IMAGE: Screenshot from the Science Gallery’s Field Test video—watch it in full here.

In Dublin, my smog meringue collaborators at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy have been busy curating an exhibition all about the future of farming. Called “Field Test,” the interactive installation is on display at the Science Gallery until June 5, and, if you’re in town, you should most definitely visit. There are countless events, publications, and exhibits about the future of food, but many fewer about how shifts in agricultural technology and ownership will also help reshape landscapes and dinner plates alike. “Field Test” is a welcome—and exciting—counter-balance.

Some of the artifacts on display are simply on the cutting edge of today’s technology: something like 25,000 calves have already been born using Moo-call, the latest in wearable computing for cows. The Silent Herdsman, a smart collar and software platform, has been generating data points on the eating and rumination habits of British cattle ten times per second since 2010.

IMAGE: “Second Livestock” by Austin Stewart.

These two devices are both in the exhibition’s section on “Farm Cyborgs,” which Zack Denfeld and Cat Kramer of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy have identified as a “bridge species,” somewhere between electrical engineering and anatomical reality, the cloud and the manure lagoon. Other items on display in this section are more speculative, and, indeed, provocative: Austin Stewart’s “Second Livestock,” an Oculus Rift for chickens, conjures up an entirely credible future in which the use of virtual reality to enhance livestock well-being is standard practice—but also raises the question of whether our own technologically mediated existences qualify as humane living conditions.

IMAGE: “Stir-Fly: The Nutrient Bug 1.0,” The Tissue Culture & Art Project in collaboration with Robert Foster. “Field Test.” Credit: Science Gallery Dublin.

Elsewhere, the plastinated remains of the first cultured beef burger, served by Mark Post in 2013, are on display alongside a working, table-top bio-reactor that is growing insect cells within the gallery. Unlike mammalian tissue, insect cells can be grown at room temperature, making them a perfect protein for domestic fabrication. (The installation is called “Stir-Fly,” which may or may not be a serving suggestion; no word on whether its harvest will be available for sampling!)

My favourite section, at least from afar, may well be the Seed Boutique: an installation that puts ten carefully selected seeds on a pedestal—and in a gumball machine, which dispenses one of the ten at random, in return for a one Euro coin.

IMAGE: “Field Test.” Credit: Science Gallery Dublin.

These range from the Beefy Resilient Grex Bean, a pulse that not only “tastes more beefy than beef does,” but is part of the Open Source Seed Initiative, to an Outredgeous Lettuce seed, specially bred for flavour as part of the Culinary Breeding Network and distinguished by being the first lettuce grown and eaten in space. Together, the seed selections raise issues of intellectual property and agricultural espionage, industrial consolidation and food independence. And they force us to question the goals of plant breeding and genetic modification: is yield or pest resistance actually more important than environmental resilience or flavour?

IMAGE: Astronauts sampling space-grown Outredgeous red romaine lettuce. Credit: NASA TV.

I was honoured and delighted to serve as an adviser to the exhibition, and even more chuffed to be listed as curator of one of the installations: Pest Sounds. I selected a soundtrack of insect recordings from a database assembled by U.S.D.A. entomologist Richard Mankin, whose research focuses on the acoustic detection of pests in stored foods, as well as sonic pesticides. For more on the challenges of finding a seventeen-day-old rice weevil in a grain silo, as well as the possibility of exploiting male citrus psyllids’ attraction to the mooing of horny lady psyllids, you should read this Edible Geography post and listen to this “Field Recordings” episode of Gastropod.

IMAGE: “Pest Sounds.” “Field Test.” Credit: Science Gallery Dublin.

I can’t wait to check out “Field Test” in person. Fortunately, I don’t have to: I’ll be in Dublin next week, giving a free talk at the Science Gallery on Tuesday evening. You can register here—hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

[Thanks, Dad.]

IMAGE: Katie Holten, Photograph of an excavated Cox’s Pippen tree re-erected in a shed in East Malling (Original photograph (1952) courtesy of David Johnson, East Malling Research, UK), 2005.

On Christmas Day, artist Katie Holten posted this stunning image of an excavated Cox’s Orange Pippen tree, originally taken at East Malling Research in 1952.

The Cox is Edible Geography’s apple of choice: it is “considered the greatest-tasting apple of all time,” according to food writer Rowan Jacobsen. East Malling Research, the U.K.’s leading fruit research institute, also holds a special place in the otherwise cold heart of this refrigeration-obsessed author for its pioneering work on the controlled atmosphere storage of apples.

