Reuniting stumped readers with the books from the edges of their memories.
The carpet was khaki, the lights yellow, the walls a dishwater beige. The basement computer lab in Midtown Manhattan didn't have much ambience. But 20 librarians from the New York Public Library were seated in the room—and they were there to crack mysteries. Their tools were a whiteboard, a marker, a series of screens, and a metal bell of the sort you'd find on a hotel-lobby desk. Whenever it dinged, it meant a case had been closed.
Before we each had a little, flickering encyclopedia in our hands, we had librarians, and they’re still experts at finding the answers to tricky questions. Through the Ask NYPL portal, a decades-old, 24-hour phone and text service, the staff has triaged everything from queries about the Pope’s sex life to what it means if you dream about being chased by elephants. The library staff are ace researchers with a massive trove at their fingertips. A sense of mystery in their work comes when people approach them with vague questions and patchy details—particularly when they’re looking for books, but they don’t remember the authors or titles.
A few years ago, staffers in the New York Public Library’s reader services division drafted a blog post about how to track down a book when its title eludes you. This post spurred a follow-up, in which reader services librarian Gwen Glazer recommended library resources and a number of other strategies (among them are Goodreads groups, a sprawling Reddit thread called whatsthatbook, an indie bookseller in Ohio who is happy to poke around for a $4 fee). Thanks to Google—“how to find a book”—many stumped people seem to land on that post, and they have often written about their enduring puzzles in the comments section. The messages now number in the thousands. Glazer says she often arrives at work to see another 10 title requests.
To solve these little mysteries, Glazer recently assembled a team of sleuths from across the branches: Chatham Square, in Chinatown; the Jefferson Market, in Greenwich Village; the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, near the Flatiron Building; and the Mulberry Street branch, in Nolita. At lunchtime on a recent Wednesday, they were gathered in that computer lab in the library’s offices—across the street from the soaring, spectacular Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (the Main Branch)—to nibble on homemade lemon rosemary cookies and apple, carrot, zucchini bread while they clattered away on their keyboards. Other members of the team participated remotely. The "Title Quest" hackathon was underway.
Glazer encouraged some folks to start at the earliest comments and work their way back; others started with newer ones. Readers wanted help with all sorts of books. A story about a dragon that enlists a young girl as his apprentice, and also happens to be a cheesemonger. One about a kid named Wurm (“Spelled with a ‘u’ and not an ‘o,’” the commenter added), who makes a computer game in his college dorm room. Or one about mistaken identity, love gone wrong, and torrid affairs and unhappy marriages, set around 1900. (This one piqued other commenters’ interest: “I have no idea what the name of this book is, but if someone replies with the correct answer could you plz email it to me as it sounds like something I’d really like to read,” read a reply. “Was it good?”)
The first case was cracked in just a few minutes, courtesy of a remote staffer who recognized the plot of Imbolo Mbue's 2017 Behold theDreamers. The room filled with a smattering of applause and enthusiastic dinging of the hotel bell. Someone made a hash mark on the dry-erase board. The staffers were in the zone, quietly murmuring to themselves. “There are a lot of murder mysteries about very wealthy relatives,” one person muttered, scrolling through a list. “Serial killers …” another trailed off. Then, the room fell pretty quiet again, until the next ring of the bell.
Glazer and company looked for proper names, locations, keywords, and other leads. There's a database where you can search by cover keywords, but it's not always useful, since cover designs change over time and editions. Also, readers' recollections aren't always reliable in the first place. “You have to know that at least one detail someone is certain about is not right,” said Stephanie Anderson, assistant director of selection and ordering. Searching databases can also be a bit of art, said Rhonda Evans, an electronic resources librarian at the Schwarzman Building, because the metadata of a database entry is inputted manually and can be somewhat subjective, informed by the person who enters it, and their era and location. In one database, for example, searching for “integration” will return a different list than you'd get if you looked for “desegregation.” “Words we think mean the same thing can pull up totally different results,” Evans says.
Glazer was chasing the story with “Wurm.” The post was full of surprising and helpful details—the commenter thought that there was something to do with sand? Glazer started searching NoveList (a database available for in-library use), but nothing looked quite right—a lot of fantasy novels and picture books. “This is where librarians get librarian-y,” Glazer said. She tightened the search, checking boxes for “teen” and “fiction,” but still came up empty handed. “Now I’m just going to straight Google,” she said. She landed on a Reddit page and drew in a breath. “Oh! I think we might have gotten it.” She read on. “This looks like it.” It was The Gadget Factor, a 1985 young adult novel by Sandy Landsman.
