food unites us

If politics divides us, it is surely food that unites. It is food that inspired most if not all the great campaigns to discover the world: spices that drove trade between the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans with Asia, the Arabs to cross the Indian Ocean, the Persians to find overland routes to India, the Europeans to discover the Americas.

While many, many wrongs were done during the great ages of Empire, the movement of people around the globe over the last 5,000 years in particular has been of infinite mutual benefit. As people discovered new cultures they discovered new ideas, new people to fall in love with, new books to read, new colours, new architecture, new foods.

In kitchens around the world, people welcomed new elements, new techniques of cooking, new ingredients, incorporated them into their own cuisines and synthesised them into new dishes.

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FLW - foodie commune

"One part of that vision is to return Taliesin to a fully diversified farm; contoured rows crops cover the Welsh hillside, hundred-year-old trees are tapped for maple syrup, grapevines produce fruit table wine, and cows freely graze on the pasture before being milked or slaughtered for meat. But Taliesin is also meant to be a self-sustaining community of chefs, farmers, and architects contributing to the property as they once did as part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship Program, established in 1932. According to a 1934 brochure the program had fellows “farming, planning, working, kitchenizing, and philosophizing in voluntary co-operation in an atmosphere of natural loveliness they are helping to make eventually habitable.”

Taliesin worked closely in conjunction with Taliesin West, which Wright built in the McDowell Mountains of present-day Scottsdale in 1938 as a winter retreat for himself and the majority of the Wisconsin residents. Throughout the colder months, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, and preserves were sent by rail from those looking after the farm to their peers in Arizona. Wyer plans to revive this tradition this season with a shipment of preserved produce.

Sounds kind of like a commune, right? It closely resembled one. So much so that shortly before Wright’s death in 1959, a Wisconsin circuit judge determined that Taliesin was in fact operating for the sole benefit of Wright and not as a non-profit organization. Whether Taliesin was an Emersonian utopia or labor camp is still up for debate, along with the stigma surrounding the property’s existence. “Throughout the whole history of this place, they were so isolated that people in town shunned them, called them socialists, and didn’t want to get involved with them. They didn’t know what was going on with them and didn’t want to know,” Dungue says. “I think that carried through history and people still don’t know.”


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changing american diets

After seeing the Open Data Institute’s project on the changing British Diet, I couldn’t help but wonder how the American diet has changed over the years.

The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of these sort of things through the Food Availability Data System. The program estimates both how much food is produced and how much food people eat, dating back to 1970 through 2013. The data covers the major food categories, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, across many food items on a per capita and daily basis.

In the interactive below, we look at the major food items in each category. Each column is a category, and each chart is a time series for a major food item, represented as serving units per category. Items move up and down based on their ranking in each group during a given year.

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secret history of a food that everybody loves

The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.

Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.

But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

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The Chinese Take out box

When you order Chinese delivery, do you ever stop to look at the takeout box? That white container adorned with red pagodas is one of the most iconic boxes around. But did you know that it's actually an American design? In fact, you probably won't even find these boxes in China.

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mid century mod foods

There is no mystery for me in the almost cultlike enthusiasm for midcentury modern architecture and design. Whether it’s a Bakelite bracelet or a Barcelona chair, there is absolutely no denying the perfect harmony of 20th century technology and art. It doesn’t matter if it’s cars, toasters, apartment buildings, couches … it’s impossible not to appreciate the vision, if not to covet the object.

The same cannot be said for midcentury cuisine. It looks bad, tastes worse, and consumed over decades surely must kill you. Whoever first decided that food and technology were meant to comingle and produce offspring was delusional. Maybe evil...

Kurt Cyr, a Palm Springs renaissance man who has not only garnered a reputation for his modernism tours and popular lecture series/social gathering, Salon of the Parched, became fascinated several years ago with the question of why people who love midcentury architecture revile the food. His discoveries resulted in ModEats, a demonstration/cooking series he put on at the Saguaro Hotel. “If we are going to talk seriously about midcentury food, the spectacle of kitsch draws the focus away from one important factor that we take for granted today,” he says, “[And that is] the revolutionary discoveries of food science during this period.”

