markets impromptu, 01

[image: the gaucho, 2009 | assemblage of melons in wooden orchard fruit crates off calle rondeau in nueva cordoba, cordoba, argentina.  by day, this small strip is home to some interesting graffiti, stray dogs, and very few people.  after midnight, calle rondeau transforms into a fernet-soaked hustle of pageantry and sexual viscosity]

impromptu moments in between the tenants of the built world, momentary cultural phoenix in the taxonomy of the intermediate- transient, potential arrangements at rest.  the simplicity of setting and material could suggest any instant in the century before- occupants posed on a temporal vista of past and future.  is this a market?  could the extemporaneous bric-a-brac serve a different, anonymous agency- vagabonds with stories outside this rarefied milieu?  could the pragmatist's recipe for melon e jamon save these vicarious comestibles from slipping into the dialectical intercourse of the surreal?  or is it too late?  might the text, melon and strength, suggest the gravity-assisted initiation of a rube goldberg circuit, sending into motion one melon at a time?  or is this an eternal, chimerical lunch with borges?

markets forgotten, 01

[image: the gaucho, 2010 | former home of martinez brothers' produce on western and foster in chicago- now resting, a motionless mu, like a polyamorous cubism for the gaze of those stopped in traffic]

produce markets in chicago are nodes in the circulatory, retail geography of chicago neighborhoods, substantiating the ghosts of the south water street market into the modern built environment- utilitarian bivouacs whose comestibles are legend to each neighborhood's distinctive ad-hoc and historic culinary identities, whose diversity so often populates the spaces in between our lives.  it is with the photograph, and the legacy of sontag, that we can atomize the whitmanesque evangel of the interstitial into a spiritual narrative of our edible, urban landscapes.  

 

[image: the gaucho, 2010 | what remains above the front door is from the you are beautiful movement.  standing alone, now a modest culinary daguerreotype of bygone recipes]

the evolution of a building's form- a redefined substrate whose framework houses materials charged with the weightless legacy of perishable talismon, a surface for the inclusive semiotic of a brassai-like graffiti- is like the evolution of a recipe.  building and recipe each have a genetic backbone whose expressed morphology can be adapted to accommodate the passing of time.

versimilitude, shamanism, & hospitals

[image: theophrastus philippus aureolus bombastus (c. 1493-1542) | portrait of the inimitable protestant doctor who in his thirties assumed the name paracelsus, meaning above celsus, a doctor working in first century a.d. rome.  a practitioner of derridean dichotomies, paracelsus rejected the orthodox, dogmatic pedagogy of galen and avicenna, and, like his contemporary, martin luther, departed from what he believed to be corruptions borne from the middle ages, returning to the original gospels- away from books, into the countryside, and into the alchemical workshop.  bound by the tensile strength of only his arrogance and a fair amount of ingenuity, paracelsus dismissed academic anatomy, ushering in chemical practices that challenged galenic humural constitutionalism- focusing on pathological ontologies from the outside, as assigned by the stellar]

paracelsus' doctrine of signatures is a metaphysical escapade and the early reformists' functional dossier of the wisdom of the countryside- a doctrine teaching that life was a perpetual germinative process controlled by the indwelling spirit of archeus- a sort of ethnobotanical map of the oral folk traditions and phytochemical diversity of his time.  a primary tenet of this doctrine was that like cures like, viz. a plant resembling an eyeball will have practical applications in treating disorders of the eye-  a bestowed power that was the signature of the creator.  far from a novel practice, this technique has been used throughout history, from amazonian shamans to ancient chinese healers.  this is somewhat paradoxical, though- his repudiation of classical anatomy, but his reliance on anatomy when adapting the morphologies of unrelated species to the shapes and forms of the human body.  he is a little like a shamanic janus- a dualistic, spiritual intercessor between god, man, and plant.

[image: www.guardian.co.uk]

applying the signature to the above pictured food of convalescence served hospitals nationwide, what can be said of the associative organ in the human body?  how are these functional, cost-based structures of corporate alchemy to breathe their trans-fat divination into my ventral extrusion- hernias shaped like the gambia inside senegal?  to be orthodox, perhaps the gastromorphic extrusions of surplus corn and mechanized aggregates of the cheese that goes crunch, with the appropriate food science intercessor, would be better served to nurse my visceral protrusion.