Throughout the afternoon, the staff tracked down 48 titles, but they weren’t always positive that they’d nailed it. Lynn Lobash, manager of reader services, sometimes wound up “85 percent sure,” she said. She hoped that that would be enough to reunite someone with a long-lost book they couldn’t wait to revisit.
A ghost pepper–based coating could help ecosystems recover from wildfires.
Has your home garden ever been been gutted by rodents? Maybe your seeds just weren’t spicy enough.
New research suggests that capsaicin—the spicy part of chili peppers—can be a robust deterrent to seed-eating rodents. Ecologists interested in restoring ecosystems after disturbances such as wildfires conducted experiments with deer mice. They started with glass enclosures where on one side, the mice were offered regular old sunflower seeds, while on the other side were seeds that had been given a special, capsaicin-laced coating. The mice ate 86 percent fewer pepper-treated seeds than untreated ones. When they took the experiment outside to the Missoula Valley in Montana, the scientists saw the results play out. Seeds that were treated with capsaicin were far more likely to survive to become plants than ones left untreated, the team recently reported in the journal Restoration Ecology.
This seems like a pretty intuitive outcome—if we can't take the heat, why would mice?—but getting to this point wasn't as easy as it seems. Researchers were using capsaicin from bhut jolokia, the Indian "ghost pepper," which, with over a million Scoville Heat Units, once held the record for world's hottest pepper. It was plenty hot, but the team struggled for years to develop a binding gentle enough not to harm the seed, and strong enough to endure the elements. Even the latest, strongest coating can't survive the whole winter, so the team will continue to refine it.
Matthew D. Madsen, an ecologist at Brigham Young University who helped develop the new coating mechanism, explained why the innovation is important. Invasive weeds and increasingly frequent wildfires have made it hard for native plants to survive to restore ecosystems. The plants need a “boost,” he said, and one way to do that might be to help them defend themselves against rodents. Invasive weeds can burn more easily than native plants, so successfully recruiting more native species to an ecosystem can be crucial to managing future wildfires.
This could be a good strategy to help support recovering ecosystems—so long as pepper-loving Chinese tree shrews don’t come calling.
Painstaking recreations of a rapidly changing city.
In fast-changing Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the artist Pui Wan makes tiny versions of real buildings before they’re demolished for new construction. Her artwork aims to preserve these spaces, as well as the memories of the communities that inhabit them. Pui Wan says she hopes that younger generations will be able to tangibly experience old buildings through her models. One such structure is a kopitiam (coffee shop) that has operated for over 60 years. Shortly after this video was filmed, the kopitiam shut down permanently.
In the video below, Atlas Obscura takes viewers on a tour of Pui Wan's world, both in miniature and in real life.
Hawaiian-language experts are working to preserve a century’s worth of history.
The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s first native-language newspaper was published in 1834. By the 1870s, there were 10 such newspapers serving a population with an almost 100 percent literacy rate—impressive considering that as recently as the early 19th century, Hawaiian was primarily an oral language.
The explosion in Hawaiian-language papers demonstrated that Hawaiians were committed to documenting their own culture. The newspapers were also a critical method of sharing ideas across the islands, and with the rest of the world. Within these papers readers could find accounts of sustainable farming practices, regional politics, and reports from the battlegrounds of the American Civil War.
Then in 1896, three years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarch Queen Liliʻuokalani, teaching the Hawaiian language was formally banned in local schools. With this change in law came a sharp decline in fluency, and in 1948 the last Hawaiian-language newspaper shut down.
Today, tens of thousands of fragile newsprint pages, from a period that ranges over 100 years, sit in archives and collections around the islands. But with only 1.2 percent of the population currently able to speak Hawaiian, much of the information they contain is inaccessible to those for whom it would be most relevant.
In the video above, we visit with a group of Hawaiian-language scholars who are now working to scan, catalog, and translate this archive. The hope is that by digitizing and opening up access to the stories within these lost newspapers, a crucial resource will be available for generations to come.
Wealthy and entitled, as only the scions of conquistadors could be.
In 1523, Diego Colón, the eldest son of the man known as Cristóbal Colón—whom the United States calls Christopher Columbus—crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the last time, called back by the Spanish crown to answer for his actions in “New Spain.” Since his father had died, in 1506, Diego had been fighting to claim the wealth and power he believed he was owed, that Spain had promised his family.