Holten’s photo, however, points toward another facet of East Malling Research’s outsized impact on the apple: the wholesale redesign of orchards around the world using so-called “dwarfing” rootstocks. As a pamphlet published to mark the laboratory’s centenary explains, before East Malling Research was founded in 1915, apple orchards consisted of “tall, widely spaced fruit trees, yielding about seven tonnes per hectare.”

Over the millennia since the apple’s domestication, growers had tried to exploit spontaneously occurring genetic mutations that made the trees shorter and thus easier to harvest, grafting the best fruiting varieties onto these cloned dwarfing rootstocks. The first order of business of the new lab in East Malling was to respond to the demand from Kentish orchardists to improve and standardise the various dwarfing rootstocks then in circulation. Pomologist Ronald Hatton studied the relationship between a tree’s anatomy, its “vigour” (scientific shorthand for an apple tree’s growth, health, and fruit yield), and its rootstock, screening cultivars from across Europe to select and breed a series of freely distributed rootstocks, labelled in descending tree-size order from M1 to M9.

IMAGE: The effects of commercially available Malling rootstocks on apple tree height and shape.

Today, more than ninety percent of eating apples grown in the U.S. and Europe are grown on M9 rootstock. According to a report (PDF) issued in 2013, attempting to quantify East Malling Research’s value over its one hundred-year history, the M9 rootstock clone produces low, compact, and uniform trees. The result: growers could fit between 7-8,000 trees per hectare, compared to the 3-4,000 common in orchards before, vastly increasing the overall yield from the same amount of land. And, because the fruit could be picked without need for ladders, harvesting labour costs were halved. In its first forty years, between 1920 and 1960, the M9 rootstock, in the report’s conservative estimate, “provided 18m tonnes of additional apples globally as well as saving 70m hours of picking time.”

Beneath the surface, invisible and, outside the industry, unknown, this single clone has reshaped the global landscape and economics of apple production. But, if the impact of East Malling Research’s rootstock studies is astonishing, the techniques developed for studying tree roots are, as Katie Holten’s photograph hints, equally arcane and fascinating.

Wolfgang Böhm, a scientist at the Institut fur Pflanzenbau und Pflanzenzuchtung at the University of Göttingen, surveyed the history of root studies in his 1979 textbook, Methods of Studying Root Systems. He dates the first example of the traditional “skeleton technique” of dry root-excavation to the eighteenth century, when British clergyman Stephan Hales (who was also the first person to measure blood pressure) carefully dug around the roots of a sunflower in order to measure and weigh them. It wasn’t until 1926, Böhm writes, that the American ecologist J. E. Weaver “developed this simple excavation technique with garden tools into a recognized scientific method”—one that has remained largely unchanged ever since.

To excavate a tree root, one must dig a trench, far enough away from the plant so as not to accidentally lop off any sideways-spreading roots but close enough so as not to create extra work. For the trench, backhoes and shovels are permitted; according to Böhm, “Cullinan (1921) used dynamite … but in general this technique cannot be recommended.” From then on, however, the soil must be removed particle by particle from the plant-facing side of the trench. A variety of hand tools can be used, depending on the delicacy of the root system: Böhm lists “ice picks, small metal forks, screw drivers, forceps, spatulas, small dental picks and sharp pointed needles of different sizes.” As if this process was not already painstaking enough, the root system must, Böhm specifies, be drawn on a 3D grid and photographed as soon as it is uncovered.

IMAGE: Anonymous man excavates grass root systems using a needle. This photograph and the one below from Wolfgang Böhm’s Methods of Studying Root Systems.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to read that “one man needed five weeks to excavate, measure, and record the root system of a 15-year-old lodgepole tree.” In all, Bohm writes, “nearly 60 tons of soil had to be moved in the excavation of a mature orchard tree” such as the Cox’s Orange Pippin, above.

Nonetheless, over the years, the scientists at East Malling Research have excavated dozens of apple trees, raspberry bushes, and strawberry plants, in order to develop new rootstocks as well as observe the effects of soil type, orchard density, irrigation, pruning methods, and shading on the root systems and resulting harvest.

IMAGE: East Malling Research’s rhizotron, an architectural device for subterranean observation.

In the 1960s, East Malling Research supplemented the excavation method with the construction of the world’s first underground root laboratory, or rhizotron. This is an underground corridor whose walls consist of forty-eight shuttered windows, which researchers can open to peer out onto the root systems of adjacent trees and plants. At East Malling, the rhizotron has been planted with a Gala apple grafted onto M27, M26, and M9 rootstock, and, while the resulting photographs and measurements only document a section of the tree’s root system, they have the advantage of allowing observations over time.