In fact, Cyr believes the work of world-renowned chefs such as Ferran Adrià of elBulli, would not have been possible without the trailblazing work of the mad food scientists at General Foods or Nabisco. “Molecular gastronomy is definitely the grandchild of the food science discoveries of the 1950s,” Cyr says, pointing out that the balsamic vinegar pearls that top modern deconstructed Caprese salads would not be possible without the invention of … Jell-O.,,,

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McBarge

A floating McDonald’s restaurant may sound like a wonderful fast-food industry concept but you won’t find any Happy Meals at this restaurant.
The McBarge was built in 1986 for an estimated cost of $8 million (£5.6 million) but proved to be a bad investment and has been left empty for the last 30 years in a creek on the west coast of Canada.
Urban explorers have more recently ventured inside the abandoned restaurant to capture what it looks like now, sharing the photos on a Facebook group.

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Food Time line

The food timeline! ...
"Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip...and why? So do we!!! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it's impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve. We make food history fun."

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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

“Everything is a trail through the museum,” said Williams, referring to the museum’s current exhibit titled the Trail of Smoke and Fire. “BBQ is not monolithic. In some parts of the south, it might be mutton or chicken. Or along the gulf coast we have roasted oysters and smoked mullet and other kinds of fish. And we’ve put them in the states where they happen just for context.”
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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

16th century food porn

Though the contemporary phenomenon of food porn may feel like an Internet-era excess, there’s a long history of different cultures taking part in obnoxious public displays of meals. The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, currently on display at the Getty Research Institute, considers the history of table decoration and food display in early modern Europe. The underlying message of these centuries-old examples feels echoed in contemporary TV cooking contests like Cake Wars or The Great British Baking Show: So much of eating is about spectatorship, about consuming feats of gastronomy with the eyes more so than the mouth. So lavish Pinterest planning and meticulous Instagram filtering of Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a corruption of the ages-old communal joys of eating—it’s a natural extension of it.

When it comes to party food especially, the sense of sight has always trumped the senses of taste. For Voltaire and other philosophes of the 18th century, taste was not a single sense but the act of discrimination in general, whether applied to painting or pastry. Its opposite was bad taste, or tastelessness. The meat mountains, fruit pyramids, and marzipan castles that graced princely and aristocratic tables from the 16th century onward may have pleased the palate, but they were primarily intended as feasts for the eyes: visibly expensive, fragile, and time-consuming to create, using hard-to-find ingredients like white sugar or out-of-season produce.

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General Tso

SYNOPSIS
This mouthwateringly entertaining film travels the globe to unravel a captivating culinary mystery. General Tso’s chicken is a staple of Chinese-American cooking, and a ubiquitous presence on restaurant menus across the country. But just who was General Tso? And how did his chicken become emblematic of an entire national cuisine? Director Ian Cheney (King Corn, The City Dark) journeys from Shanghai to New York to the American Midwest and beyond to uncover the origins of this iconic dish, turning up surprising revelations and a host of humorous characters along the way. Told with the verve of a good detective story,The Search for General Tso is as much about food as it is a tale of the American immigrant experience. A Sundance Selects release from IFC Films.

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Food Design

Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter
According to Austrian designers Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter, “People should talk about food as an aspect of culture, as the most important good, as business, as a design product of daily life.” They founded the interdisciplinary design studio honey & bunny productions, curated the exhibition “Food Design” for Museumsquartier Vienna and performed as eat designers in Milan, Amsterdam and many other places. As authors they published the award-winning books “Food Design” and “Food Design XL” that show how shape, colour, smell, consistency, production methods, history and stories influence food product design. Stummerer and Hablesreiter have given a number of international lectures and taught at schools including Bucharest and Istanbul. In 2008 they directed the movie “Food design – a film”.

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Pizza Hunt

Photographer Ho Hai Tran’s Kickstarter project to record the unique but now repurposed architecture of the original Pizza Hut buildings created in the 1970/80s/90s is proving very popular. Tran’s project, Pizza Hunt (proving is so popular it has already exceeded its target funding), will see the photographer travelling across New Zealand, Australia and the US to shoot what you could call ‘ghost’ buildings.

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MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) is creating the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat.

