Gastropod

By Cynthia Graber and Nicola TwilleyScience Arts History Food

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Gastropod episodes

November 25, 2014 Bite: Smoked Pigeon and Other Subnatural Delights
In this week’s bite-sized episode, Nicky travels to the campus of Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, for a day of talks and tastings exploring the shifting status of stinky cheese, offal, insects, and other funky foods. At different times and places, these foods have been regarded as “subnatural”—low-class, disgusting, even unhygienic. But what does categorizing these foods as subnatural say about us, and what happens when we decide that they’re desirable, after all?
Episode Notes
Here are links to the peculiar but fascinating events, ideas, and books we discuss in this bite-sized episode.Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments,David Gissen
The term “subnature” was coined by architectural theorist David Gissen in 2009 to describe the less desirable aspects of the built environment: puddles, pollution, and pigeons. His book explores the historical assumptions behind this mostly unquestioned hierarchy in which light, air, and greenery are perceived as “good,” while the equally natural dust, dirt, and weeds are unwelcome.
Image from the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, Aranda/Lasch, 2004
It also includes a selection of projects by contemporary architects and preservationists that engage with historical perceptions of subnatural environments and attempt to re-imagine them for the future. For example, Gissen includes both a discussion of anti-pigeon spikes and a description of the Brooklyn Pigeon Project, in which architecture firm Aranda/Lasch developed a set of algorithms and tools to help humans re-visualize the city from the point of view of a flock of pigeons.Subnature and Culinary Culture, Duke University
By collaborating with colleagues from a wide range of departments at Duke, as well as chefs, cheese-makers, and foragers from the local community, Tom Parker, a visiting scholar from Vassar, created a campus-wide program of events, talks, installations, and edible experiences exploring what the idea of subnature might mean in terms of food, and why particular foods, texture, and flavors have been marginalized in certain societies.
Chef Kim Floresca smokes sturgeon at the Duke University campus smokehouse, with Tom Parker and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab. Photo by Nicola Twilley.
Roasting quail in a downtown Durham parking lot. Photo by Nicola Twilley.
Highlights included the construction of a smokehouse on the lawn outside the university president’s offices, as well as a dinner in which the chefs from five local restaurants came together to showcase local subnatural ingredients prepared in transformative ways. On the menu: car-park roasted quail, cooked using a set-up that chef Matt Kelly described as “redneck ingenuity,” and sturgeon coated in a crust of corn fungus and its own heart and collagen, smoked in the Duke smokehouse.
“Sturgeon: Its Roe, Marrow, Collagen, & Heart. Lacto-Fermented Onions. Our Soured Cream. Saltwort.” As prepared by chefs Kim Floresca and Daniel Ryan, [ONE] Restaurant. Photo by Nicola Twilley.“How Wine Became Metropolitan,”Edible Geography
This is the post about David Gissen’s new map of France’s wine regions that started the ball rolling by introducing Tom Parker to the idea of subnature. Gissen represents wine appellations as stops on a subway line rather than as geographic territories in an attempt to communicate the relationship between each region, rather than their legal boundaries.
The Metro Wine Map of France, David Gissen
The post Bite: Smoked Pigeon and Other Subnatural Delights appeared first on Gastropod.

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18 min
November 11, 2014 The Microbe Revolution
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard about the human microbiome. Research into the composition, function, and importance of the galaxy of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that, when we’re healthy, live in symbiotic balance in and on us has become one of the fastest moving and most intriguing fields of scientific study. But it turns out that plants have a microbiome too—and it’s just as important and exciting as ours. In this episode of Gastropod, we look at the brand new science that experts think will lead to a “Microbe Revolution” in agriculture, as well as the history of both probiotics for soils and agricultural revolutions. And we do it all in the context of the crop that Bill Gates has called “the world’s most interesting vegetable”: the cassava.

