Cartography by a Four year old

When growing up in such a household it was only to be expected that the four year old in the house has started to make maps. Lots of them. There is always the sun at the top, a horizontal line which is the road and crosses or scribbles for houses. The one in the middle is a map he made from the house to the supermarket. He then led us, map in hand, without a wrong turn to the supermarket and back so we can only conclude that the map was correct. For perspective: the images below are from the almost six year old and from the just turned two year old. 

Foraging in Scotland in 1871 and The pacific in 1943

The copy of Edible Wild Plants of Scotland (F. Buchanan White, 1871) on Archive.org begins at page 22 so I don't know what is missing but these words from the introduction are a high-trumpeted claret call to graze the bonny hills. It reminds me of this earlier fragment from Gilbert White.

[I]n civilized nations, it is the naturalist — not the mere classifier of species, nor he who gathers together a collection of objects of natural history as he would a collection of postage stamps, coins, or old china, but the true lover of nature — who is the chief inheritor of this love of the wild freshness of the earth's morning, still lingering on the mountain's side, in depths of the primeval forest, or amidst the waves of ocean. And thus it seems to me that to the naturalist, wild flowers and fruits will always be more beautiful and attractive than all the richest treasures of the garden. 

But a comparison should scarcely be made, perhaps, between wild fruits and those which have become subject to man. The whole character of the latter has become changed; the bitter has been made sweet, and the small large - all freedom has been lost.

 Of a completely different time and tone is Emergency food plants and poisonous plants of the islands of the Pacific by Elmer Drew Merrill, issued in 1943, technical manual published by the US War Department. The images are from that book.

Guestimate the Cuisine / The Jamie Oliver Switch [map your recipe]

Last weekend I started to experiment with a new function in Map your Recipe. 

The new option is called 'Guestimate the Cuisine' and as you would expect it tries to work out the culinary style of the recipe. Is it Italian or Chinese? Mexican or Moroccan? French or Indonesian? It works by comparing the ingredients in the recipe against the essential ingredients of ten types of cuisine. The result is expressed in a percentage of style. There is some obvious overlap in ingredients (many different cuisines rely on coriander and garlic) and some cuisines are more alike then others even though the actual recipe will taste completely different. 

I will be adding new cuisines (suggestions welcome) and tweaking the parameters but already I am quite surprised that it seems to work with a certain amount of reliability: it does distinguish Chinese from Italian food. For some recipes it gives several guestimates and these I think are a useful way to understand relations between cuisines. An Thai dish recognized as partly Indonesian makes more sense than a Greek dish recognized as 40% Mexican.

 Like everybody else I greatly admire the works of Jamie "whack it all in there, absolutely delish" Oliver. Map your Recipe reveals many of his recipes to be all over the place both geographically according the scheme of Vavilov as in taste. I created an evaluation function that based on the outcome of the cuisine guestimation will determine if a recipe could have come from Jamie Oliver. Remarkably the first recipe I tried, a "Thai chicken laksa mildly spiced noodle squash broth" produced the above result. Or in the words of the great bard: "yeah!?"

Iraqi recipes on the map

Annia Ciezadlo is the author of this recent article on targeted attacks by the Assad regime on bakeries as a method to subdue the Syrian population. It is well worth your attention. 

In an older article "They Remember Home" (PDF, 2008) on the food culture of a group of Iraqi refugees in Lebanon she includes recipes for the Iraqi dishes Kabset Baitenjan and Tashreeb Dijaaj. Of course I could not resist running them through Map you Recipe. 

Now remember that Map Your Recipe displays where the vegetable ingredients of a recipe were first domesticated according to the 'food hearth' theory proposed by the Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov.  

The recipe above resulted in the map below.  


Canola is made from rapeseed and therefore 'Mediterranean'. Sumac is a large family of shrubby trees that also include the American cashew, the type here suggested as optional is sumac spice typical for Middle eastern cooking. 

