Thinking Through Food
If you, like me, were previously only familiar with pectin s powers in the context of setting jams and jellies, this statement, from a recent article in Nature about the secret language spoken by plant cell walls, might stop you in your tracks: Pectin is a complicated molecule constructed from at least a dozen sugars, connected [ ]
A long, long time ago, on this remote corner of the pre-Substack Internet, I began exploring what I dubbed the artificial cryosphere—the vast distributed winter of warehouses, juice tanks, reefers, meat lockers, and banana-ripening rooms that we’ve built for our food to live in. My refrigerated adventures led me to curate an exhibition at the [ ]
Behold! Edible Geography rises, vampire*-like, from the dead, for today marks the publication of my very first book! Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine is co-authored with Geoff Manaugh, whom long-time readers of this blog will recognize as my husband and frequent collaborator, as well as the author of BLDGBLOG and, more [ ]
IMAGE: Peak Pegasus. Photo by Jackie Pritchard, Marine Traffic. Peak Pegasus is a bulk cargo ship, built in 2013, and, like so many commercial vessels, flagged in Liberia. At 229 metres long and 32.26 metres broad, she is Panamax-sized (the maximum width that can squeak through the canal is 32.31 metres), and she can carry [ ]
The year I moved to New York, Sockerbit, a Scandinavian pick-and-mix sweet shop, opened in the West Village. I went once, and never again in the six years I lived in the city. The problem was not that I did not enjoy the fragrant, soft pink Smultronmatta (rippled squares of wild strawberry licorice) or the [ ]
IMAGE: The classic Ferrero Rocher Ambassador s Party ad. To put a hazelnut into every bonbon, Ferrero buys about a third of the world’s hazelnut supply. A third! That s just one of the fascinating details in this Forbes profile of the Ferrero family, which also includes the business s origins in ersatz wartime chocolate. * Founder Pietro s first [ ]
As allergy season gears up in the northern hemisphere, yesterday brought news that even leaving the planet will bring no relief. A press release announcing the publication of a new paper in the journal GeoHealth warned that future astronauts may well suffer from lunar hay fever, complete with the characteristic sneezing, watery eyes, and sore [ ]
IMAGE: Jabriel, a luxury bull, whose semen is the most valuable in the billion-dollar Brazilian cattle genetics industry. Photo from the Holy Cow series by photo-journalist Carolina Arantes. Jabriel is what can be described as a “luxury bull”–his genes so perfect that he lives protected in the farm of a lab in the south-eastern state [ ]
IMAGE: Innocent wackaging via. If you ve bought juice, crisps, cereal bars, soups, breakfast pots (porridge, as was), or any number of other ready-to-eat packaged foods in the U.K. this millennium, you may have noticed that your snack fancies a chat. British food packaging now has a matey, at worst babyish, tone that simply didn t used [ ]
An egg, it turns out, is not just the best thing to put on top of almost any dish. For starters, artists have been using eggs as a canvas for centuries; the International Egg Art Guild showcases some fine examples of eggery, from delicate laser-cut eggshells to traditional Ukranian wax-resist methods. The photo galleries from [ ]