He had managed to win the support of Charles V, the most recent king, but after Diego raised taxes in Hispaniola and invested in slavery and sugar plantations, the new king had started to see him as a rebel. For decades, the monarchy and the Colón family had been caught in a legal battle, a battle that would stretch on for centuries, over the wealth ripped from the “New World”—the labor of the people in colonized lands, the natural resources, and a share of the tax revenue sent back to Spain. Diego wanted more of it than, in practice, the monarchy was willing to hand over.
In history books, when the story of European exploration and colonialism is told, conquistadors and their sort take center stage. But after they died, whatever titles they’d been given or land they controlled passed to their children. While the names of these explorers are familiar—Ponce de León, Hernán Cortés, John Cabot, Francisco Pizarro—the fates of their children are less remembered, like many people who inherit wealth rather than make it.
Some took up their fathers' profession, commanding ships of their own across the ocean, while others concentrated on keeping, or just spending, the wealth they’d been handed. Often, like Diego, they fought for more—whatever they thought their parents had been promised. Just as some wealthy families today turn their riches toward a legacy beyond the business, usually in culture or philanthropy, some explorers’ kids tried to solidify their family’s place in the elite and elevate their status. Thus the plundered wealth of the Americas became libraries, gardens, titles, and monuments (to the glory of the heirs).
The Colón Brothers
Of the two Colón brothers (half-brothers, actually), Fernando more closely fits the image of a rich kid today. Born into an exalted position thanks to his father’s accomplishments, Fernando lived a charmed life. Early on, he was inducted into the halls of power, serving alongside his brother as a page to the royal family. When he was 14, his father brought him along on business—a fourth voyage across the Atlantic to Hispaniola and back.
But for Fernando, colonialism didn’t stick. After his father’s death, he took a quick trip with Diego to Santo Domingo, and then returned to Spain just two months later, to oversee the legal battles between his family and the state.
In Europe, he pursued intellectual projects. He became a respected cartographer and an avid collector of books, using his family’s money to build one of the largest and most impressive libraries of its time. Fernando had a taste for modern innovation: Rather than focus on manuscripts, he bought printed books, some of the earliest made in Europe. He invested in his family’s legacy, writing one of the first biographies of his father and planting a garden filled with specimens brought back from the Americas.
While Fernando was spending money, Diego was trying to consolidate his family’s status as one of the most powerful families in the “New World,” with control over Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. Before his father’s first voyage, in 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had agreed that, if his quest succeeded, Cristóbal Colón would be entitled to 10 percent of the takings of his voyage, plus a bevy of titles. Every time Diego tried to claim what he thought he was owed, the crown fought back. When he died, his father’s legacy was still contested.
The monarchy’s legal case rested on the idea that it wasn’t Colón, but one of his ship’s captains, who had first discovered the Americas. Ultimately, Diego’s widow went into arbitration with the crown, and his son, Luis Colón de Toledo, came out with a title—Admiral of the Indies—control of Jamaica, an estate in Panama, and a 10,000-ducat annuity that was meant to last in perpetuity.
It was, perhaps, less than the Colón family thought they were owed and less than Cristóbal’s contract specified. But the Colón family came out ahead of other scions of conquistadors. These families represented a threat to the existing elite, and as more Spanish wealth-seekers and bureaucrats crossed the ocean, the ascendant heirs of explorers were often viewed with suspicion. The Cortés brothers, for instance, came close to being killed for their push to join the ruling class.
The Cortés Brothers
For Cortés's first son, Martín, being the child of an explorer meant growing up without a mother. Born early in the 1520s to Malinche, an enslaved native woman who traveled with Cortés as his translator, Martín was separated from his mother early in life. Cortés made his eldest son part of the life of the Spanish Empire. He brought him to Spain and petitioned Pope Clement VII to legitimize the boy. His father’s status came with privileges: Like the Colón brothers, Martín joined the court as a page and eventually became a knight.
By then, Cortés had another son, also named Martín, with his Spanish wife. The second Martín, a noble don by birth, became his heir. When Hernán died, don Martín became the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca and one of the richest people in the Americas. As heirs like him began to chafe against the rules imposed on them by representatives of the king, don Martín became a central figure in the fight for power in Mexico.
