COPENHAGEN IS ABOUT TO BECOME the embodiment of grab-and-go snacking. In a recent vote, the City Council resolved to introduce free, portable, city-wide munchies: public fruit trees. They’ll opt to plant edibles, from blackberry bushes to apple trees, wherever city planning calls for greenery. For Astrid Aller, a Copenhagen City Councilor from the Socialist People’s Party whoContinue reading “Copenhagen Wants You to Forage on Its City Streets”
Category Archives: Food
Tour Honolulu’s Japanese Food Scene With This 1906 Map
WE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT Takei Nekketsu. The proprietor of a dry-goods store, he was one of the many small business owners who made up the thriving Japanese community of early 20th-century Honolulu. But Nekketsu had a number of special talents. He wrote some of the earliest Japanese-language histories of Hawai’i, and he made maps. OneContinue reading “Tour Honolulu’s Japanese Food Scene With This 1906 Map”
The Gobi Desert is a Red Sea of Chili Peppers
In Northwest China’s Gobi Desert, autumn tints the landscape a flaming scarlet. The fields of red aren’t deciduous leaves blushing with the season. They’re chili peppers, spread out to dry under the hot desert sun following the late-summer harvest. Each September and October, farmers across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which produces a fifth of China’s world-leading pepperContinue reading “The Gobi Desert is a Red Sea of Chili Peppers”
Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby Bottles
FOR DECADES, ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCAVATING ANCIENT children’s graves in Germany and Austria were puzzled by a set of artifacts: small, rounded vessels, some with handles, and some with designs that looked like the ears and feet of unrecognizable creatures. “We think of [them] as mythical animals,” says Julie Dunne, a Senior Research Associate in chemistry at theContinue reading “Found: Milk Residue That Proves Ancient Europeans Used Cute-as-Heck Baby Bottles”
Sold: Charles Dickens’ Liquor Log
ON JUNE 6, 1870, CHARLES Dickens strolled into the cellar of his country house, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, and surveyed his liquor stores. The day before, wine merchants at Joseph Ellis & Sons had dropped off a cask of good sherry. If Dickens wanted whiskey, he could dig into stone jars of it, including someContinue reading “Sold: Charles Dickens’ Liquor Log”
The Founder of America’s Earliest Lesbian Bar Was Deported for Obscenity
IT TOOK OFFICER MARGARET LEONARD three tries to get her hands on Eve Adams’ book of lesbian short stories. We don’t know what, exactly, the New York Police Department officer experienced when she first slunk undercover into Eve Adams’ Tearoom at 129 MacDougal Street. But it’s easy to imagine a group of artists gathered under gleamingContinue reading “The Founder of America’s Earliest Lesbian Bar Was Deported for Obscenity”
Found: Slime-Covered Notebooks Full of Conservation Data and Fish Scales
SKIP MCKINNELL FOUND THE SLIM books in a Vancouver basement: stacks of field notes coated with salmon scales still stuck to the 100-year-old fiber with slime. Then affiliated with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, McKinnell had read about the notebooks, which allegedly contained extensive data about and samples from British Columbia’s salmon population from the firstContinue reading “Found: Slime-Covered Notebooks Full of Conservation Data and Fish Scales”
The Refugee Women Turning Tastes of Home Into a Food-Delivery Business
WHEN FOOD BECAME SCARCE UNDER Taliban rule, Hoor got creative. Since the Mujahideen conflict, trade between neighbors had been periodically forbidden, rations were portioned out to the privileged, and even growing garden plots could be risky. But years of war had taught her how to find food for her family in a pinch. Hoor snuck groceries underContinue reading “The Refugee Women Turning Tastes of Home Into a Food-Delivery Business”
The Tuscan Town Famous for Anarchists, Marble, and Lard
AT FIRST GLANCE, THE APUAN Alps of northwest Tuscany’s Carrara region are pure white. Alison Leitch first saw them from a train window when traveling through Italy in the early 1980s. From a distance, she writes, their dazzling tops looked like snow. Her seatmate told her otherwise: The blinding whiteness was actually marble dust, a powdery byproductContinue reading “The Tuscan Town Famous for Anarchists, Marble, and Lard”
Eat Like Royalty With This Cookbook From the Emperor Who Built the Taj Mahal
IT WAS THE MID 1600S, and Friar Sebastian Manriquea, a Portuguese priest who had come to visit the Mughal Court, wanted to witness a royal supper. It was a rare sight. The Mughal emperors, who ruled territory across the northern Indian subcontinent, usually didn’t dine with anyone but their wives and concubines. But on this day,Continue reading “Eat Like Royalty With This Cookbook From the Emperor Who Built the Taj Mahal”