IMAGE: Apple tree excavation, 2013, from the East Malling Research annual report.

IMAGE: “Fruit of the Tree,” East Malling Research’s display at the Chelsea Flower Show, 2013, via.

The tradition of dry excavation continues. Indeed, in 2013, East Malling Research won a medal at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show—the first ever awarded to a scientific exhibitor—with a display whose centrepiece was a fully grown apple tree on M9 rootstock. The video below gives a short glimpse of the process, which took a team of ten three weeks.

I had always thought of the branching filigree of a tree’s root system as a spectral mirror of its aboveground architecture, but, as it turns out, it is in fact the rhizosphere that determines the shape of the tree that we see.

Gratuitous cute elephant photograph by Brian Snelson.

Edible Geography readers have perhaps heard of “pollinator pathways,” an initiative to thread together isolated pockets of green space into nectar-filled corridors, in order to give butterflies and bees easier passage across otherwise unfriendly urban expanses of concrete and asphalt. A recent article in British Airways’ High Life magazine about efforts to save Kenya’s last remaining elephants introduced me to an interesting twist on the concept of bee-based landscape design: “honey fences.”

Although the main threat to the elephants’ survival is ivory-market driven poaching, a significant number are also killed each year following altercations with local villagers. As Angela Carr-Hartley, director of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, politely put it, “These communities have mixed feelings about an elephant coming into their smallholdings overnight, as they can wreak havoc eating the crops.”

Beehive fence, photo via The Elephant and Bees Project.

Zoologist Lucy King came up with the honey fence solution, which takes advantage of the fact that elephants are terrified by the sound of bees. (The delicate skin inside their trunks is apparently particularly vulnerable to being stung.) King had read that elephants tend to avoid acacia trees, usually a favorite food, if bees have built a hive in the branches. Based on that initial insight, and after several years of behavioral experiments, including playing elephants the sound of disturbed bees from a hidden loudspeaker and filming their reaction, King developed the honey fence system: a series of hives, suspended at ten-metre intervals from a single wire threaded around wooden fence posts. If an elephant touches either a hive or the wire, all the bees along the fence line feel the disturbance and swarm out of their hives in an angry, buzzing cloud.

A pilot honey fence in 2009 proved successful, deterring all but one bull elephant, and The Elephants and Bees Project has since spread to sites across Africa. Neville Sheldrick of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust told Africa Geographic that nearby farmers are sure the fence is working: “When I visit they proudly walk me around showing me the footprints of elephants that have walked up to and along the fence in several locations before turning back towards the park.”

By encircling a village with a cordon of hives, the village’s crops are protected, the elephants steered away from potential conflict, and, adds Carr-Hartley, “the farmers are able to garner some revenue from the harvesting of honey.” The result of truly delightful example of interspecies landscape engineering, jars of “Elephant-friendly” honey are for sale at The Elephant and Bees Research Centre in Tsavo, Kenya.

The concept of terroir will be familiar to most Edible Geography readers; recently, we also explored the idea of “merroir,” or tasting place in sea salt. But what about aeroir—the atmospheric taste of place?

IMAGE: A London-style Peasouper Smog Meringue. Photo by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

This afternoon, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and I will be offering New Yorkers a chance to taste aeroir, with a side-by-side tasting of air from different cities. With the support of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, we have spent the past few months designing and fabricating a smog-tasting cart, complete with built-in smog chamber, as well as developing a range of synthetic smog recipes.

Having made its debut at a meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva a fortnight ago, the cart will be stationed on Rivington Street, just off the Bowery, from noon to six today. We will be serving up free smog meringues from three different locations as part of the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY street festival.

The cart builds on an earlier project by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy. In 2011, after reading that an egg foam is ninety-percent air in Harold McGee’s bible of culinary chemistry, On Food and Cooking, the Center took whisks, mixing bowls, and egg whites out onto the streets of Bangalore, using the structural properties of meringue batter to harvest air pollution in order to taste and compare smog from different locations around the city.

IMAGE: Harvesting urban air pollution using egg foams. Photo by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

I’ve been a fan of the Center’s work for a while (I included their publication, Food Phreaking #001, in my best books list for 2013), and, inspired by their smog meringue project, I began to speculate about the concept of “aeroir,” and the idea that urban atmospheres capture a unique taste of place.