By the time both Martíns had returned to Mexico, in the 1650s, tensions were rising between the crown and the second-generation heirs of the Spanish colonists, who believed they were owed a monopoly on the enslaved labor of native people. Don Martín was not the most restless among them, but he did enjoy an exalted position. The king’s viceroy had already begun to complain that don Martín “postured as royalty,” addressing nobles as if they were below him on the social ladder and forcing other elites to join his entourage when he traveled.
His downfall came in 1566, when he and other heirs put on a masquerade commemorating his father’s victory over Montezuma, staging a meeting of the two leaders and a fake fight between the two sides. At the party, according to later accusations, two brothers, the Avila boys, allegedly started making plans to crown don Martín ruler of New Spain.
If such a plan existed, it didn’t last long. Soon dozens of these second-generation colonists had been arrested, including the first Martín Cortés. The Avila brothers were beheaded and their heads left in a central plaza to rot on spikes. The first Martín was captured, imprisoned, and tortured.
Don Martín was saved by his relationship with the king. He was allowed to go to Spain and plead his case. His older brother was eventually allowed to follow him. The Martíns spent the rest of their lives in Spain, as punishment for imagining (or allowing the king to imagine) they could become a dynasty of their own. It wasn’t a hard life—don Martín was still wealthy and enjoyed himself. And they got to keep their heads.
Not all explorers’ children were seen as such threats. Some, like Sebastian Cabot—son of John Cabot, the Venetian who explored the coast of North America for the English—were explorers in their own right. Others took the wealth they were given and faded into history. Some, like the children of Ponce de León, barely escaped coups in which other Europeans took over the colonies their parents were overseeing. But some traded on their names to ascend far up the traditional social ladders of Europe.
Pizarro’s Daughter
Like the first Martín Cortés, Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui, born in 1534, had a European father and a native mother. Charles V recognized her as the official heir of Pizarro in 1537. Like Martín, she was separated from her mother early in life and was raised by a relative. When, in 1541, a rival of Pizarro's assassinated him and took power, she was hidden away in a convent.
Her father was dead, which left Francisca Yupanqui a wealthy young woman, with a powerful name. By the time she was 15, an uncle on her father’s side had traveled to Peru and soon formulated a plan to marry her and start a new dynasty in South America. After the crown discovered this act of rebellion, Francisca was ordered back to Spain, where she encountered yet another uncle who took an interest in her and her wealth. This one she did actually marry, and together they set about consolidating the spoils of the New World their family had been promised.
In the world of the Spanish Empire, Francisca managed to rise still higher. When her first husband died, she became a wealthy widow in a strong position. She quickly remarried a man with more political power, Pedro Arias Portocarrero—who had helped found Panama, and governed Nicaragua—and joined the Spanish court. She used her wealth to build, in Trujillo, Spain, a “Palace of the Conquest,” which had a luxurious corner balcony and busts of Francisca, her father, her first husband, and her mother, Inés Yupanqui, as part of its elaborate decoration—a monument to a family and to colonialism itself, which still stands today.
The future is now and it’s happening, appropriately, at Cornell University.
Popcorn is a powerful thing. It can take a microwaveable bag from flat to bulbous in just minutes. It's loud enough to scare a dog. And if you've ever put too many scoops into a stovetop popcorn pot, you may have seen a bunch of kernels work together to push the lid off and escape all over your kitchen.
We saw, we heard, we smelled—and yet we did not fully understand. In a recently published paper, "Popcorn-Driven Robot Actuators," researchers from Cornell University's Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab demonstrate how popcorn's propulsive properties can be used for more than snack-time joy.
Under their tutelage, the humble grain has helped robots change shape, grip objects, and even shoulder moderately heavy weights. "Popcorn seemed like a silly idea at first," writes lab head Kirstin Hagelskjær Petersen in an email. "But now we believe [it has] real promise for quite a few applications."
Many of the creations of the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab are inspired by insects, which, although they're small, can accomplish a lot by working together in swarms. In the past, Petersen and her lab have developed technology based on termites, spiders, and honeybees.
Popcorn, too, is small but mighty. It is "a multifunctional material that can change its mechanical properties very rapidly," explains Steven Ceron, a doctoral student in Petersen's lab, and the paper's lead author. This makes it a great candidate to power robotic actuators—the parts of robots that, rather than sensing and responding to their surroundings, complete tasks through physical movement. ("To be a [full] robot, it would probably need other parts that were not popcorn-powered," Ceron says.)
