Bread

Cheese

Any and all leftovers

I admit it. Sometimes sandwiches entail more of a commitment to bread than I’m willing to make. As much as the food over in me rolls her eyes, I go through phases in which I’d rather limit my consumption of refined carbohydrates to the occasional serious dessert, caramel sea salt tart trumping tune on rye in my book. But there’s a fuck-you element to a sandwich that I simply can’t deny, a glorious mobility that no other foodstuff can provide. It’s not like you can hold a salad in one hand while you steer your getaway car through the night. It’s not like you can slurp soup during a seaside hike. And it’s not like you can stow last’ night’s leftovers in your purse to munch while you ogle the dog run on your lunch hour.

My inner Frugal Fanny kvells over such economy-how yesterday’s lamb can be repurposed with a sliver of asiago cheese, a sprig of parsley, a layer of fig jam spread liberally over rosemary focaccia; how you can pack your vegetable and your protein and your fat in one sweet-and-savory punch. Feel free to improvise wildly, because no matter how baroque you get, any disaster will be limited and contained to a single casualty and between two slices of bread. God knows I would never have happened upon the winning combination of roasted pork, pickled peaches, lemon, fresh mayo habanero sauce and chopped cilantro had I been trying to please anyone besides myself. Never mind the Bullocks, man, sandwiches are just so punk rock.

A former labor organizer, Lisa Rosman has reviewed film for such publications as Marie Claire, Salon.com, Time Out New York, indieWire, LA Weekly, and Us Weekly. From 2003-2005, she served as the Brooklyn Rail’s film editor and, from 2005-2009, she served as Flavorwire’s film editor. She also ran the film blog The Broad View from 2005-2008. In 2012 she was honored as one of Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year for her relief work in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Most notably, she once served as the assistant for Sesame Street’s Elmo. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn, where she also works as a creative intuitive.  

Twilley talking about chewing gum mapping at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

NY-based writer and curator Nicola Twilley praises “the unsung heroes of cookie embossing”, delves into the history of napkin folding and imagines a city of mobile services. Through her blog, Edible Geography, she offers fascinating reports on seemingly trivial spaces, places and histories and asks important questions about the role of design and technology in our food systems and our communities. Nicola’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Dwell and GOOD Magazine, where she was also Food Editor. She is co-founder of the Foodprint Project and Venue and co-directs Studio X-NYC. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

How and when did you start Edible geography?

Three years ago, in 2009. At some point, as a freelance writer, I found that being curious about so many different things and wanting to write about all of them was a bit of a problem. I had to focus my curiosity somehow. I found inspiration in the way my husband, who was writing about disparate things for his blog, BLDGBLOG, was successfully unifying them under the theme of space and architectural speculation. I realized that food could be that lens for me, through which I could look at things that interested me. That growing realization was confirmed when I read this book by Carolyn Steel, called Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. I think it made me see that I could write about food but still write about everything else and never run out of things to write about.
Also, starting a blog was a way to force myself to write more often, which was important, because I’m extremely lazy.

What was your relationship with food before then?

I was reasonably food literate, though I’ve definitely learned more about food since writing for the blog. I certainly didn’t (and don’t) consider myself a foodie, or a food activist of any sort.

I ask about your relationship to food but it would do great disservice to Edible Geography to call it a food blog. I think it deals with so much more.

Yes, it’s always really hard for me to describe to people what it is I write about! When I say I write about food, people expect restaurant reviews or recipes.

It seems to me that you’re almost engaging in an anthropological exploration of spaces and intersections of people. Also, you oftentimes write about things that seem to belong in an alternate universe. I think that your titles accentuate that. I’m thinking, for example, about Spaces of Banana Control, The Atlas of Aspirational Origins, or Underground Cow Tunnels. I mean, cow tunnels? That sounds so unreal!

Well, actually, noone knows if they are real, which of course I find fascinating. There’s a report in which the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission said something like “well, if they’re real, they’re a historical monument.” I love thinking about what it means that the idea is so compelling, not just about whether or not it’s fact. And I love the possibility of a legacy of a previous food system existing underneath the city.