MOFAD will be a global leader in food education, featuring innovative exhibits and programs that show how exciting it is to learn and care about the culture, history, science, production, and commerce of food and drink. Imagine a place where you can use an Aztec kitchen, see cereal made before your eyes, decode food marketing, taste West African street food, make Chinese hand-pulled noodles, learn about agriculture and composting, and see how the body digests a sandwich—all in one museum.

In 2013, MOFAD debuted its first explosive mobile exhibition, BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal. The exhibition, which featured a 3,200-pound breakfast cereal puffing machine, drew accolades from media outlets such as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

MOFAD Lab, the organization's first brick-and-mortar home, will open in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 28, 2015. In this space, MOFAD will design and showcase its exhibit concepts as it works toward opening the full museum in New York City by 2019. Join the MOFAD mailing list to stay updated on upcoming exhibitions and programs

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Food Axis

Blending architectural and social history with the necessity―and the passion―for food, this engaging new book attempts to understand the development of the American house by viewing it through one very specific lens: the food axis. Taking in far more than the kitchen, author Elizabeth Collins Cromley explores all areas of food management within the home―preparation, cooking, consumption, and disposal. Her food axis implies a network of related spaces above and below ground, both attached to the house and separate from it. 

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Edible Monument

The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) section of the Los Angeles center, features rare prints, elaborate serving pieces, as well as early cookbooks and serving manuals that show monuments of food from hundreds of years ago. One section of the exhibit is appropriately called the Theater of the Table, a title that could have pertained to the whole presentation.

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Waffle House re-do

Nahser's aim was to make the yellow-and-red color scheme integral to the company's brand, and he succeeded. Is there a more recognizable roadside sign than the yellow Scrabble pieces spelling out WAFFLE HOUSE? (One designer has called the sign a great example of a monospaced font.) Whether deliberately or through benign neglect, the company did not move far from Nahser's vision until now. While other national chains tinker endlessly with their store designs—there are now McDonald’s restaurants with wood slats—Waffle House has kept things old-school. And why not? Nahser's bright box is the perfect symbol for a business that prides itself on welcoming customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. (Waffle Houses are so dependable, in fact, that FEMA created a Waffle House Index for natural disasters.)

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Ancient Rome feasts

An informative and richly set of illustrated presentations followed by a discussion with experts on ancient Roman art, architecture and philosophy. Learn about the ways ancient Romans dined, how they enjoyed their food, how they stored and prepared meals from the kitchen to the richly decorated triclinium.

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Food and Urbanism

Food and Urbanism: The Convivial City and a Sustainable Future

Susan Parham

Cities are now home to over fifty per cent of the world's population, but the contribution of food to shaping cities is often overlooked. Food matters in designing and planning cities because how it is grown, transported, bought, cooked, eaten, cleaned up and disposed of has significant effects on creating a sustainable, resilient and convivial urban future.  The book explores methods for extending the gastronomic possibilities of urban space - from the scale of the table to the metropolis. Using a wealth of examples from cities worldwide, the book explores how physical design and socio-spatial arrangements focused on food can help maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Underpinning the book's analysis of food and cities is the view that decisions about a hyper-urban future should recognise the fundamental role of food. Food and Urbanism provides an original and new contribution to food scholarship; exploring some intriguing research questions about the ways that food, urbanism and sustainable conviviality interconnect.

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Taste of Chicago

By the time of the 1893 World's Fair, downtown Chicago was expanding rapidly with major hotels and a large retail shopping district, metal frame office towers, buildings to house the arts, and cable cars and elevated trains. On this one and a half hour walking tour, you will learn how Chicago developed into a world class city. You will see historic buildings from 1893, and learn about the business leaders and architects who "built" Chicago. You will also get to taste food that first made its appearance at the world's fair and is still popular today. Did you know that all beef hot dogs started in Chicago in 1893? Or that sweet treats like Cracker Jack, brownies, and Wrigley Spearmint and Juicy Fruit gum began here? Join us on this fun "see and taste" walking tour. 

This tour includes a full-sized hot dog, caramel corn, and brownie that can be eaten along the way or taken home with you. Beverages are not included, but you may bring your own on the tour. Please note that open beverage containers may not be allowed on all tour stops.
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