The Kabset Baitenjan results in this map:

As said before: Map you Recipe makes no claims about originality and does not endorse food crop nationalism. But what immediately strikes me about these two recipes is a total absence of ingredients associated with the Middle East that includes staples like barley, figs, lentils, alfalfa, pomegranates, quinces and fenugreek. 

If you take an Italian or Indian or Chinese or Ethiopian dish you will nearly always find an ingredient associated with the region apart from the source of carbohydrates (wheat/rice/potatoes). But not here. 

I am not saying it means anything but I would like to offer the theory, 98% in jest, that in the deep past these dishes started out as foreign food and became naturalized. What would be Nebuchadnezzar equivalent to Jane Austen's curry? Think of it as Babylonian fusion food enriched with the later and inescapable potato.

Why look at Wild Plants

Flowers are for insects and the flowers you buy from the florist are eugenic monstrosities that in an entomological episode of Snog, Marry or Avoid would get a 100% avoid rate.

Street plants, real plants, have beauty not for their flowers but for the variation of their strategies, the history of their travels and the intricacies of their survival. You do not study urban wild plants to find rarities, though you wouldn't want to miss them, and you never tire of the common plants. The only goal is to learn about what is out there. 

Plants are outside and so must you be. 

Plants are everywhere and so can you be.

Early on I met a woman with verifiable botanical skills, "she knows her plants". This was at a plant finding expedition near a train station and after taking the first corner we came across a grassy sloped patch with a rosette she, Oh Shock, did not recognize. That is how enormous you can find the world in one little, secluded and everyday place. That is when I learned that the study of wild plants is a process that takes a lifetime. So I take it slow and don't worry about not knowing the name of a plant. It will come to me.

The study of wild plants begins with identification but that is only the way in. Once you know its name you know you can recognize it next time you see it. Once you have seen it twice you can enter into the history (where is it from) and the geography (why is it here) of the plant itself and the place it grows in. 


Plants watcher are a nerdy bunch and they have collected data, described places and wrote travel guides for centuries. You know things have gone wrong when you rate a book for the inclusion of plant lists. 


My favourite book is the "New Atlas of Dutch Flora" that gives the historic distributions for 1500 individual plants.

But I could not do without many other books, especially the books that take you back to the Utrecht of 1843 or to the Terschelling of 1886 or the Amsterdam of 1975. Often the archaic language alone works miracles.

To speak about plants as a way into something else is all good but the pleasure of seeing a plant is what drives it.

I have not yet used the words 'nature', 'environment' and 'ecology' but they enter the story as well, somewhere.

Plants are just a tiny aspect of urban life but their study gives so much context in so many ways to my surroundings  that I now can't imagine ever forsaking it. 

Communist world literature

"The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." - The Communist Manifesto

Found in this article on world->global literature. 

- We now have international one-sidesness and narrow-mindedness.  

- How does EthnoPoetics relate to this stunning insight from1848? 

The Holocene is so MySpace. The Anthropocene is shit.

The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy working group responsible for setting a precise boundary between the middle and late Pleistocene is able to work in relative peace as relevant studies and data drip in. At no point is their work interfered by blogging careerists and pop-science gurus. At no point are people assuming that a decision on the matter has already been made or that the outcome is only a formality. 

How many people can seriously lay claim to expert knowledge on what determines the beginning and end of geological ages? Yet the group working on the acceptance of the Anthropocene as a valid geological epoch appear to be lagging behind the consensus of popular understanding: humans Have become a geological force and further data can only tell us what we already know. We Have become all powerful and in the future we will be even more so and as such the Anthropocene is a self-evident update of the geological timescale. 

Why do people who keep stum on the technicalities of geographical chronology lose their common sense when the topic is the Anthropocene? Why do so many take it for granted without a second thought.