As far as the titles, I do have fun with them. I studied creative writing and literature; using language to make the ideas more resonant is something I love doing.

You seem compelled by archives and maps.

Yes, I’m very interested in design and cartography, understanding how we perceive space and landscape. I actually have a background in art history. My interest in art has always revolved around the idea of it changing the way we perceive things. When I encounter that in places other than art, I get very excited.

One of the things that I find refreshing about your writing, is your open-minded and rather optimistic attitude towards the role of technology, science and design in the realm of food.

I am optimistic. On a personal level, I am wary of certain things. For example, I think genetically modified food should be labeled, and I always avoid rBST in milk.
But I don’t agree with the “it’s only good if we grow it ourselrves and we have to slaughter every animal we eat” mentality. That kind of nostalgia is really regressive. Sure, technology can be misused, but that doesn’t take away from its creative potential.
One area that really fascinates me is flavor science. Though it has mostly been used to allow the food industry to sell us processed corn in various forms, I still think it’s a very creative field, with incredible potential for experimentation and discovery. Talking with flavorists, I was fascinated by the way they try to recreate the flavor profile of a grape or an orange, say, in photorealistic detail . One of them told me that the projects they love to work on the most are energy drinks, since the flavors don’t have to relate to anything that already exists, in the real world. It’s a pure thing, like abstract art.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was flavor education in schools and kids learned what makes up a flavor? Perhaps if we had children with educated palates they would make smarter food choices.

I want to believe in all these things too, and I think there’s a great need for new, creative technologies in areas like farming. But how do you envision science being used as a tool to improve our food system, specifically in the developed world right now, instead of a tool for profit?

I think that giving people the knowledge and the tools to experiment and understand things like genetic modification and think about them is really important. If people are in control of these tools, instead of feeling like they’re imposed upon them by a big scary corporation, then they can begin to think beyond the false dichotomies of natural=good and technologically modified=bad. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is a group you might be familiar with that does interesting work to help people explore the nuances and shades of grey in how we understand all the sorts of modifications we make and have made to our food.

In Brooklyn, we also have this community gene lab called Genspace. Of course, there are dangers and things have to be under a certain amount of control. But there have to be opportunities for understanding and playing with technology before condemning it outright. It’s important to understand the differences and similarities between current technologies, like gene-splicing, and agricultural practices of the past, like selective breeding.

I strongly think that it’s a big mistake to leave the future of our food, which is such an important part of our lives, exclusively up to corporations. We should all be thinking about the future of food.

GSAPP students visiting the Banana Distributors of New York facility, image courtesy of Nicola Twilley

Do you teach? I know you were involved with something called Studio X-NYC.

Studio X-NYC is an event space I co-direct with Geoff Manaugh — it’s part of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation’s global network of urban futures labs.The idea behind it is that lots of people have a stake in the built environment, beyond architects and urban planners, and that Studio-X sites could function as platforms to engage those people in new kinds of conversation about the future of the city. We organize events and put together projects and a publication. In addition, I also teach at GSAPP. Last year, I taught a seminar on spaces of artificial refrigeration, which is something I’ve been really interested in for a while. Refrigeration has truly reshaped our society and the way we live. I think of it as this global network that we absolutely rely on, almost like the Internet. I’m currently curating on an exhibition on the North American coldscape at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which opens in December, as well as working on turning my research into a book.

I also co-taught a studio called City of Mobile Services. We wanted to ask the question, what kinds of urban services and infrastructures can you make mobile and what happens when you do that? One thing that made me think about these questions was the advent of mobile slaughterhouses, which was an incredibly clever way to re-allocate the geography of meat production.

What were some projects that came out of that?

There was a mobile garden, specifically designed with shift workers in Manhattan hospitals in mind, which I thought was interesting in the way it took into consideration the workers’ lifestyle patterns and offered them an alternative to the fluorescent-lit hospital cafeteria. There was also a mobile pig roast, which played with air flow and scent in an urban context.

What do you make out of this moment in terms of food, when everyone seems to be thinking about it? What would you like to see in terms of the way we think about it?

