The writer did some smart research by talking to the right people for the place he wanted to know, the experts, i.e. ramen nerds. I think Mr. Gross, who writes the Frugal Traveler blog for the Times, searched the web for English speaking ramen bloggers, and gathered what he needed for his article while hanging out with these folks at their favorite ramen spots. It’s a wonderful piece. Solid multimedia, a great link dump at the end, nice passionate writing, etc. I’ve also really enjoyed reading the blogs of the folks who lent Mr. Gross their knowledge for this article.

Exhibits that talk about the social and historical meaning of food in a time and place, like Key Ingredients by Food, are like this times article in that they use food to help people better know a place. There are more of these exhibits than even I would have thought. Stuff at historical societies, community centers, small museums. And I continue to be amazed at just how many such exhibits are called Food for Thought.

Author and professor Albert Rolls wrote a great explication entitled Andrew Marvell’s Sweet Vegetable Love. Great title, right? Rolls says we should look to Aristotle and to former hobo and renowned literary critic JV Cunningham to understand vegetable love. This is far, far beyond what I intended when I set out to write this glib post, but these things happen when you get the impulse to visit your badly neglected blog at 3am after an unusually fine meal and five cups of coffee.

But why doesn’t Marvell use the word “natural” rather than “vegetable”? He wants, I would argue, to allude not simply to natural love but also to the doctrine of the three souls and to draw out the green connotations that Cunningham reduces to an absurdity with his image of “an expansive cabbage.” [link]

Not sure whether I forgot or never learned about Aristotle’s notion of three souls, but thanks to Google Book Search I have Harvard Medical School’s copy of Science from 1891, which contains a nice little relevant passage. Check out the scan; how handsome is that?

…coming now to his generalizations it was true philosophical insight which enabled Aristotle to perceive in organic nature an ascending complexity of organization from the vegetable kindom up to man. [link]

While looking for the Aristotle bit, I came across an essay on the Epicurean concept of love. I had to know who posted such an extensive treatise to the Yahoo Groups International Stoic Forum, so I searched the author’s name, Jan E. Garrett. This led me to an interview of Jane E. Garrett on the blog RecoveredRecipes.com. Ms. Garrett may or may not have written the post on Epicurean love, but she definitely wrote a book containing several hundred mid 20th century recipes from the Lawrence Journal World, which is of course right up my alley. [link]

The time is 3:44am and the caffeine is running strong. To quote my friend Dan Schultz, who was last seen somewhere in Southeast Asia, I’m hanging on by a very thin thread. I think I’ll go read some more poetry.

Also, bonus, I belieeeeve American intellectual property law does not lock down these images. They’re in the public domain, having been created prior to 1923. Nice, right?

BTW, the job fair was fantastic and you should try to go if you’re interested in Federal Libraries, Archives, etc. In the mean time, just join the Careers in Federal Libraries Google Group.

Links:
Marcia Wood’s article on the collection: Agricultural Research Magazine, September 2000 – Vol. 48, No. 9

Exhibit page: USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection:

Page w/ image links: Medium Res JPG [some links broken, will attempt to notify relevant staff to request fix & high res images]

i tend to like things that are titled “natural history of______”. not sure exactly why, but in this instance there were all sorts of diverting chicken related vignettes that spanned from agribusiness to small farms to household pets. yes, they interviewed the woman who brought one of her beloved brood back from the brink of death using mouth to beak.

science of speed eating was very interesting, largely because of the portrayal of the topic and the resulting audience reaction. i wish i had a screenshot of the hulu comments (vitriolic, even for the internet), but the video is no longer on hulu. why? i’d be guessing. anyway, the film follows a nice regular family guy training to become a competitive eater, as well as veteran gurgitator Tim Janus.

so, doctors from the departments of radiology and gastroenterology at upenn did some diagnostics on Janus’ bread basket, using a young doctor whose family used to call him the garbage disposal, as a control. basically, dr. metz hopes he might glean insights to help dyspepsia sufferers from the study of competitive eaters.

now, i’m a fan of competitive eating. i’ve cheered on competitors July 4th at Coney Island. i know lots of strange and wonderful stats. and matter of fact, i recently took 3rd in a german food eating competition. but science of speed eating seemed to want to conclude that elite competitive eaters were mysteries to science, somehow able to do the inexplicable without repercussions. it’s true that the good doctors seemed legitimately amazed, which is hilariously reflected in the paper that dr. metz and his colleagues published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, Competitive Speed Eating: Truth and Consequences. however, the documentary didn’t really convey the full range of the doctors’ dispositions, which i’d describe as amazed, interested, concerned and cautionary.

aaaaaanyway, i enjoyed both movies. sort of a nice middle ground between food movies (yay, dessert!) and food lectures (it’s a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. everything the body needs).