a narrative of perennial grass

[image: fodder and pasture plants, geo h clark and m oscar malte | rye is believed to have originated in central and eastern turkey before becoming the principle cereal grain in most european areas east of the maginot line and north of hungary.  prior to christianization, pagan europeans believed the spirits of the grain lived amidst the fields of grain.  following the harvest, the spirits would be homeless.  to accomodate this, corn dollies were made from rye hay to give the spirits a place to stay throughout winter before the dollies were ploughed into the first furrow of the new season]

jd salinger's worldly field of rye serves as an interesting contradiction- a place where he, a sage preserving the games of youth, keeps children from falling from a cliff- the realization of adulthood, only to then run, like a violin spider, from the termites of a slowly rotting library, into a uniformity of an otherworldly, ascetic countryside.  it is now, as he has merged with the infinite, that his multiplicity of written and speculative legacy will remain as flaubertian cover crop for future generations- a reclusive mirage over the staple fields of the wheat of allah. 

[image: wikipedia | rye is a substrate for the peculiar and biologically ingenious fungus, claviceps purpurea (pictured), that grows on the ears of rye.  the fungus contains high concentrations of the alkaloid ergotamine, a complex molecule that contains lysergic acid, an important analog and precursor of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.  when consumed, ergotamine can result in the pathological syndrome, ergotism, which is characterized by hallucinations, irrational behavior, burning sensation, and convulsion.  reports of ergotism in history date to 1676 and have been experienced as recently as 1951, where, in pont-saint-esprit, france, over two hundred people were affected from the consumption of ergotic rye]

[image: www.law.umkc.edu]  

it has been suggested that ergotism was directly responsible for the behaviors of the hexed at the salem witch trials- one of the more bizarre and decadent displays of judicial theater and platitude from a chrysostom people who expelled such worldly and cultured pleasures from their life.  evidence of optimal weather conditions, the importance of rye as food staple, and the hexed's behavior provide an alternative narrative to the puritans' accusation and enquiries of witchcraft- believed to be the indwelling manifestation and corruption of voodou from slave culture.  if this was, in fact, the circumstance, we see how food can be the vehicle for alkaloid-induced, unexpected near-shamanic states- a case where socratic nature challenges the calvinist rigidity of a people, and where the polymorphic spirit of the native mahican and massachuset tribes rises from another culture's supreme authority.  

[image: various stages and bodies from the life cycle of claviceps purpurea | infection of a grain occurs when a spore from claviceps mimics a pollen grain growing into an ovary during fertilization.  infection requires access to the female stigma for the fungus to be able to penetrate deep enough to get to the grain's vascular bundle for energy.  puritan belief held that because eve corrupted, all women carried with them the stain of original sin.  this resulted in their marginalization]

the writer and the witch, then, came under the grips of both the limits of their neighbors, as well as the ethereal- that which transposed them from their babel and polarized them into the elusive, from which emerged a mythology concomitant with the metaphorical sexual lust of the fungus for the female form- where clever, best guess mechanisms sometimes inundate the susceptibility of design.  

foodprint nyc

the first in a series of conversations about food and the city, foodprint nyc will take place february 27 from 1 to 5:30 pm, and is being hosted by columbia university's downtown studio-x space.  co-organized by edible geography's nicola twilley and sarah rich, this free event will cover:

            how our urban food systems work today, how historical forces have 

            shaped them until now, how they might develop in the future, and 

            how these food systems, in turn, have shaped our environment and 

            ourselves.

the schedule of guests will include topics covering zoning diet, culinary cartography, edible archaeology, and feast, famine, and other scenarios.  if you can't make it, the event will be broadcast on columbia university's itunes u channel and i will be in attendance, reporting omnisciently.

[image: cornell.edu | plans for ebenezer howard's garden city.  greatly influenced by edward bellamy's 1888 utopian novel, looking backward, howard's single publication, to-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform, reprinted in 1902 as garden cities of to-morrow, imagined a world free of slums and full of opportunity.  the realization of his model in both letchworth garden city and welwyn garden city influenced suburban development of new towns after world war ii]  

how historical forces have shaped our urban food systems is a theme author and architect, carolyn steel discusses on ted, as well as in her book, the hungry city: how food shapes our lives.  in her book, she introduces the idea of sitopia- a greek binomial of sitos, meaning food, and topos, meaning place- as a way of re-thinking cities and the way we live in them.  her work references the garden city movement, an approach to urban planning that was founded in 1898 by sir ebenezer howard in the united kingdom.

