwhile, the advantages of having inspectors, waste disposal, and even shared frozen storage on a single site could be extended to the markets’ future customers: why not build culinary incubators nearby, so that catering start-ups benefit from proximity to vendors as well as shared commercial kitchen facilities?

IMAGE: Billingsgate Fish Market: Delivery Vehicles in Lower Thames Street (1930), from Markets and Fairs of England and Wales Part VI, London, by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, HMSO, London, 1930, via.

Issues of transport and access are more complicated, but, certainly, larger composite markets are not a problem-free solution, as the high rates of asthma in the Hunts Point neighbourhood of the Bronx demonstrate.

The BBC documentaries showed that, increasingly, buyers are purchasing by phone rather than coming in everyday in person; perhaps some investment in infrastructure to combine deliveries, build a robust online or phone business, and improve transit or even build part-time “food lanes” (like the city’s recent dedicated Olympic lanes) between the wholesale markets, as well as to the city centre, could help solve the most pressing challenges.

Of course, these are just ideas — they need plenty of research and data to become anything more useful than that, not to mention significant investment to implement. Still, London’s wholesale markets are too important — in terms of their heritage and people, certainly, but also because of their current and future role in feeding the city — to be allowed to fall away in favour of Sysco.

NOTE: I’m looking forward to exploring the topic of market cities in much more depth at the fantastic-sounding 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 21-23, which I will be attending as a guest of its organisers, the Project for Public Spaces, and the local visitors bureau, Positively Cleveland. You can register to attend here, as well as expect reports on the proceedings (and perhaps better informed ideas!) from me here.

Previously on Edible Geography: The Axis of Food.

IMAGE: Bees on the roof of the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Photo courtesy the Waldorf Astoria, via American Public Media’s Marketplace.

A beehive is the urban roof accessory du jour, even more popular than its eco-friendly cousins, solar panels or greenery. New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel is only the most recent to join a trend that includes roofs from the Paris Opéra to Chicago’s City Hall, as high-end chefs, locavores, and urban homesteaders alike enjoy the taste of honey made from trees and flowers in their own neighbourhood.

Meanwhile, in the UK, rising lead prices have led to a sharp rise in churches losing their roofs to theft. A report in The Telegraph captures the scale of the problem, describing organised gangs that use Google Earth to plan raids that strip the lead from church roof after church roof:

One church was reportedly hit 14 times in 2011 alone as thieves returned again and again to take the new lead each time it was replaced. 2010 was the third worst year on record for the theft of metal from churches, with 1,484 claims costing the insurer more than £3 million.

IMAGE: A partially stripped British church roof. Photo courtesy Ecclesiastical Insurance, via English Heritage.

Curiously, you can unite these two trends with fantastic results.

A church in York, the victim of repeated lead thefts, has done exactly that. In a recent letter to The Times, architect Hugh Petter explains that “the flat roofs of this historic building are now the home of bees,” and that “since the hives were installed on the church […] there has been no further trouble.”

In what seems to be an extremely clever solution, would-be thieves are effectively dissuaded without the intrusion and expense of alarms and security guards. Meanwhile, the congregation can be kept sweet and/or future repairs subsidised through the gift or sale of holy honey.

IMAGE: The Rosslyn Chapel hives. Photo courtesy The Times, via BLDGBLOG.

Of course, it’s possible that the canny folk of York were not the first to come up with this idea. Certainly, while reading the letter, I was reminded of the 2010 discovery of two stone beehives carved into a pinnacle on the roof of Scotland’s fifteenth-century Rosslyn Chapel. The BBC reported that the manmade hives, which the bees could enter through a hole in a carved stone flower, had been inhabited until “a canopy was put over the chapel during renovation works,” and that the bees would likely return when the repairs were finished.

At the time, architect Malcom Mitchell told the BBC that the hives as “unprecedented,” because they “were never intended to be a source of honey.” Instead, he speculated, the stone hives seemed to be put there “purely to protect the bees from our inclement weather.”

Scotland does indeed enjoy a climate that is frequently both wet and cold, and perhaps metal theft was not quite as pressing a concern in the middle ages. Nonetheless, with burglary deterrence to add to their gifts of honey and pollination services, sharing our roofs, religious or otherwise, with bees seems like a pretty sweet idea.

NOTE: Thanks for passing along the letter, Dad!

Underneath the pubs, shops, houses, and office buildings of Nottingham lie more than five hundred man-made caves, carved into the city’s soft sandstone bedrock over a thousand years, and now largely abandoned and forgotten.

