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Edible Geography

Let The Countdown Begin: Foodprint TorontoYesterday

IMAGE: Picture this former streetcar storage and maintenance facility filled with people who are curious, concerned, and/or enthusiastic about the relationship between food and cities… it’s Foodprint Toronto!

Just a quick reminder that Foodprint Toronto takes place this Saturday, between 12:30 and 5:00 p.m. EST, at Artscape Wychwood Barns (map) in Toronto. It’s the second in an international event series co-curated with Sarah Rich, as well as the reason for the sad (for me, anyway) lack of recent posts here on Edible Geography.

Eating the StreetJuly 15

IMAGE: 2:30 p.m. in Mexico City…. time for a snack! All photos by Nicola Twilley, unless labelled otherwise.

Mexico City’s streets are dense with food vendors. Statistics are hard to come by, since the industry is largely unregulated, but in her 2007 Survey of Street Foods in Mexico City, anthropologist Janet Long quotes a survey by Reforma newspaper that found 560,000 street vendors in the city proper — an astonishing one vendor for every 8.5 chilangos.

Certainly, walking around the city it can seem as if almost everyone is eating mysterious and delicious-smelling foods on the street, from dawn to dusk. In his must-read portrait of Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, author David Lida writes that:

The sidewalk is a chilango’s pit stop, his permanent picnic. He likes to eat standing up, the aroma of sizzling meat mingling with those of exhaust fumes, putrefying garbage, dust, and sweat.

But for a Spanish-challenged gringo (su

Nomadic MilkJuly 11

Dutch artist Esther Polak spent frustrating years in art school trying to depict pastoral landscapes: dragging an easel out into the meadows near where she grew up; experimenting with oil paints, pastels, and photography. The results, as she tells it (at the ElectroSmog International Festival for Sustainable Immobility in March) were unsatisfactory.

IMAGE: Dutch dairyscapes, (left) Jacob van Ruisdael, View over Harlem, (right) Vermeer, The Milkmaid.

Part of the problem, she explains, is that “most of this part of The Netherlands looks like a green meadow — but, actually, you’re looking at a landscape of milk production.”

Then one day, some friends took Polak out on a boat that was equipped with GPS. She decided to experiment with the technology, equipping volunteers with PDAs back in 2002, before ubiquitous mobile computing, in order to produce user-portraits of Amsterdam. With a sense of the technology’s potential, she then returned to her original obsession: figuring out how to depict the landscape in a way t

Save the Date: Foodprint TorontoJuly 6

IMAGE: Foodprint Toronto (logo designed by the awesomely talented Nikki Hiatt).

The sharp-eyed among you — or at least the sharp-eyed among those of you who visit the site rather than reading through RSS — might have noticed the CN Tower has replaced the Empire State Building in the Foodprint logo. It’s true: Sarah Rich and I are very excited to announce that we’re hosting our next Foodprint Project event in Toronto on Saturday, July 31.

Foodprint Toronto is the second in a series of international conversations about food and the city. The first, held in New York City earlier this year, was a packed-out success, with a stellar line-up of speakers jumping to their feet to share their opinions on topics as diverse as food deserts and food printing, as wel

The Tyburn Angling SocietyJune 30

A tip passed along from BLDGBLOG’s meeting with documentary filmmakers tracing lost rivers in cities all over the world led me to the Tyburn Angling Society, and its curious confluence of daylighting, urban foraging, and legislative archaeology.

IMAGE: The crest of the Tyburn Angling Society, from Jim Bowdidge’s pecha kucha presentation, available here as a pdf.

The story begins in 959, when King Edgar the Peaceable, whose reign was otherwise noted for stability, monastic reforms, and sexual appetite, issued a royal charter listing the privileges and imposts of Westminster. According to