“Where The Buffalo Roamed” [weathersealed.com] is a simple but persuading infographic illustrating the distance to the nearest McDonalds in the US.

The Feral Trade Courier is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems. The database offers dedicated tracking of feral trade products in circulation, archives every shipment and generates freight documents on the fly.

Hungry City is a book about how cities eat. (…) when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for thirty million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of again, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that those of us living in cities get to eat at all. Food shapes cities, and through them, it moulds us – along with the countryside that feeds us. Every day we inhabit spaces food has made, unconsciously repeating actions as old as cities themselves. We might think that take-aways are a modern phenomenon, but 5,000 years ago, they lined the streets of Ur, one of the oldest cities on earth. Markets and shops, pubs and kitchens, diners and waste-dumps have always provided the backdrop to urban life.

Hungry City follows food’s journey from land to city, through market and supermarket, kitchen and table, waste-dump and back again, to show how food affects all our lives, and impacts on the planet. The final chapter asks how we might use food to re-think cities in the future – to design them and their hinterlands better, and live in them better too.

The interview discusses urban food-distribution networks, the cultural and nutritional effects of food-vendor carts, the geographic distance from “farm to table,” food-contamination scares, what Sarah describes as “the ways in which food and eating behaviors influence the physical shape of the city,” Nicola’s interest in “cupcake shops as indicators of gentrification,” and much more.

peterorosz:

Imagine, if you will, the burger force – a field of energy that radiates from every freshly-cooked patty, earth-penetrating and inverse-squared with distance, compelling the hungry carnivore to seek out and devour the well-done ground beef at the source.

Now, wrap that concept in a Star Wars motif – set in the present day, with the second-tier burger chains as the rebels – each, by themselves, without mutual aid, battling the 12,000-plus restaurant McEmpire. The situation is most dire, for the upstarts control but a few significant islands of territory amid the overwhelming and darkly-rendered influence of the McForce.

Weather Sealed: A Disturbance In The Force

Infographic showing the average distance food travels in Iowa, US. Also, several related graphics and info under the “food” tag.

A PIECEMEAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE ORIGINS OF OUR FOOD

On spices and early globalization. How did early geographical knowledge influence trade and urbanization through food?

“In his book, An Edible History of Humanity, Standage writes about how spices were an early form of currency and some, like peppercorns, signified great wealth. Arab middlemen controlled the spice trade, and their monopoly allowed them to inflate the prices of cinnamon and pepper for years. Standage says it wasn’t until an Indian ship went adrift in the Red Sea that the Europeans realized there was an easier route to get all those spices they had been craving.”

A házak, amelyekben az ültetvényeket tartják, általában Budapest külső kerületeiben, családi házas övezetben vannak. „Nagy házakat keresnek, százötven-kétszáz négyzetmétereseket, mert ez dupla előny nekik: egyrészt nagy területet tudnak beültetni, másrészt kihasználják, hogy ezeket a házakat nagyon nehéz kiadni, mert magasak a bérleti díjak. A bérbeadó persze boldog, hogy végre ki tudja adni a házát, és elfogad minden feltételt, azt is, hogy ne járjon ki a házba ellenőrizni.”

A nyomozó szerint sokszor fizetnek akár fél-egy évre is előre. A házak mindig nagyon jó állapotban vannak, sok köztük az úszómedencés-szaunás, de a beköltözés után rögtön átalakítják őket. Minden felesleges holmit kipakolnak, árammal csak egy-két háztartási gép meg a tv megy, minden más, ami az ültetvényhez kell, az jellemzően  lopott árammal működik. Ezt úgy intézik, hogy ipari áramot igényelnek, arra hivatkozva, hogy varrógépeket akarnak üzemeltetni. Azonban még a mérőóra beállítása előtt megcsapolják az ipari vezetéket, és ettől kezdve lopott árammal üzemeltetik az elszívó- és világítórendszert.