View Evening in Tacony in a larger map
Possible Agenda:

• Stop at Jack’s Place on Hegerman Ave. for a sandwich that will feed you and three friends.
• Go to the library and learn about canning.
• Get another sandwich, this time a cheesesteak from Frusco’s.
• Head down the street to see why the Grey Lodge makes Esquire’s Best Bars in America list.
• Getting hungry again?! BBQ at Sweet Lucy’s. BYOB!

Those of you who are vintage saw buffs are likely familiar with the area because of Disston’s Keystone Saw Works, once the worlds largest manufacturer of saws. But there’s more than industry to Tacony, friends, so go forth and eat!

Example. This past winter Ankeny Iowa used garlic salt to melt snow and ice from their roadways. True story. Ankeny based spice giant Tone Brothers donated 18,000 lbs. of garlic salt to use on 400 miles of road. Magnificent. Also, makes me want to write a piece on corporate ownership hierarchies in the food industry.
And this past weekend, I ate a variety of seafood delights, a perfect opportunity to write about books on foraging like Stalking the Blue Eyed Scallop.

There’s so much to write about. Serious culinary history stuff and wonderfully frivolous stuff. My challenge with this blog is the same I am always presented by menus; I want everything.

Douglas Baldwin’s Website
.pdf A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking Version 0.4f

After finding Baldwin’s site, I read an interview with him by Norwegian organometallic chemistry PhD and food blogger Martin Lersch. And then I read some of the 80 page eGullet thread where posters including Baldwin, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold and eGullet founder Steven Shaw explored sous vide.

I got curious about Baldwin’s prominent search engine ranking on the term sous vide. Sometimes I forget that the Internet is full of people with esoteric interests; I checked Yahoo Site Explorer to get a sense of how many websites link to Baldwin’s writing on Sous Vide…close to two hundred.

Some links that cracked me up included
Goons with Spoons board on Something Awful
Cooking For Engineers Forums
Gourmet Magazine, which links to Baldwin’s site with the words food dork

This kind of passion is both hilarious and inspiring, and it renews my appreciation for scientists and the varied communities of science connected with food. More detail to follow; I’d like to do some posts about specific scientific communities that center around food, like food chemists and nutritional scientists.

I’m really into Google Earth. I don’t really know why. I like maps, like the one I made of cookbook stores back in April. And one of my first posts on this blog was about the exhibit of culinary maps at the Michigan Map Library. But this project of mapping the Michelin Star Restaurants in San Francisco has me obsessed with Google Earth for about a month now. I love that it’s free. I love that there’s a huge amount of user generated content. I love that creating content can be really simple and intuitive, or extremely customized.

Putting together the content for my map was fun and labor intensive. I got the list of restaurants from the Michelin Guide website. I think I looked up the addresses manually, then used Batch Geocode to get the latitude and longitude of each location. I searched Flickr for creative commons licensed images from the restaurants. Then I fed all of this information into the Google Spreadsheet Mapper template.

Perhaps you’ll enjoy the Mapping episode of This American Life. I did. Acts one and five are spectacular. Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold describes his taste map of Pico Boulevard.

Also, during Jan Longone’s presentation on her exhibit The Old Girl Network: charity cookbooks and the empowerment of women, she showed a map of the charity cookbooks from Michigan. It’s a great presentation, and you can stream the whole thing [link].

I’m pretty psyched to explore datasets and publications by other agencies to find food-related content.

food studies lectures on itunes u from Jason Young on Vimeo.

iTunes U has sooo much stuff! Over the past couple years, I’ve been really jazzed about online learning. Some of the institutions and corporations I respect most, from the New York Public Library and Google, the Smithsonian and MIT, are making information available freely available through the Internet. Some interesting public-private partnerships have made great contributions to web based education, like the Google Book Search project, and iTunes U.

Dozens of universities and a few libraries and museums make videos and podcasts that they’ve created available through iTunes. Among the lectures on physics, math and classics, I’ve listened to Calvin Trillin speaking at Stanford, Alice Waters at Yale, Jose Andres at the Culinary Institute of America. I made a brief tutorial on how to find culinary movies and mp3s on iTunes U. I’m wrestling with Camtasia a bit, so please use the comments to let me know what need improving, what’s hard to see, hear, etc.