[image: agnes denes, wheatfield- a confrontation | 1982]

using the hague as a case study, stroom den haag kicked off the program, foodprint. food for the city.- with the goal of creating a sort of noosphere from designers, entrepreneurs, artists, farmers, food experts, and the public to delimit the scope a handful of distributors have on our urban food networks.  among the guests was carolyn steel.  watch her lecture here.

supplanting epicurean cybernetics

[image: wikipedia]

prohibitive consumption- extant judiciaries of proscriptive eating, modifiers in the syntax of cuisine, and edible dossiers of epicurean wisdom and whimsy throughout history.   intricately interwoven into the table settings of most cultures, food taboos trace their phylogenies to a number of sources.  far from being the great faits accomplis of any culture's epicurean vernacular, though, food taboos do deliver an interesting discourse on resource partitioning, sanctity of life, spirituality, toxicity, and group identity and cohesion, all within their unique contexts of colloquial, creole cybernetics and asking questions like, how do these restrictions persist in culture?

[image: ravi varma press | part of a hindu pamphlet protesting the practice of beef-eating using the form of gau-mata, within whom the revered sages and elements are believed to dwell.  kali, the male demon on the the far right, attempts to slaughter a sacred cow.  currently, indian law bans cow slaughter with the exception of the states of west bengal and kerala.  this does not mean, however, slaughter doesn't occur illegally.  it's estimated that of the 33,000 indian slaughter houses in operation today, 30,000 are doing so illegally- supplanting epicurean cybernetics] 

[image: wikipedia | prithu chasing prithvi, who is in the form of a cow.  prithu milked the cow to generate crops for humans.  prithvi is the hindu earth and mother godess, appearing in art as a woman with four arms and green skin.  she also appears in early buddhism]

instances of sanctity of life and resource partitioning are the well-spring from which is born the hindu and ancient persian tradition of reverence towards the domesticated ungulates, cows and bulls- interwoven into ancient vedic cosmogony like spirits lurking in the shadowy corners of cathedrals.  the framework within which this restriction exists is ages old and pervasive, preserving the lives of animals integral to the agricultural and nutritional well-being of a people, while lending surface to the ornaments of hindu narrative.

contemporary and novel food taboos reach into genetics with GM crops, zoonostic phobias with h1n1 as well as foot and mouth, ubiqituous distribution networks, securing market share with food lobbyists, a sort of combative and preventative eugenics with iodized salts in some muslim communities, as well as energy production with the toxicity of chernobyl- sometimes with a breadth reaching a pandemic level of restriction.

[image: www.chernobylee.com]

the curious, insidious nature of the effects from the chernobyl disaster has spawned a number of regional food restrictions persisting nearly 25 years later- transient, invisible shepherds of toxic, edible dialects delimiting any national border.   the uk food standards agency has over 300 sheep farms still on restriction in areas of wales where contamination levels in sheep meat is over 1000 becquerels of caesium-137 per kilo.  the chemical and physical properties of the peaty soil types present in welsh uplands, where radioactivity was deposited, allow the caesium to be passed from soil to grass, grass to sheep.  while the number of farms on restriction has declined 95% since the disaster in 1986, the polymorphic nature of the uptake of this isotope, whose half-life is 30 years, is a bizarre, almost anthropomorphic spokesperson for the gamma energies of epigenetic gastronomy- man-made pollen from madame curie's nuclear kitchen.

air | water | flour

[image: wikipedia | san francisco's boudin bakery has used the same starter since the time of the california gold rush.  bread has significantly shaped our social vocabulary]

sourdough starter- an indelible, edible narrative not yet patented, kernels of substrate, encomiums of tradition, and matronly vector.  today, a starter is a charged currency with causal agency, where in bakeries worldwide, the days' ends are punctuated by burning any remaining dough, rendering any remaining possibility to an inert meme- a seeded, tartuffian ritual born from a by-product, and born to preserve the intellectual and biological capital of our culture.  using starter as meme, then, we seem able to transpose certain values upon this meme, kneading into these continuous precursors, discrete ideas of ownership and privacy before they meet the hubristic flame.

[image: www.wisconsinhistory.org | the spring green, wisconsin home of frank lloyd wright- taliesin was the name of a welsh poet and means, shining brow.  the home stands as a brow on a hill and pays homage to his family's welsh ancestry.  this image is believed to be from taliesin before tragedy struck in 1914, when the living quarters burned to near completion] 

this philosophy is in stark contrast to the social starter culture of amish friendship breads and ideas like the family pastoral of frank lloyd wright's linear-horizon hearths- both means of unifying the continuous maternal ancestries of bread through gift and metaphor, respectively.  the succession and transmissions of starters, like a culture's folk tales, are, in a sense, epiphytic narrators pollinated by one individual to another- intimate microcosms of a cultural lexicon and capable interlopers- and are modeled on relatively fixed structures.