The answer to this should at least contain the following elements:

- We are unable to think about ourselves (as a species) in a timescale longer than, let's say, a century. What is prominent now must be prominent for ever. Look at Britney Spears: she does not go away, surely global warming must be just as persistent.

- We think of ourself as living through great changes. Google? Holy! FaceBook? Holy! Smart Phone? Holy! Tablet Pride!! Everything acceleratingly accelerates, everything in our lives gets reinvented every decade and geology should follow our love, no our need, for fashions. The Holocene is so MySpace.
 
-The Anthropocene fits our self-image. We like to think of ourself as all-powerful. Some may resent it and for them the Anthropocene is what defines us as Lex Luthers, it is the kryptonite the feeds our self-loathing. For others the Anthropocene represents the, unstated, ultimate goal of humanity to overcome all matter and energy, to become   Superman and change the ancient ways of our planet. 

- We just can't face the possibility of being a bunch of hairless (chimpanzee ugly) and socially crude bonobos.

Predicting Amazonian dark-earths

"Predicting pre-Columbian anthropogenic soils in Amazonia" or read about as pop-science. The practical application of this I suspect would be to narrow down the search area. The above graph however is one of the better info-maps on the anthropogenic Amazon that I have seen. 

John McPhee talks about structure

Do you know John Mcphee, Dostoyevsky in the age of Discovery Channel? He is only one of the greatest stylist in contemporary non-fiction. But 'style' is the wrong word, he is more a strategist, someone who follows a system that works so perfectly and that is set up so frictionless that it disappears behind the story. It's all system and no personal glory. Sometimes the system gives him a little time, when he gives the reader a breath of space to catch up and then he will make an 'action' like a football player will submit himself to a positional system and only when he has some time waiting for other players to take their positions he will show he can play with an unexpected arty move. 

McPhee is a strategist, and looking for a snooker equivalent he is like Mark Selby: a player who pots like the best but will never forget to lock up a yellow or a brown near the cushion just in case. Watching Selby can sometimes be a bit boring and so is reading McPhee, but that is always down to a failure on the side of the spectator/reader to enter in the right frame of mind. McPhee doesn't do quick fixes, he is all arches across arches, roundabouts hidden in roundabouts.

Currently I am reading his book about the chad. It is about fishing. I like it: that is how good he is.

John McPhee on Structure. Here are the final paragraphs they show you exactly what I mean.

Where to end a piece? As noted above, I usually know from the outset what the last line will be. In 1982, I was walking around in the Alps with a patrol of Swiss soldiers. We had been together three weeks and were plenty compatible. Straying off limits, not for the first time, we went into a restaurant called Restaurant. Military exercises were going on involving mortars and artillery up and down the Rhone Valley, above which the cantilevered Restaurant was fourteen hundred feet high. The soldiers had a two-way radio with which to receive orders, be given information, or report intelligence to the Command Post. They stirred their fondue with its antenna. They sent coded messages to the Command Post: “A PEASANT IN OBERWALD HAS SEEN FOUR ARMORED CARS COMING OUT OF ST. NIKLAUS AND HEADING FOR THE VALLEY.” More fondue, then this: “TWO COMPANIES OF ENEMY MOTORIZED FUSILIERS HAVE REACHED RARON. ABOUT FIFTEEN ARMORED VEHICLES HAVE BEEN DESTROYED.” And later this: “AN ATOMIC BOMB OF PETITE SIZE HAS BEEN DROPPED ON SIERRE. OUR BARRICADES AT VISP STILL HOLD. THE BRIDGES OF GRENGIOLS ARE SECURE. WE ARE IN CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY.” 

Setting down a pencil and returning to the fondue, I said to myself, “There is my ending.” The petite A-bomb was a gift to structure. Ending pieces is difficult, and usable endings are difficult to come by. It’s nice when they just appear in appropriate places and times.
After running aground, the river pilot Mel Adams said, “When you write all this down, my name is Tom Armstrong.”