IMAGE: Geoff Manaugh, Ellis and Mark Smout, and David Strange-Walker exploring a former sand mine cave. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

Last week, BLDGBLOG, Mark Smout of Smout Allen, and I were lucky enough to visit some of them in the company of David Strange-Walker, an archaeologist whose pioneering Nottingham Caves Survey is mapping and 3D-scanning all five hundred, as the first step in an even more ambitious caves regeneration initiative that aims to reconnect the city with its subterranean heritage, as well as bring this unique architectural feature to international attention.

IMAGE: A tannery cave, open to the public as part of the City of Caves experience. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

Over the course of the afternoon, we visited all sorts of caves: cemetery catacombs, former sand mines turned into air raid shelters, tunnels, prisons, and a tannery. However, although we couldn’t visit it, I was most excited to hear about David’s favourite cave: a virtually intact medieval malting cave beneath a nightclub in the Lace Market district.

IMAGE: The exterior of Propaganda nightclub in Plumptre House, under which lies David Strange-Walker’s favourite cave. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

IMAGE: Geoff Manaugh tries out David’s beta iPhone app to see the malt kiln cave beneath Propaganda. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

LINE BREAK

VIDEO: Flythrough of the medieval malting caves beneath Propaganda nightclub, by the Nottingham Caves Survey.

Malting is the process by which barley is germinated and dried, in order to prepare it for the next stage in beer-making: fermentation. There are nearly thirty malting caves under Nottingham, each with a well and soaking vat of some sort, a larger germination room, on whose sloping floor the wet barley would be spread and allowed to sprout, and a roughly spherical kiln room, in which the grain was roasted.

IMAGE: Plan view of the malt kiln cave “found beneath the site of Plumptre House in 1991” (now Propaganda nightclub) by Tony Waltham, from Sandstone Caves of Nottingham.

IMAGE: Panorama of the Plumptre House malt kiln caves, via the Nottingham Caves Survey.

Unlike today’s beer, which also contains hops, medieval ale consisted solely of water, yeast, and malt. And, according to David, Nottingham’s cave-based maltings gave the city an important advantage in the ale brewing industry: they were fireproof, as opposed to the timber-framed malthouses found elsewhere in the British Isles; and, most importantly, they maintained a relatively consistent temperature, which meant that malting could go on all year round and wasn’t limited to the traditional October to May season.

Culinary historian Peter Brears agrees, telling local website This is Nottingham that the city had “one of the greatest concentrations of urban malt kilns,” trading its surplus — with Cheshire, for example, for salt — and brewing the rest for local consumption. The consistent cool temperature of the caves also made them ideal for storing beer and wine. In his pamphlet, Sandstone Caves of Nottingham, geologist Tony Waltham notes that “in the centre of Nottingham, the number of pub cellar caves almost matches the number of pubs,” although most are now disused.

IMAGE: Maps of the known caves under Nottingham’s city centre by Tony Waltham, from Sandstone Caves of Nottingham.

IMAGE: 1934 photo of beer stored in sandstone caves underneath the Elephant & Castle Inn in Nottingham; by G. F. Campion and via the North East Midland Photographic Record.

We did have the chance to visit an abandoned cellar cave, under the Old Angel Inn, and see the thralls, or ledges, on which the barrels would have been stored and the shaft of the now bricked-up barrel hoist, as well as two rather disgusting air raid shelter-era toilets.

IMAGE: Photos of the Old Angel Inn by Nicola Twilley: cellar entrance; exterior; looking up the bricked-up barrel hoist; and down into the air-raid era toilet.

IMAGE: 3D scan of the Old Angel Inn caves by the Nottingham Caves Survey.

Frequently, the cellar caves were also used for drinking — David mentioned that domestic wine caves often had a “gentleman’s lounge” area, and Tony Waltham writes that “travellers of the 17th century recorded Nottingham’s fame for its good ale, which was available for drinking in cave cellars.” Several of the city’s pubs still offer a cave-drinking experience, even if the beer is not stored there anymore. Indeed, at the end of our afternoon underground, we enjoyed a refreshing pint and dinner in the cave bar of The Hand & Heart.

IMAGE: The Upper Cave Bar at the Trip to Jerusalem pub, from Tony Waltham’s Sandstone Caves of Nottingham.

Sadly, according to Waltham, “most or all of the cave malt kilns had been abandoned by about 1640,” while the last of Nottingham’s pub caves was cut in 1875, and “modern safety regulations make cave digging rather more difficult in the past.”

But, in an era of beer archaeology, when speculative brews based on biomolecular analysis of ancient Mesoamerican pottery can regularly be found on supermarket shelves, an intact medieval malting in an urban cave seems like too good an opportunity to waste. And, as a recent article in The New York Times reports, microbrewers are increasingly looking to source grain from boutique maltsters, leading to a revival of the ancient craft.

IMAGE: The malting cave underneath Propaganda nightclub by the Nottingham Caves Survey.