[image: budding yeast cells of candida milleri, one of two yeasts commonly populating sourdough starters, along with lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.  budding is the reproductive means of these eukaryotes] 

the structure of a traditional sourdough is a remarkably simple culture- flour, water, & air.  mixing water and flour creates glucose and fructose for yeasts in the air to metabolize, whose metabolites feed the bacteria in the flour.  this symbiosis is now a dough- an ancestral form of pre-ferment, whose matriculated gluten proteins will lend support once the yeasts begin releasing gas in response to heat.  like the breath of the baker gives rise to yeasts, the yeasts give rise to bread.  and like geography gives rise to the constituents of an environment, so the environment gives rise to folk tales- both systems growing from the unseen.        

remnants of ruminants

[image: new york times | misfits of modern agribusiness- fainting goats are so named due to a hereditary genetic disorder called myotonia congenita which causes a goat, when startled, to tense for about ten seconds.  many young goats will topple on their side, while age brings with it the strategy of spreading their legs or leaning on a fence.]

say hello to the tennessee fainting goat, chip- a chomsky meets sendak bricolage of surrogate maternity and plebian daydream- a visually mythic pastiche of constellation hopefully diversifying the holstein's tribune of static gastronomy and agricultural lysol.  chip is a promising, stocky breed who, along with his lab-fellows, may change the face of a quickly evolving urban pastoral- crafting sustainable urban plots.

chip is part of an emerging technology known as cryopreservation where the fertilized embryos of unusual breeds are frozen, thus preserved, and then raised in surrogate, nubian mothers at a later time.  like seed banks, this advancement is cataloging and preserving biodiversity for future generations.  a male fainting goat's stout frame is ideally suited for future urban plots because they are less likely to leap fences and will produce a good poundage of tasty, versatile meat.

[image: constellations of words | cataloged in hyginus' fabulae, aegipan were extensions of the imagination of travelers exploring the atlas mountains in northwest africa.  pliny the elder describes a mount atlas where, fruits of all kinds grow spontaneously there in such profusion that pleasure is always satisfied.  and, at night atlas flashes with many fires, so men say, and is filled with the wanton frolics of goat-pans and satyrs and resounds with the music of flutes, pipes, drums, and cymbals.]

fainting goats are one of three breeds normally raised for their meat, with the south african boer and the new zealand kiko rounding out the list.  their meat, or chevon, is dependent on their age, with a characteristic goatiness believed to be linked to the presence of 4-methyloctanoic and 4-methylnonanoic acid- words that are worth nothing more to me than oenerisms, imagining them as three-dimensional constellations keeping watch over the goats of atlas mountain at night.

[image: www.theoi.com]

today, good goat consomme and birria have long been a carefully shared styrofoam cup and corn shell amidst the restaurants of chicago's pilsen and little village neighborhoods- amazing five dollar treats surrounded on all sides by a rich  culinary identity.  across the street from don pedro's carnita haj on 18th is birreria reyes de ocotlan, home to an equally transformative broth that one day may include the remnants of cryopreserved ruminants raised within the legacy of billy goat tavern owner, billy sianis' eternal tutelage.

chicago alternative consumption strategies

[image: CAPS- chicago alternative policing strategies]

wander around just about any neighborhood in chicago and you will find the chicago alternative policing strategies how to describe a criminal guide in windows of retailers and homes, as well as on the side of squad cars.  part of the mission of cap's collective, and arguably more innovative than alternative, policing strategy is to encourage communities to engage and enact "rather than simply react to [crimes'] symptoms after the fact "- developing complex networks of social immunologies and creating a pragmatic, visual system of verbally describing our communities.  an aside- interesting is the duplicitous looking identity of the above pictured fellow- an individual living in two worlds.

is it useful or possible to supplant this strategy onto the problem we sometimes face when trying to remember a bottle of wine?  can a set of reductive questions concerning visual traits of a wine create memories like antibodies?

surface & substance, 01

[image: latinamericanstudies.org | jade mask from the rio azul]

masks, like sauces, redefine and create a second skin- mutable, non-verbal topographies within a greater semiotic cosmology that transfer the diner or wearer away from their gravity and bifurcate dimension.  the mask of the mayan shaman is then, tangible proxy for understanding the relationship of man to the realms of the underworld.  the mole or molli sauce, too is a vehicle for understanding the edible geographies and urban economies of the mayans- supplanting the senses amidst the markets of teotihuacan.  mask and molli can appropriate and cloak a second-hand substrate- viz. chicken viscera, axolotl, and tecuitatl- and transform its surface while preserving the mystery of its interior and leaving intact the possibility of magic.