"All popcorn works the same way," he continues. "You heat it up, and if it gets to its critical temperature, it goes through a physical-slash-chemical reaction." Or, as he and his coauthors puts it in the paper itself, "the kernels represent an energy reservoir which can be deployed into mechanical motion when needed." Or, in other words: "It pops."
By harnessing the power of that popping, and the intermeshing it creates between kernels, Ceron and his colleagues were able to build several types of popcorn-powered actuator. In one, a dozen or so unpopped kernels are placed inside a wire coil and surrounded by a few layers of silicone tubing. Voltage is applied to the wire (slowly, "to keep the popcorn from burning," the authors explain).
As the kernels pop, they crowd against each other, causing the silicone tube to go from flaccid to rigid, and to lift a 100-gram weight in the process. In another machine—described as "a three-fingered soft gripper powered by popcorn expansion"—the same principles apply, but the actuator is tripod-shaped. As the popcorn pops, it tightens its grip arounds a rubber ball.
Both of these belong to a category called "jamming actuators," which are commonly used to grip things with non-uniform shapes. "The way it works normally is, you have some kind of powder or grit in a bag, and you suck the air out with a pump or a compressor," at which point the grabber closes around its target, says Ceron. (You can see one in action here.)
"You can achieve the same thing here with the popcorn. But instead of having to include a bulky pump or compressor to suck the air out, you would just need to have that battery [to heat it]. You could have a new class of jamming actuators."
For another type of actuator, the group took paper—in this case, a recycled Newman's Own Organic Popcorn bag—folded it into the shape of a bellows, filled it with popcorn, and glued it shut. Then they stuck it in a microwave, to "achieve... expansion," as the article puts it. The resulting shape held its shape and resisted compression. "Once they pop, they interlock with each other," says Ceron. "They were even able to hold up a 9-pound kettlebell."
In a final experiment, the team made a particularly Rube Goldberg-esque contraption. Unpopped kernels were placed between two wooden plates, which were attached to a gripping claw by flexible tendons. Hot air was blown through holes in the bottom plate until the popcorn popped, lifting the plate and closing the claw.
This is all very fun. But as Ceron points out, popcorn has serious benefits as robot fuel. "In this lab, we're always looking for ways to manufacture robots that can be powered very easily … with very cheap materials," he says. Popcorn fits the bill: It's readily accessible (corn surplus, anyone?), it's lightweight, and—unless you're buying it pre-popped at a movie theater—it tends to be pretty inexpensive.
The main downside, Ceron says, is that its state change is irreversible: you can't un-pop a kernel, so each movement can only happen once per fuel dose. Since popcorn dissolves in water, it might be possible to flood the robot's popcorn chamber, wait for everything to melt away and flow out, and then fill it up again. "I think that could be the next step," Ceron says.
Or you could always get some hungry moviegoers to eat your waste product. There are some things that humans will always be best at.
It's a wondrous dessert popular in Hong Kong, and we're challenging our readers to make it at home.
Since we launched our food vertical, Gastro Obscura, last fall, we've been busy expanding Atlas Obscura's offerings to include wondrous dishes and ingredients from around the world (to date, we've added more than 775 Gastro Obscura foods!). With the help of your suggestions, our personal lists of Want to Tries grows daily. So we thought it was high time to host our first ever cook-off, where we ask you to try making a Gastro Obscura dish at home and tell us about the experience.
For this first edition, we're challenging Atlas Obscura readers to make black sesame sweet soup, a pitch-black dessert soup that's creamy, nutty, and unforgettable all at once.
We’ve provided the basic ingredients list and directions below. Feel free to embellish or adjust the recipe however you'd like. For instance, some people like to add sweet dumplings.
Ingredients
1 cup of white rice (long grain or short grain)
1 cup of black sesame seeds
7–8 cups of water, depending on the desired consistency
1 cup of granulated sugar (add more sugar to taste)
Directions
1. Toast the black sesame seeds on low heat for 2 minutes in a skillet or wok, until they are fragrant.
2. Soak the toasted sesame seeds overnight in 2 cups of water.
3. Soak the uncooked rice in 2 cups of water overnight, or until soft.
4. Drain the rice and combine in a blender with 3 cups of water. Blend until smooth.
5. Drain the soaked seeds and combine in a blender with 1 cup of water. Blend until smooth.
6. Combine the blended seeds and rice in a soup pot, and add roughly 3 cups water. Add sugar as desired for flavor and consistency. Mix and bring to a boil.