As we started to work together, I visited the atmospheric process chambers at the Bourns College of Engineering, at the University of California, Riverside, to see how scientists actually recreate smog conditions in the lab, in order to study the relationship between emissions and atmospheric chemistry.

IMAGE: Mobile smog chamber, UC Riverside CE-CERT. Rows of UV lights are used to “bake” the smog. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

IMAGE: Deflated Teflon bags hand in the large atmospheric emissions chamber room at UC Riverside CE-CERT. The mirrored walls reflect UV light to ensure the smog “bakes” evenly. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

During my visit, a group of students was setting up an agricultural smog, which is characterised by ammonia and amines from feedlot manure lagoons and other organic waste. These combine with NOx and incompletely combusted hydrocarbon emissions from cars, power plants, and industry to give the Central Valley of California, for example, some of the worst air quality in America.

We watched as a team injected precise amounts of different precursor chemicals into a gigantic Teflon chamber, where they would be cooked under hundreds of UV lights in order to catalyse the reactions that create smog. The students were hoping to characterise those reactions, in order to understand the entire chain of chemical processes leading to smog formation, and then design and test ways to prevent or mitigate against it.

With advice from Professor David Cocker and Mary Kacarab at UC Riverside, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and I worked out how to build a DIY, mini-smog chamber. We then developed and tested recipes using readily available precursor ingredients in create a variety of different smogs.

IMAGE: Smog tasting cart set up in Geneva, at a meeting of the World Health Organisation. Photo by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

IMAGE: Emissions from these precursor chemicals are pumped into the cart’s chamber and exposed to UV light to create a synthetic smog. In this image, pine needs and orange peel provide terpenes to simulate a biogenic smog. Photo by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

After running around New York City in order to source our precursor ingredients (a huge thanks to Kent Kirshenbaum, chemistry professor at NYU and co-founder of the Experimental Cuisine Collective), we spent Thursday afternoon and evening in the kitchens of Baz Bagel (excellent bagels, amazing ramp cream cheese, and truly lovely people) assembling the cart, mixing different chemical precursors, and then “baking” them under UV light to form a London peasouper, a 1950s Los Angeles photochemical smog, and a present-day air-quality event in Atlanta.

We chose these three places and times to showcase three of the classic “types” that atmospheric scientists use to characterize smogs: 1950s London was a sulfur- and particulate-heavy fog, whereas 1950s Los Angeles was a photochemical smog created by the reactions between sunlight, NOx, and partially combusted hydrocarbons. Present-day Beijing often experiences London-style atmospheric conditions, whereas Mexico City’s smog is in the Angeleno style.

IMAGE: Diesel and NOx, two precursor chemicals. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

Meanwhile, at its worst, Atlanta’s atmosphere is similar in composition to that of Los Angeles, but with the addition of biogenic emissions. An estimated ten percent of emissions in Atlanta are from a class of chemicals known as terpenes, from organic sources such as pine trees and decaying green matter. We had also hoped to create a Central Valley smog as well, but time got the better of us.

Each city’s different precursor emissions and weather conditions produce a different kind of smog, with distinct chemical characteristics—and a unique flavour.

IMAGE: Whisking meringues inside the smog chamber at Baz Bagel on Thursday. The long gloves were sourced at a sex shop, hence the fetching black vinyl. Photo by Gabe Harp.

As it turns out, Arie Haagen-Smit, the man known as the “father” of air pollution science, was originally a flavour chemist who rose to prominence thanks to his work on pineapples. Nadia Berenstein, the flavour historian I interviewed for a recent episode of Gastropod, pointed me to a speech Haagen-Smit gave in the 1950s, explaining his shift in research from fruit flavours to smog science to a room full of his former colleagues. In it, he explains, “I am engaged at the present time on a super flavor problem—the flavor of Los Angeles.”

I can confirm, based on Thursday night’s bake-off, that the different cities’ smogs do, indeed, taste different (and yet equally disgusting).

IMAGE: Gabe Harp piping “London” mini-meringues in the kitchen at Baz Bagel. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

Inhaling smog over extended periods is extremely damaging to human health. In New York City, which has the 12th worst ozone levels in the nation according to the American Lung Association’s Annual “State of the Air” report, air pollution levels are highest in neighborhoods that are majority non-white and low-income—a particularly insidious form of environmental injustice. By transforming the largely unconscious process of breathing to the conscious act of eating, the smog-tasting cart aims to create a visceral, thought-provoking interaction with the air all around us.