Everyone is so interested in it! Just this morning I saw a press release from the State Department talking about Clinton and food diplomacy. I mean, everybody is jumping on the food wagon! I think it’s really exciting, actually.
What I hope, and I think it will largely be the responsibility of the media, is that the conversation doesn’t become even more polarized but that we come to understand food in a more nuanced way. And that we approach it creatively, instead of just sticking a beehive on an architecture model, for example, because it’s trendy. I also want people to be aware that when we talk about food, it’s not just about food we’re talking about but also economics, geography, history, technology, politics, health issues…

Tell me about your new project, Venue.

It’s a project I’m doing with my husband, Geoff Manaugh, and in partnership with Studio-X NYC and the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. It’s a 16-month long journey of site visits and conversations, which we’re using to build what we’ve described as “a cumulative, participatory, and media-rich narrative archive of the built, natural, fictional, internal, and virtual environments that we build and inhabit.” We set up a mobile interview studio and have conversations with a wide range of people from various professions-a guy in Boulder who is responsible for maintaining the official United States time standard, a water rights lawyer, people who are culturing synthetic biological crust…All these different people have interesting ways of measuring, analyzing, or redesigning the environment, constructing the framework through which we understand the landscape and reading it for what it can tell us. We also bring with us some really interesting survey tripods and measuring devices of our own, designed by Chris Woebken.
We are gathering all of our documentation online and we’re also turning the project into an exhibition and accompanying book for 2014. I’m very excited about it.

Venue’s identity, designed by Folkert Gorter, spotted in the wild. Image courtesy of Nicola Twilley

Interviewed by Maria Pithara

Avocado Quesadilla with Corn Salsa

Similar to but not to be confused with hors d’oeuvre. This is a tidbit, often tiny, served as a free extra to keep you happy while you are waiting for your first course to come. It gives you an idea of the chef’s approach to cooking and the restaurant’s attention to your appetite.

Photograph by Alissa Eberle

Aaron Gilbreath recently reminded us that “in blues music, which has its roots in the rural South, few agrarian motifs are as widespread as the lowly chicken. They produce both eggs and meat. Their appearance and personality lend themselves to parody and comic representation and their strut resembles human dance. “
 
While its white flesh has been omnipresent, in salads, sandwiches and weeknight dinners, the lowly, noisy, peculiar and often times magnificent chicken has been ostensibly absent from our everyday lives.
 
In recent years however, in an effort to live and eat better, and maybe spare a few chickens from a miserable life in a chicken factory, many who were previously unable to tell a Silkie from a Plymouth Rock have brought the chicken back into urban and suburban yards and learned to care for it in exchange for meat, eggs and anecdotal stories.
 
To learn more about the chicken’s trajectory, from the jungle to the back yard to industrial meat machine, read this excellent article from a recent Smithsonian magazine, titled “How the chicken conquered the world.”
 
(Bonus feature: these utterly bizarre and fun images.)

Besides music, the chicken has also made a (live) appearance in contemporary art:

Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen has been using the chicken as a motif central to ethical, political and philosophical conflict and inquiry. For his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), which began in the late nineties and continues today, the artist interbreeds domestic chickens from different countries. His aim: To create the true cosmopolitan chicken and use it as a symbol for global diversity.
 
Vanmechelen is using a diverse range of media to translate the core idea of the CCP to our society, from very expressive paintings and drawings, to photography, video, glassware, performances and sculpture.

“Het appèl van de kip” by Koen Vanmechelen
Museum Valkhof, Nijmegen, 2008
Photo; Minne Dalemans

Thomas Mailaender is a French artist whose humorous and subversive gestures include donating 3000 toilet paper rolls to a French soup kitchen and dropping a giant fake mussel on a beach in Nice, France, then calling the local papers. In 2010, in collaboration with Juste Le Cabinet Architecture office, he built a vertical 50 x 50 meter structure; printed photos from the internet, which he then tacked on the walls; and filled the structure with chickens, much to the chagrin of both local animal activists and copyright advocates. Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand had this to say about The Chicken Museum: “If hens lay eggs, it means they feel good, and if they feel good, it means that the exhibition is good.”