7. Lower the heat, and simmer until thickened, about 5–10 minutes. Stir the soup regularly to prevent burning.
8. Serve warm. Expect to end up with 4 to 6 servings.
Once you’re done cooking your best black sesame sweet soup, tell us all about how it came out via the form below, along with an appetizing (or at least entertaining), Instagram-ready image of your dish, which you can email to eric@atlasobscura.com. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, August 21. We’ll share our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. Thanks for helping us bring the world’s most wondrous foods to more kitchens, and let’s get cooking!
Unusual trends dominated the 1930s, such as the goldfish-swallowing fad that cropped up on college campuses. But choking down live fish wasn't so much a snack as it was a novelty. Yet another trend of the time was much more filling, and just as unprecedented: In Tulsa, Oklahoma, residents started eating crows.
At the scholarly site The Recipes Project, Michael Walkden explains that the crow-eating craze can be traced to one man: Dr. T. W. Stallings, a former county health superintendent who was the first to promote eating crow. His reasons were two-fold, according to Walkden: Farmers disliked seeing the birds raid their fields, and Stallings held a deep personal dislike for the birds. At first, Stallings held "crow banquets," where the secretive main ingredient was masked as quail. He soon managed to turn people into crow-eating aficionados, even after it came to light that the bird in question was indeed crow, and not quail. One of the most outspoken fans was the governor of Oklahoma, who founded the "Statehouse Crow Meat Lovers Association" in response.
Stalling's recipe consisted of rubbing plucked crows with lard to combat their dryness, cooking them in a sealed cast-iron pan along with celery, and finishing them off with lots of gravy. Three crows per person would make a meal.
Stallings's passion for eating crow caused a craze. In 1935, a "wave of enthusiasm for crow" swept Oklahoma, reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Of course, in the trailing days of the Great Depression, eating crow was more than just excitement over an alternative protein. For farmers in Oklahoma, hungry crows posed a threat to an already precarious livelihood, and the meat was a welcome addition to their daily diet. Walkden also points out that the surrounding press and public support for crow-eating could be nothing but good for the agricultural industry, so "state officials had a vested interest in promoting the extermination of the birds," too.
Though eating crow was a curiosity, it also went down easy. The birds, mostly dark meat, have been described as pleasantly gamy by most accounts. Not to mention it was was plentiful in Oklahoma and beyond. Crow-hunting clubs popped up, dedicated to shooting and eating all things corvid. In 1937, The Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin noted that "for several years there has been a campaign to prove to people generally that 'black partridges' are a delicious food." It was an uphill battle, especially since crows, as scavengers, have been known to eat meat and garbage. Also, crows occasionally eat eggs and nestlings of other birds. Many hunters believed that shooting and eating crows was even good for conserving the populations of more desirable game birds, such as ducks.
Lucky for the crows, the trend soon fizzled, likely because times were less desperate. Walkden suggests that most people's instinctual disgust towards certain animals is hard to overcome, so perhaps crow-eating was doomed from the start. But Stallings was not to be deterred. Even in 1947, as part of his "Crow-for-Food movement," Stallings could still be found telling reporters that crows were easy to get, rich in Vitamin B, and tasty.
Watch how a 400 million-year-old species is preserved.
Coelacanths have been around for more than 400 million years, can grow to more than 2 meters long, and weigh up to 200 pounds. Today they are considered living fossils, according to Kevin Swagel, assistant collections manager in the Fish Division of the Field Museum in Chicago. Swagel unboxed one of the museum’s three coelacanths to reveal the preservation process.
In the video below, Atlas Obscura learned how the museum preserves its delicate wet specimens.
Functional light bulbs, messages from the dead, and lots and lots of dentures.
Summer is the right time to wander aimlessly, and the beach is a great place to do it. But you have to watch your step: the ocean is always tossing up weird trash and treasures, from rainbow-colored plastic eggs to mysterious sea blobs.
Last week, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to share the strangest things they had come across on the beach. Wow, did you deliver. The ocean, as you experience it, has a sense of humor and a sense of mystery. It's full of trash, gifts, missives, and artifacts. (Plus dentures—lots and lots of dentures. At least nine of you have found false teeth, and some of you have come across more than one set.)