William Shawn once told me that my pieces were a little strange because they seemed to have three or four endings. That surely is a result of preoccupation with structure. In any case, it may have led to an experience I have sometimes had in the struggle for satisfaction at the end.
Look back upstream. If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were. 

People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

Who grows what? new web page

Map your recipe can tell you where some of the ingredients were first domesticated, but it won't tell you where they are grown today. Using data from the FAO I have added the top 3 producing countries for those crops for which data was available. A link will point you to this new webpage that shows on a map all producers given by the FAO for a number of crops. 

The reason for adding/making this is partly to show another face of a globalized food market, but I was even more interested in the geographical spread of crops. Why do we eat potatoes in the West instead of taro or cassava? Maybe climate is to blame.

The humble literature of complex civilizations

Cookbooks, which usually belong to the humble literature of complex civilizations, tell unusual cultural tales. They combine the sturdy pragmatic virtues of all manuals with the vicarious pleasures of the literature of the senses. They reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culinary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget, the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies. The existence of cookbooks presupposes not only some degree of literacy, but often an effort on the part of some variety of specialist to standardize the regime of the kitchen, to transmit culinary lore, and to publicize particular traditions guiding the journey of food from marketplace to kitchen to table. Insofar as cookbooks reflect the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the term cuisine, they are likely, as Jack Goody has recently argued, to be representations not only of structures of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes, but of class and hierarchy (1982).

From "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India" by Arjun Appadurai. The paper itself deals with class in India but this first paragraph is good to quote here for the clarity of the way it states the anthropological angle on cookbook research.

Maps of Vavilov's food hearths

Three maps freed with a little screen-shot magic from a Google Books preview of Vavilov's 'Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants'. Posted earlier were the later agricultural origin maps by Carl Sauer, now we can compare.

Click to enlarge.

The NOMA ready-mades

Etnobotanica brings together papers on European wild plant use in places that I would consider obscure (ohh that Dutch self-centredness). There is much on Albania and Macedonia for instance. It's a fantastic resource and I have pointed to another paper earlier. 

"Wild food plant use in 21st century Europe: the disappearance of old traditions and the search for new cuisines involving wild edibles" by Łukasz Łuczaj and others gives a broad overview on the current status of foraging. It notes that one hand the traditional knowledge of wild food is disappearing while at the same time it is reinvented (not reintroduced as the paper argues) in avant-garde cooking. 

In all it is a bit scattershot, but that is only to be expected for such a huge and complex field in which every country has its own history and where generally there little overlap between separate traditions exists. Good piece to get you talking. I am happy in the meanwhile with the different plant lists like this this stocking-list from a South Swedish wild food firm that also supplies Noma. It is a list that contains so many plants that are growing between the cracks of the pavements or in neglected gardens that it once again shows how much of Michelin-starred wild food cooking resembles the experiments of Surrealism to create extraordinary sensations by rearranging ordinary and/or discarded material like bus cards and cut-outs from newspapers. 

Reading Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou

 

The six months or so before his book Scarp (2012) was published deep topographer Nick Papadimitriou was the talk of the psychogeographers ghost town (see, see). The radio show he did with John Rogers was a real highlight and together they discussed the upcoming book extensively. I intended to purchase it on the day it would come out but I never did. Only last month I scooped up a remaindered copy on Ebay. 

Why did it take so long? Fear of disappointment. 

I was afraid that after so much pre-excitement the book could only fail. That it seem to get awfully quiet around Papadimitriou after Scarp's publication only reinforced that feeling.

Now I have read it and I did so with great pleasure. It is much funnier than I thought it would be and his 'proximity flights', when he takes on the persona of other people or animals (the chapter that is eyeing scarp from the perspective of the eternal rook is extremely memorable) work very well. Much of what Papadimitriou makes a fascinating figure has to do with his resolute uniqueness. He is the arsonist that set fire to his school twice, he is also the psychogeographer who rejected the term and created for himself his own system of knowing and internalizing space. The proximity flight is a good example. That he still considers himself to live in long abandoned Middlesex is another. 

