Fueling Mexico City: A Grain Revolution

IMAGE: Walmart, Mexico City. Walmart sells more food each year than anyone else in Mexico. It is the country’s biggest private employer, with a range of supermarkets (the high-end Superama and discount Bodega), department stores (the wonderfully named Suburbia)...

The Amazing Allegorical Synthetic Fish

IMAGE: Rainbow trout, via. Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire popularised the ingenious idea that the biographies of plants provide us with a mirror in which we can see our own history, desires, and values. The triumph of corn, for example, tells us a wealth of...

Multifunctional Desserts

In a 1976 episode of Saturday Night Live, Dan Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner starred in a short ad for New Shimmer: a miraculous new product that was “both floor wax and a dessert topping!” IMAGE: “New Shimmer” on Saturday Night Live,...

Ginger Biscuits and Deodorant Guns

IMAGE: A unintentional theme from the Headspace: Scent As Design conference – at least three different speakers used this random archival photo in their presentations. In his book The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr describes the case of Janet Rippard, “a former...

Digest | Feeding the Bronx

The Center for Urban Pedagogy has created an awesome new video that explores some of the economic and consumer forces that combine to create the South Bronx foodscape. It’s called Bodega Down Bronx, and you can watch it in full (a half hour well spent) over over...

Digest | Of Civil Wars, Diaspora, and Culinary Nostalgia

When Fuschia Dunlop, a British cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine, was compiling material for her recent book on Hunanese food, she faced a difficult decision: to include, or not to include, a recipe for General Tso’s Chicken. IMAGE: General...