IMAGE: A malt kiln in a cave complex under Castle Gate. The person is sitting on the ledge on which the roasting platform rested; the fire burned underneath, fed by the stoke hole on the left. Photo from Tony Waltham’s Sandstone Caves of Nottingham.

With the help of a crack team — perhaps Patrick McGovern, Warminster Maltings, and Brew Dog — you could source local grain, malt it in the medieval kiln underneath Propaganda nightclub, and then cellar and consume the results in your local pub cave, in order to truly capture Nottingham’s subterranean terroir. I hope somebody does — I’d love to taste the results.

NOTE: A huge thanks to David Strange-Walker of the Nottingham Caves Survey for the fantastic tour, to Mark Smout, who chauffered us up to Nottingham and back, to everyone who let us into their caves, and to Geoff Manaugh, who set up the visit and will no doubt be writing it up in full on BLDGBLOG shortly.

Previously on Edible Geography: Archaeo-Alcohology, Bronx Beer Caves, and Brooklyn Bridge Champagne.

IMAGE: Soil samples (the darker ones are carbon-stained), via.

In the United States, soil protection is typically discussed in terms of erosion. Through a model law disseminated during the 1930s Dust Bowl, states were encouraged to create soil conservation districts with the authority to plan and carry out irrigation, drainage, and erosion control programmes, and this continues to be the standard American framework for soil legislation and protection today.

Meanwhile, under entirely separate legislation, the EPA focuses on remediating contaminated soils through its Brownfields and Superfund initiatives.

IMAGE: Urban farmers at Berlin’s Prinzessinnengärten grow food in mail sacks and plastic crates to avoid soil contamination as well as remain mobile in case the site is redeveloped. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

In Germany, however, as I learned from my foodscape mapping collaborator (and soil expert) Alex Toland, federal soil legislation encompasses not only erosion control and remediation, but also recognises the importance of soil as “an archive of natural and cultural history.”

The soil, in other words, is not simply a natural resource, but also a memory bank of sorts — an evolving record of accretion, erosion, contamination, and manipulation that bears witness to processes occurring on timescales as radically different as continental drift and human inhabitation.

IMAGE: Stuttgart mapped according to its archaeological sites (Fundstellen) and soil monuments (Geländedenkmale).

According to Alex, the soil archive clause is rarely invoked, although it has been used to protect a couple of Neolithic sites. However, as this inventory of Stuttgart’s soil archive [PDF] makes clear, the law does indeed define soil as a repository of “information about specific conditions of soil formation in the past or information about human culture and agriculture” — which means that, sealed beneath the pavements of the city, are hundreds of protection-worthy “soil monuments” that include everything from rare geological formations to areas of increased phosphate levels that trace former cattle yards.

IMAGE: Rubble map of Berlin by Alexandra Regan Toland in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Gerd Wessolek, as installed at the Altes Museum Berlin-Neukölln in September 2010.

In Berlin, Alex has created her own soil memory maps, focusing in particular on sulphate leaching from the city’s post-World War II rubble mountains. In the aftermath of heavy Allied bombing, Berlin was covered in more than 75 million cubic meters of rubble and debris that had to be “cleared, sorted into recyclable and non-recyclable material, and moved to suitable storage and dumping sites before the city could begin rebuilding.”

IMAGE: Rubble women at work in Germany’s ruined city centres; photo via Der Spiegel.

The work was mostly done by women, called “Trümmerfrauen” or rubble women, who dismantled the city’s ruined buildings and piled them up into artificial hills in Berlin’s public parks, according to reconstruction plans drafted by architect Hans Scharoun and colleagues. As Alex explained, Berlin is in a glacial spillway, washed flat by meltwater, so its rubble hills — particularly the 80-metre tall Teufelsberg — significantly redefined Berlin’s topography.

IMAGE: The rubble mountain in Volkspark Freidrichshain, photographed in 1950, via.

IMAGE: Teufelsberg today, and a rubble mountain soil section; photographs by Alexandra Regan Toland.

Now, sixty years later, the rubble mountains form a lesser-known monument to the war, an archive of shattered bricks, tiles, and mortar covered with secondary forest that is slowly leaching sulphate into the city’s waterways.

IMAGE: Elevated sulphate levels in Berlin’s soil trace the chemical’s water-borne spread from the gypsum mortar and plaster entombed in the city’s rubble mountains. Map included in Alexandra Regan Toland’s rubble mapping installation.

IMAGE: Rubble map of Berlin by Alexandra Regan Toland in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Gerd Wessolek, as installed at the Altes Museum Berlin-Neukölln in September 2010.

In a city filled with memorials, the soil offers a different perspective: re-framing the environment as an ongoing co-production of both human and natural activity rather than a series of wars and walls.

Previously on Edible Geography: Sweet and Sour Soils and The Dust of Our Ancestors.