From the Chicken Museum#2 installation, by Thomas Mailaender, exhibited during the group show “From Here On” at Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, curated by Clement Cheroux, Joan Fontcuberta, Eric Kessels, Martin Parr, and Joachim Schmid.

Oh and  in case you thought there couldn’t possibly be a link between chickens and architecture or contemporary design, let these coops blow you mind:

Breed Retreat by Frederik Roije

Cocorico by Maxime Evrard

Modern Coop by John Wright

Finally, a book and a recipe:

Chicken Hemingway

from  Rogues, Writers and Whores by Daniel Rogov

The following dish was dedicated to Hemingway by the chef at The Terrace Inn in Petroskey, Michigan, where Hemingway occasionally stayed during fishing trips.

4 chicken breasts

1 cup all purpose flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsp pepper

2-3 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp fresh basil, chopped

1/4 cup dry white wine

1/4 cup sweet cream

3 tbsp dried red cherries

fettuccini pasta, for serving

In a shallow bowl, mix together the flour, salt and pepper and into this dip the chicken breasts, coating well.

In a skillet heat the olive oil and in this saute the chicken breasts for 3 to 4 minutes on each side.

Add the chicken stock, basil, and wine. Simmer until the liquids are reduced by half. Add the sweet cream, simmer gently until slightly thickened, add the dried cherries and heat through. Serve over the pasta.

While summer is undoubtedly the most bountiful season for grown food, it is also a season to experiment with minimalist cooking. There are constraints put on the camper to deliver a satisfying meal using as few ingredients and utensils as possible. This can be a welcome change to the everyday cooking done in a fully stocked kitchen. This recipe can be achieved with as few as 3 ingredients and 2 utensils.

Campfire Breakfast Burrito

– sausages, preferably handmade*
– eggs
– corn or flour tortillas

Preheat campfire, ie, make flame. Crack and whisk eggs in an aluminum frypan (Open Country has a wide selection of campware kits) or cast iron skillet and place over fire. Place sausages in a separate pan or skillet and place over fire, or combine eggs and sausages in one pan if traveling light. Once eggs are cooked through and sausages are lightly seared cut up sausages (a hobo knife is recommended) and combine with eggs. Warm tortillas over fire. Place egg mixture into tortilla, wrap, enjoy.

* If in Chicago the Butcher and Larder is a great option for handmade sausages.

Mollie Edgar is a designer, photographer based in Chicago.

When I think of summer zucchini, I think of fritters. They should be greasy, only pleasantly.

Most summers of my life were spent on the Aegean coast of Turkey. It gets hot down there, even in the mornings but the deep green sea stays icy until flocks of picnicers, toddlers and hungover twenty somethings start to crowd it around noon. That was when, us kids, our damp towels wrapped around our necks, dragged ourselves out from the short waves, back to our bikes and lazily pedaled home among cicada cries. Few splashes of cold water from the hose on our sand and algae coated feet and we were ready to enjoy a pile of still warm fritters with thick yoghurt under the shade. Shower and light reading or walkman listening on the hammock followed.

This was when we were teenagers. The fritters still wait for us though, whenever we can find time from being adults and go back there.

Below is a tribute to those times and inspired by a recipe by Didem Senol, the chef/owner of wonderful Lokanta Maya in Istanbul.

Zucchini Fritters with Cucumber Yoghurt (About 10)

Ingredients:

2 medium sized zucchinis / or 3-4 smaller (about a pound)

About 1.5-2 teaspoons salt

2 large eggs

1/2 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

about 5 ounces mild Feta Cheese, crumbled (I prefer French Feta to brinier Greek varieties)

2 scallions, thinly sliced

a small bunch of parsley, finely chopped

a small bunch of dill, finely chopped

fresh black pepper

oil for frying (I like nut oils for this, like peanut)

1 cucumber (try to get the seedless European varieties)

1 single serving container of thick Greek yoghurt

a small bunch of mint

Wash, trim, grate zucchinis (with their skins on) in a bowl. Toss with the salt. Transfer to a colander and set aside for 10-15 minutes. Take handfuls of zucchini and try to squeeze as much excess water as you can. There will be a lot of water. You wan’t to get rid of it to avoid soggy fritters.