[image: botanical.com | linnaeus gave the name kakaw the binomial, theobroma cacao meaning food of the gods]

both mask and molli are physical expressions exfoliating the cooperative landscape of ritual and meaning, physical and ephemeral.  the association of place each suggests due to their temporal intensities commits mask and molli to epigraphical and archaeological frameworks-  both transients in a sensory enculturation and both tools of procession.  over the course of generations, the physical mask is preserved, while its ceremony vanishes.  conversely, the molli's ceremonial relics persist, while the sauce itself vanishes- leaving interpretation by the senses to the surfaces of idols and potters.  

in the case of molli, the transmission of tradition through oral history has effectively preserved the practice of kakaw production in the americas from pre-columbian times- withstanding the technological developments in favor of a largely tactile, hands-on production with a lengthy cultural half-life.  

encapsulating feasts and culinary urbanism

[image: new york times]

japan's worst recession since wwii has changed the once overnight, graduated cubbies of capsule hotels, used by salarymen missing their trains, into long-term residencies for professional interlopers in the transition state.  no larger than 6.5 feet long and 5 feet wide, capsule hotel shinjuku 510's berths offer little more than a place to sleep, leaving the communal spaces (see nyc's new work city) like bathing and dining areas room to explore the habit and ritual of waking life- an intimate public.    

[image: new york times]

the communal dining space is, in some ways, a return to the cooking fire, around which food and stories are shared, relationships developed, and grammars born.  one such grammar could be a bento-styled, modern kaiseki ryori that seeks to mend a growing socioeconomic gulf- simple, restrained dishes  that engage and transport the diner.  these dishes could tame and untangle the mess of mfk fisher's udon noodles, giving refinement a place on the table amidst tokyo's clatter.  the solid geometry of the table is the interlocuter between the day's gravity and edible oneirisms occupying spaces much larger.

[images: www.archrecord.construction.com]

born from japan's technocratic metabolist movement, capsule hotels' original ideals, like the buddhist notion of impermanence and change, were meant to evoke the process of organic growth.  designer kurokawa kisho's now-failing masterpiece, the prototype nakagin capsule tower in shimbashi, japan, sits like an 8-bit bento box aware of it's own impermanence- not unlike biosphere 2 outside of phoenix.  while these units are sizable larger than shinjuku's, they were meant to afford full functionality to tokyo's stochasticity in as little space as possible- ephemeral stopping points along any one trajectory.  but it seems now, as a gulf in class arises, the empirically efficient systems that the capsules modeled is delimiting the mobility and freedom it created, re-focusing the attention from modular technologies and liberty to permanence and privacy shaded by a macrame curtain and earphones.  

magritte's occlusion and perceptive expectations

[image: ideas made of light  | le blanc seing- the blank check, by rene magritte 1965]

the move away from classic models in both art and science has helped illuminate some of the ways we go about thinking.  one example was recognizing the fallacy of reducing perception to reception- we don't need to feed our brains a complete set of inputs for it to construct a clear output.  in the case of magritte, entire slices are missing from the surreal le blanc seing.  we undoubtedly recognize both the agency- the woman on the horse, and the field- the forest and the composition as a whole.   while we recognize this field is spatially impossible, we are able to fill in the blanks and identify the agent by a process known as the binding problem.  magritte has achieved this using the rubric of occlusion and closure. 

[image: ideas made of light]

transposing this technique, viz. occlusion, onto the world of wine suggests a similar rebuttal of the classical model of reducing perception to reception.  biochemist and winemaker frederic brochet conducted a series of experiments where he explored the relationship of the visual sense to the chemosensory- smell and taste.  what he discovered is that chemosensory data is often occluded by visual data- the brain recognizes both but prioritizes sight.  the visual cues brochet examined, wine's color* and the label, tell the brain something very convincing, albeit fragmented, two-dimensional transmissions.  the brain then fills in the rest, rendering both the wine and the painting to functional isotopes of our memories and a paradigm for the senses.  


*of the polyphenols present in red wine, anthocyanins may have incidentally ascended the gustatory hierarchy, reigning temporarily supreme over tannins in the sensory meritocracy.