One of my collaborators, Zack Denfeld of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, reports that during previous installations and performances of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy’s Smog Tasting project, the most frequently asked question has been: “Is this safe to eat?” His typical response is, “Well, is it safe to breathe?”

Unsurprisingly, there is not a lot of research on the impact of eating polluted air, as opposed to the more common method of exposure, breathing it. However, the scientists we have spoken to have pointed out that the human digestive system is more robust and better able to deal with these chemicals than our respiratory system—and that the trace amounts captured in a mini-meringue make for a very small dose, in any case.

IMAGE: Zack Denfeld pumping precursor emissions into the smog chamber. We didn’t assemble the entire cart at Baz Bagel, due to space constraints. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

IMAGE: Smog “baking” in the chamber at Baz Bagel. Photo by Nicola Twilley.

In any case, our hope is that the meringues will serve as a kind of “Trojan treat,” creating a visceral experience of disgust and fear that prompts a much larger conversation about the aesthetics and politics of urban air pollution, as well as its health and environmental effects. Eat at your own risk!

This smog-tasting cart is intended as the start of a larger collaboration exploring the concept of “aeroir.” After all, air is the site at which we have an intimate, constant interaction with a geographically specific manifestation of urban planning, economic activity, environmental regulation, and meteorological forces. We hope to develop a multi-sensory series of installations, devices, and performances to make that interaction sense-able.

For example, we imagine that air quality could function as a kind of culinary constraint that inspires new kinds of regional cuisine, aided by the development of smog flavour wheels. Working with scientists who are measuring how smog affects the human sense of smell, as well as chefs, we could imagine developing a menu of street food pairings for particular atmospheric conditions.

Equally, we hope to partner with engineering labs to create novel wearable technologies that add olfactory and trigeminal stimulation to any eating experience—a sort of “smog seasoning.” Aeroir may well be the missing ingredient that makes tacos taste the same in the restaurant back home as they did on the streets of D.F.

The overlap between culinary technology and atmospheric conditions is literal as well as metaphorical. During my visit to UC Riverside, I visited their new Cooking Emissions Laboratory at UC Riverside to explore new research into the impact of “burger smog” on urban air quality—something I will be reporting on at greater length in the coming weeks.

IMAGE: Atlanta-style smog meringues as served in Geneva. Photo by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy.

With their original smog meringue insight, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy opened up a powerful method to translate quantitative environmental data and the scientific understanding of pollution and physiology using the images, metaphors, and tools of food and cuisine. It’s a thrill to work with them to explore its potential.

The smog-tasting cart will be serving smog meringues on Rivington Street between Bowery and Chrystie from noon today until 6 p.m. (or whenever supplies run out), as part of the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY street festival, directed by the legendary Joseph Grima. Our participation is made possible thanks to the support of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, as part of their 25th Anniversary program, which focuses on the theme of urban nature. Scott Wiener, pizza tour leader extraordinaire, connected us to Baz Bagel, who let us use their kitchen when the day’s bagel rolling, boiling, and baking was done. Scientists David Cocker, Mary Kacarab, Kent Kirshenbaum, and Darby Jack have been all been exceedingly generous with their time and expertise as well as very tolerant of our weird approach to their field of research. As always, thanks also to Geoff Manaugh, who accompanied me on my visit to UC Riverside and helped discuss the concept of aeroir.

In the opening episode of the BBC’s new three-part series, “Inside the Factory: How Our Favourite Foods Are Made,” we spend an hour watching a loaf of supermarket sliced white get made.

There is a short diversion into the history of bread-making (including Victorian-era DIY tests for alum adulteration) and a brief interlude in an oak forest to sample some wild yeast, but the star of the show is the factory itself: the mesmerising, balletic, perpetual motion machine installed beneath Allied Bakeries’ unpromising, West Bromwich-based, hangar-style shed.

First, the ingredients are rounded up. There is a stock shot of a combine harvester at work, but the real action takes place at the flour mill and yeast bioreactor. At Coronet Mill in Manchester, kernels of wheat loop through six miles of pipe, from mill to sieve, to mill to sieve, and around again, until they are reduced to dust.

IMAGE: Six miles of pipe transport whole kernels, milled wheat, and flour around the ten-storey mill. Screen grab from the BBC.

The sieves themselves look like a series of self-storage lockers mounted on a seismic shake table. Rows of off-white boxes punctuated at regular intervals with green doors wiggle and bounce, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

IMAGE: Sieves. Screen grab from the BBC.