Transfer the now kind of dehydrated zucchini to a bowl. Lightly beat the eggs and mix in well with the zucchinis. Sift in the flour and the baking powder and mix to combine. Next, add the feta cheese, scallions, parsley, dill and couple turns of freshly ground black pepper. Mix. Leave to rest in the fridge for an hour or so.

Prepare the sauce by blending the yoghurt and roughly chopped cucumber together in a blender. Add finely chopped mint. Here, depending on the day , sometimes add a bit of coriander, a drop of chili oil, some lemon zest, or minced garlic.

Heat the oil to about 350 degrees. Drop table-spoonfuls of the zucchini mixture into the hot oil and fry until golden. You’ll need to do it in batches to avoid overcrowding the oil. Lift out and drain on paper towels as you go along. Pile on a plate with a bowl of sauce on the side and enjoy.

PS. If you don’t feel like frying on any given day, you can bake those as well. Drop spoonfuls on a baking sheet and bake until puffy and cooked through in 350 degree oven.

The result is still good but an entirely different species, incomparable to the fried ones.

Naz Sahin is a graphic designer who spends most of her time in the kitchen. She maintains a blog called Feasting Never Stops, a visual collection of culinary artifacts showing modern and ancient ways of growing, collecting, putting together and consuming food. She was born and raised in Turkey. She now lives in New York. 

Kenny Scharf’s “Donut,” courtesy of artist.

Running now through the end of July, The Art of Cooking presented at Royal/T Cafe in Culver City, CA, is a new food-and-art exhibition. The show is curated by Hanne Mugaas, whose curatorial experience includes stints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York City, and projects at the Moving Image Archive of Contemporary Art (MIACA) in Tokyo, Ooga Booga in Los Angeles, and Vilma Gold in London, among others. Most notably, she is the founder of the gallery Art Since the Summer of ’69, located on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Opened in 2008 as the smallest gallery in the world (just 6’ x 16′!), the gallery is now a mobile project.

The Art of Cooking was inspired by Mugaas’ upbringing in a family of restaurateurs and is, in her words, “a show that everybody can relate to since food is a central theme and source of everyday pleasure.” The artists included in the exhibition explore, celebrate and obsess over food, often with a big dash of humor. The works span different media, from drawing and painting to digital prints and clothing. Some of the work seems elementary– a coconut set on a Vogue magazine didn’t do much for me– but other explorations surprised and delighted. For example, William Wegman’s video of a glass of milk being slowly consumed by—what? A cow? A cat? A… No spoilers here. The camera, at glass level, allows for a slow revelation as the milk steadily declines.

Other works offered similarly-veined humor and thought. Viktor Kopp’s oversized chocolate bars re-tooled the idea of the geometric grid. Kenny Scharf’s donuts, which float serenely against brilliant skies, spoke to the surreal nature of fried dough and heavenly atmospheres. And in the realm of black humor, a short animated film by Takeshi Murata titled PopEye remade the iconic children’s cartoon character into a spinach-addled addict with anger management issues.

Takeshi Murata, I, PopEye, 2010. Courtesy the artist, Ratio 3 and Salon 94.

Royal/T has gone one step further and paired the gallery space with a pop-up Japanese Maid Cafe, which serves full meals as well as desserts and beverages. The Japanese milk tea (made with soy milk), chicken katsu sandwich, and salads ranked among some of the best treats. Claim a table and place your order before exploring the gallery– service is very slow, even if costumed.

Mugaas intends for this exhibit to be more celebratory than serious. “Food has always been present in art,” she explains in her artist statement. “With this show I wanted to focus on contemporary artists who represent food in interesting but also humorous ways – as food is (for most of us) linked to pleasure, not only when it comes to taste but also social interaction. This exhibition is meant to celebrate food – no matter if it is a gourmet meal, a donut, or a slice of toast with marmalade.”