There was strange synchronicity in many of these tales. Two people found their own class rings, returned to them after days or years. Some came across things that others might interpret as garbage, but seemed to be speaking directly to them. Others participated in larger flotsam-based cultural events, and told us about scooping up a mysterious piece of Tjipeter gutta-percha, or playing the East River Piano.
Below are some more of our favorite finds, collected and spread out just for you. Happy reading, and may the ocean give you what you need.
Gifts From the Sea
"I found a large blue laundry basket in good shape with labels in Japanese. I used it for many years." —Que Estavia, Seattle, Washington
"In 1987, I found a gold ring with my name enameled in Hawaiian. Never questioned it." —Mary, Alberta, Canada
"A coconut—in perfect shape, wrapped up in seaweed. We took it home, cracked it and it was nicer than any I bought in the store." —Robin Read, Vancouver Island, Canada
"A Little Mermaid-themed plastic comb. I was tide pooling in a pretty inaccessible rocky beach on the central Maine coast, about an hour north of Acadia National Park. It was caught in the seaweed hanging off the ocean side of one of the rocks. This just struck me as really funny because of how thematically appropriate it was ... My mother and I joked that it belonged to a young mermaid who was a huge fan of the movie." —Alex Hale, Chicago
"A man's Timex watch. The leather band was badly damaged by the salt, sand, and time, and the back of the case was corroded. True to their advertising, it was still ticking." —Bob Sawyer, Duluth, Georgia
"While holidaying in Durban, South Africa with Indian friends I came across a small soapstone figure of Lakshmi. She is the Hindu deity for wealth and prosperity, our friends were very excited by the find and encouraged me to hang on to it. I did as it was quite pretty and unusual as the waves had weathered it. In the passing two years my life has completely changed, leaving my well-paid job of 14 years to pursue more fulfilling lesser-paid work. I have become happier in these last few years than I have in my previous 35 years. I don't suggest that the figure itself has had the impact but maybe implanted something in me that makes me think differently than before. I keep her on my desk with me when I'm working at all times and several times a week will spot her and think." —Dave Curtis, Kildare, Ireland
Life...Finds a Way
"At Sydney Harbour in 1996, I found a glass bottle with a shellfish shell inside. Lots of rubbish goes in the harbor so I just assumed the creature washed into the bottle when it was small and grew too big to get out. Once it died the shells were left stuck inside." —Dianne, Australia
"After a heavy storm on the island of Senja in the north of Norway, I went for a walk on the beach and found several light bulbs, mostly quite old ones, some fluorescent tubes of 1m long. All of them were whole and one of them was still functioning when plugged into a socket!" —Oona Libens, Sweden
"A whistle with a tiny crab in it. I put it back in the sea. I wonder if it found a better 'home.'" —Marianne Davila, Northern Puerto Rico
"In Camp Osborn, south of Mantoloking, NJ, in the fall of 1975, the wind was stiff and blowing offshore. I noticed odd bits along the edge of the surf. There were dozens of exhausted butterflies that had been blown into the ocean and tossed back on the beach by the force of the waves. Some still moved, and I picked one up and held it in my hand as it tried to dry its wings. I stooped for another, and then another. Soon I had dozens and dozens of monarchs on my arms and shoulders and in my hair. I let them dry and rest as we walked along the strand. Soon I felt they were ready, and I carried them up to the dunes and deposited them in some bayberry bushes. As I left, I thanked God for the blessing I had just received. I often wonder how many of them made it all the way to Mexico for their annual migratory meet-up!" —Ron, Seaside Park, New Jersey
Prankster Ocean
"A note in a bottle that had been written about a year before. It had a man and a women's name, the date, "May our love last an eternity," and a phone number to call if found. The person who answered the phone was a friend of the man on the note. The couple had already gotten divorced ... so much for eternity." —Annie, New York
"Bikini bottoms. I was freediving near shore and I found them in the current. Did the person who lost their bikini bottoms walk away with no pants on after being unable to find them?" —Katie, Oahu, Hawaii
"In 2017, I was on an expedition cruise that stopped at Cinque Island in the Andaman Islands, a territory of India. I like to wander and take photos, which is what I was doing, quite alone, when I saw [what] appeared to be a human head on a stick. As I got closer, I was relieved to discover it was a mannequin head complete with hair. I showed the photo to a ranger and he said that it washed ashore and he stuck it on the stick." —Dorothy Thompson, Wisconsin