Meanwhile, in Suffolk, six gigantic bioreactors turn 0.1 gram of yeast into 30,000 kilos (enough for 1.2 million loaves of bread) in just four days, before spraying, squeezing, and dehydrating it.

IMAGE: The yeast factory’s bioreactors. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: Extruded and dried bakers’ yeast. Screen grab from the BBC.

Tankers bring the highly combustible flour, living yeast, and a variety of other emulsifiers and additives to West Bromwich, and then the supermarket loaf’s twenty-four hour journey from flour to shelf begins.

Only three and a half hours of that are required to knead, proof, bake, slice, and bag the bread; the rest is allocated to sorting, loading, and delivery. During that three and a half hours, the bread never stops moving.

IMAGE: Dough balls “rest” for thirty-seconds for the gluten to form. Screen grab from the BBC.

Even the thirty-second “relaxation” period required between kneading and proving the dough takes place on a series of otherwise unnecessary conveyor belt loops. This is building as circulation: a gluten-based Epcot ride and mesmerizing Chris Burden installation rolled into one.

IMAGE: Proving dough. Screen grab from the BBC.

While a giant ferris wheel takes the loaves for a spin, muffins are funneled down Carsten Höller-worthy slides and into a series of race-track start gates.

IMAGE: The slide slows and separates the muffins for the quality control inspector. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: On your marks: the muffins head out onto the packaging track. Screen grab from the BBC.

Thus far, the process at least resembles a mechanical interpretation of home bread-baking, albeit using double the ingredients and a fraction of the time. But there is a secret to supermarket bread’s combination of squishiness and spreadability: a deft series of moves that rolls up the dough ball like a cigar, cuts it into four, and then squeezes it back together again in the tin.

IMAGE: The bread dough is rolled like a cigar. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: This machine then slices and folds it in two, and then in two again, before funneling it back together. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: The four dough cylinders, lined up so that their grain alternates. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: And then dropped in the tin, to reform into a single loaf. Screen grab from the BBC.

As the bread proves and bakes, the four cylinders become one again—but, because the grain of the dough flows in alternating directions, the resulting loaf is much less likely to tear under your butter knife.

IMAGE: The loaf on the left was not divided into four; the loaf on the right was. Screen grab from the BBC.

After a trip through the room-sized oven, the bread must be cooled to below 30°C, in order to be sliced and bagged. This is “the one bit of the process we can’t speed up,” Allied Bakeries’ manager complains. Over the course of two hours, the loaves slowly circulate up to the top of a multi-storey fridge and then wind their way down the other side.

IMAGE: Spiraling up the cooling tower. Screen grab from the BBC.

IMAGE: Two spirals in the cooling tower. Screen grab from the BBC.

After a trip through the slicer*, an ingenious blow-and-scoop motion inflates a plastic bag in time to catch the loaf as it falls from one conveyor belt to another.

IMAGE: Bagging the bread. Screen grab from the BBC.

And, with a final pass through the metal detector, the loaf’s journey grinds to a temporary halt. At some point in the next twenty hours, supermarket orders will come in, and pickers will load it onto a pallet, and then a lorry. From there, it goes from supermarket shelf to basket, to stomach—or, as the show’s presenters pointed out, the bin. (British shoppers throw away the equivalent of one out of every three loaves purchased.)

The episode is still available on iPlayer, as are the subsequent programmes in the series, on milk and chocolate. It’s the kind of food television I love—and that is vanishingly rare. Although the presenters point out the differences between industrial processes and home baking and the unnecessary nature of much food waste, there is no agenda other than curiosity. Most of us—even those of us that write and think about food almost constantly, like me—will never have seen the inside of commercial bakery, let alone the yeast bioreactors and flour mills that feed it. And it is a fascinating, awe-inspiring, and occasionally revelatory sight.

*As designer and food historian Cory Bernat once pointed out, sliced bread wasn’t really the greatest thing until cellophane came along to keep it fresh. Although Iowan Otto Rohwedder designed his “single-step bread slicing machine” in the 1920s, when the first pre-sliced loaf was sold on July 7, 1928, it was wrapped in wax paper, which was far from air-tight, as well as difficult to reseal. Fortunately, DuPont came out with the first impermeable plastic wrapping in 1927, and by the early 1930s, sliced bread was being sold in cellophane. “Cellophane on bread! Impossible, one might say, but it’s a fact,” reported the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 1934.

For another look at food manufacturing’s industrial sublime, see “In the Time of Full Mechanisation.”

Thanks for the tip, Mum!