A different element of my prospected disappointment originates from this stubbornness. 

Papadimitriou comes across as someone who has used his walking and studies to sublimate an underlying insecurity and irrationality without 100% success. And this instability comes through in the book and it might have derailed it. But it didn't, instead it adds to the flavour that here is speaking a man who knows how to appreciate things that very few others people can. It is the claim of gurus and saints. The genre this book falls in may be well established but here is a writer who walks out of possession, not one who walks to write. But even then Papadimitriou combines opposites. In his introduction he states with equal weight that Scarp was his object of study long before he identified it as one zone. At the same time the book describes a number of walks made in 2011 with the exact purpose to write about it. Papadimitriou's emotional pendulum seems to swing between a desire for class war and jealously for the security of the middle class, between a need for loliness and a need for love and compassion. Struggles never to be resolved.

Papadimitriou himself connects his deep topology with his underlying psychology. A fair bit of prose is devoted to his account of his troubled youth, his crimes and the resulting brush with the law. Strangely his autobiography never gets beyond him checking into prison and it strongly suggests that the original manuscript was cut in two(or three) and that the rest will only be published when Scarp does well enough. 

I rate Scarp very highly, it is not really a book about a place or a person but a shamanic probe into the fundamental matter of desire.  

It has the effect on me that I want to go out and walk, it makes me want to buy a plane ticket to go visit Scarp myself. If only Papadimitriou would be my guide.

Charting the geographical and numerical spread of ingredients from 29 historic cookbooks

 
From various places (Gutenberg, Archive, Bit-Torrent) I have collected the full text of 29 cookbooks published between 1390 and 2010.

I will not bother you here with the full list, but the earliest is the Forme of Cury (1390) and the latest is the Paleo Diet cookbook (2010). In between there are classics like The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Beeton (1859), A guide to modern cookery by Auguste Escoffier (1907) and the Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver (1999). I have tried to find books evenly spaced through the years and have cleared them as best as I could from non-intentional ingredients. Book by book I fed all of them into Map you Recipe and collected the raw numbers that are used to make the graph above.

It maps the number of ingredients (vertical axis) for 29 books identified by year of publication (horizontal axis). The green top line tracks total number of ingredients recognized, two lines track how many of those are from the old or the new world and one line indicated from how many of the 15 food categories Map your Recipe uses ingredients are drawn from. 

Here are some observations that I think are fascinating. 

- Over time cookbooks have an increasing list of potential ingredients.  

- The big change comes about 1600 when the number of ingredients sharply rises. 

- It takes to about 1650 when produce from the Americas start to be seriously introduced to the larder.

- The food stuffs from the Americas on there own or not enough to explain the sudden increase in 17th century.

- From 1700 onwards the total use of ingredients goes up (130 max) and down (61 min) but it never goes down enough to come near the level of 1658 (41 ingredients) which at that time is the record.  

- The first cookbook with more than a hundred ingredients dates from 1851, but this remains an exceptional number for a long time.

- The Paleo-diet cookbook has the highest total number of ingredients. It is ironic that a so-called 'caveman diet' seems intent on using as much agricultural crops at it can.

- Nigella Lawson in 2007 uses 29 more ingredients than J. Oliver in 1999.

There are a few caveats. In an earlier post I did the same for 15 books searching only for those fruits and vegs that Vavilov was able to trace to a specific food hearth. In the mean time I have also added many other food stuffs that are known to originate from the old or the new world but without the specificness of the Vavilov list. The problem with the additional list is that it is in potential infinite. This is even true when you exclude meat and fish as Map you Recipe does. So you don't know what is missing even though I expect it to pick up 99% of the most common ingredients. 

This graph is not intended to be the final word nor does it make claims for extreme precision. It is meant as an illustration for general trends in food over time and I think it is very revealing.