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40 min
October 28, 2014 Bite: Forgotten Fruits & the Future of Food?
We’re back with a bite-sized discussion of two fascinating food history and science stories that have crossed our paths in the last couple of weeks. This time, co-host Nicky spends a week living on Soylent, the Silicon Valley-spawned food replacement-drink, and then we learn about the weird world of fruit detectives, who hunt down America’s long-lost apples with the help of watercolor illustrations drawn by 19th-century USDA artists. In one short, sweet conversation, we go from the recurring futuristic fantasy of the meal-in-a-pill to the unintentionally disastrous impact of Prohibition on America’s apple diversity. Episode Notes Here are links to the stories and books we discuss in this bite-sized episode—all worth checking out.“Freedom from Food,” Nicola Twilley, Aeon Nicky’s article takes Soylent as the starting point to explore the implications of opting out of food, in terms of human physiology, the family meal, female labor force participation, and more. You can read it in full here. A day’s-worth of Soylent in a jug awaits consumption in Nicky’s otherwise abandoned kitchen. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, Warren Belasco Historian Warren Belasco’s survey of how Americans in the past have imagined the future of food demonstrates that there is indeed nothing new under the sun—our ancestors were also split between techno-Utopians, fantasizing about meals in pill form, and skeptics who regarded any and all changes in food and farming with alarm. Well worth a read, not only to put current debates in context but also to marvel at such curiosities as the Electrified Farm of the 1939 World’s Fair, Gail Borden’s “meat biscuit,” and Stanford’s doomed attempts to produce “plankton soup.”“An Apple a Day, for 47 Years,” Michael Tortorello, The New York Times This recent article in The New York Times profiles Dan Bussey and his epic, seven-volume, nearly 3,000-page encyclopedia, The Illustrated History of Apples in North America, which is to be published starting in January 2015. Bussey, whose day job is in the restaurant supply business, started work on the manuscript in 1983, tracking down records and, in some cases, living specimens, of all 17,000 apple varieties known to have grown in America between the years 1623 and 2000.Apples of Uncommon Character: Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders, Rowan Jacobsen Rowan Jacobsen’s new book (published in September 2014) includes “biographies” of 123 different apples, as well as recipes, sourcing information, and pairing tips. NPR called it “Facebook for fruit,” which we think sounds more fun than the human version.USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection Blue Pearmain, Mary Daisy Arnold, 1912. From the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705.
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20 min
October 14, 2014 Dan Barber’s Quest for Flavor
In this latest episode of Gastropod, chef and author Dan Barber takes listeners on a journey around the world in search of great flavor and the ecosystems that support it, from Spain to the deep South. You’ll hear how a carefully tended landscape of cork trees makes for delicious ham, and about a squash so cutting edge it doesn’t yet have a name, in this deep dive into the intertwined history and science of soil, cuisine, and flavor. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before refrigerators, before long-distance trucks and ships. Most people had to survive on food from their immediate surroundings, no matter how poor the soil or challenging the terrain. They couldn’t import apples from New Zealand and potatoes from Peru, or rely on chemical fertilizer to boost their yields. From within these constraints, communities around the world developed a way of eating that Dan Barber calls “ecosystem cuisines.” Barber, the James Beard-award-winning chef of Blue Hill restaurant and author of the new book The Third Plate, spoke to Gastropod about his conviction that this historically-inspired style of cuisine can be reinvented, with the help of plant-breeders, his fellow chefs, and the latest in flavor science, in order to create a truly sustainable way to eat for the twenty-first century.

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46 min
September 30, 2014 Bite: What America Could Taste Like
We promised we’d serve a bite-sized snack in between our full-length episodes, and here it is—a short and snappy update, in which we share two of the most interesting food history and science stories we’ve come across recently.
This week is all about the ignored, overlooked, and (maybe) future foods and flavors of America. We’ll introduce you to the scientists using DNA sequencing to help them perform the very ancient human activity of crop domestication, and to a writer fighting to save Alaska’s most abundant and sustainable fishery. By the end of our conversation, we expect you’ll want to swap that all-American burger and fries for some wild salmon and mashed potato beans. (Don’t worry, you can still have a chocolate-chip cookie for dessert—in fact, it will be the ur-chocolate-chip cookie.)
Episode Notes
Here are links to the story and book we discuss in this bite-sized episode—both are well worth a read.“How we can tame overlooked wild plants to feed the world,” Hillary Rosner, Wired
Much of what we eat today was domesticated when people were just learning to weave clothing and still thousands of years from developing an alphabet. Today we tinker—but only at the margins. Maybe we get higher yield here or resistance to corporate herbicide over there. As far as transforming plants from the wild into new well-bred row crops, though, progress pretty well stopped a millennium before Jesus ate a matzo.
Read Hillary Rosner’s fascinating story about the scientists working to domesticate new plant species in full here.American Catch: The Fight for our Local Seafood, Paul Greenberg
Paul Greenberg’s new book explores the United States’ fishy mathematics: 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, but a third of the seafood Americans catch is sold to foreigners. That’s a problem, Greenberg convincingly argues, because if we don’t eat our oceanic bounty, we don’t care about its well-being.
We are what we eat, we are told. But we Americans do not eat what we truly are. We are an ocean nation, a country that controls more sea than land and more fishing grounds than any other national on earth. And yet we have systematically reengineered our landscapes, our economy, and our society away from the sea’s influence.
You can buy Greenberg’s book online here, and send a message to the EPA to protect the Bristol Bay fishery here.
The post Bite: What America Could Taste Like appeared first on Gastropod.
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15 min
September 06, 2014 Episode 1: The Golden Spoon
Chances are, you’ve spent more time thinking about the specs on your smartphone than about the gadgets that you use to put food in your mouth. But the shape and material properties of forks, spoons, and knives turn out to matter—a lot. Changes in the design of cutlery have not only affected how and what we eat, but also what our food tastes like. There’s even evidence that the adoption of the table knife transformed the shape of European faces. To explore the hidden history and emerging science of cutlery for our brand new podcast, Gastropod spoke to Bee Wilson, food historian and author of Consider the Fork, and Zoe Laughlin, co-founder of the Institute of Making at University College London.

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45 min

About Gastropod

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Food with a side of science and history. Every other week, co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley serve up a brand new episode exploring the hidden history and surprising science behind a…