"In the beginning of July, my family took a vacation to Anna Maria Island in Florida, and my mother was absolutely determined to find herself an intact sand dollar. It was the sixth day of our seven-day vacation, and our last day on the beach, so she was absolutely feverishly looking. I was floating out a ways on the paddleboard, and heard a high peal of hysterical laughter. I turned around to face the shore, and saw my mother, triumphantly holding a limp bit of what I thought was seaweed aloft, absolutely cackling. 'What'd you find?' I called out. 'A sand dollar!' she cried, almost doubled over with laughter. 'I found a dollar in the sand!'" —Jordan, Kansas
Death...Also Finds a Way
"A few years back on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan we found a dead calf on the beach. We were staying at a bed and breakfast and the innkeeper said, "Not another one. I guess my morning plan is burying it." We theorize that it slipped into a Michigan or Wisconsin creek during heavy rains and drowned, or somehow fell off a boat." —Lisa Rombes, Ann Arbor, Michigan
"Grew up in New York City, on Coney Island. One day, in the summer of 1942, when I was 11 years old, I saw that the beach was completely covered with thousands and thousands of freshly killed dead fish piled high! Later I learned that German submarines were actively attacking ships bringing supplies to Great Britain. Apparently the pressure of an exploding torpedo killed all those fish, which immediately were washed ashore." —Yosef Bar-On, Israel
"My 14 year old son and his friend were fishing and found a metal box. They had no idea when they opened it, that it held the cremains of a person. There was no information as to from where it came." —Oksana, Delaware
"When I was three years old, I ambled up the Lake Michigan beach towards my parents holding something long and hairy. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a scalp. There had been a plane crash near Chicago about a week earlier. My father buried it. I don’t remember this, but it is part of our family lore." —Marilyn Green, The Sea Ranch, California
Marine Missed Connections
"Underwater camera, [found on] Paradise Island in the Bahamas. The last photo was a head-on picture of a bull shark." —Ted Ryan, New York
"A 50-year happy anniversary balloon. It would have been my deceased husband and my 50th anniversary that year. He had been gone since 1994." —Charlotte, North Cape May, New Jersey
"In the summer of 1981 my mother, brother and I went to Jupiter, Florida. I had graduated that year. My brother had already bought his class ring. He lost it at the beach. 3 years later when I moved to Jupiter I found the ring just playing in the surf!" —Stacey Henrikson, Rochester Hills, Michigan
"On a totally empty beach, a sand toy in the shape of a letter H, found by my 2-year-old daughter whose name starts with an H. Her grandmother had just died, and it was as if the she had sent her a toy to play with, using the sea as a conveyance." —Martina Ebert, California
Unsolved Mysteries
"I see a clear bottle, pick it up and see there is a piece of paper inside. 'WOW, a message in a bottle, cool,' I say. I dig out the cork and pull the paper out. In large printed letters, 'I am watching you from the dunes. Look over your shoulder. I will keep watching you until the time is right. Be aware. Can you see me?' Creepy, huh." —Tim O'Brien, Nashville, Tennessee
"Oranges! Dozens of oranges." —Barbara Annis, Ann Arbor, Michigan
"Part of a yellow pull tab from an airplane life vest, in Kauai, Hawaii in 2013. Did someone have to use it?" —Mimi Schreiber, San Rafael, California
"We rented a house in Maine on Glen Cove last year. We were enjoying some beach time when this small paper Obi Wan Kenobi came floating up to us from the water (coated in something waterproof I assume). We decided to leave it for the next renters, up on some rocks away from the water line. Next day it was gone. We assumed that the water had taken what it gave up. No worries, right? About 3 days later, we were back on the beach, and the tide was all the way out. We were looking for beach glass, nice rocks, anything interesting. Imagine our surprise when out about 75 yards, standing on a rock, was our beloved Obi Wan, looking towards the ocean. We left him there, just staring off to sea." —Theresa G, Honeoye, New York
Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
On weekdays, Ric Brewer lives in Seattle and works as a communications manager for a disaster-relief nonprofit. But most weekends, he heads to his five-acre spread in Quilcene, among the foothills leading to Olympic National Forest, to check on his livestock. In this temperate rain forest setting, nearly everything glows an intense green: the grass and Douglas fir and Oregon grape. It’s a good climate for his moisture-loving animals.
It doesn’t take more than weekend visits. As many a frustrated home gardener knows, snails can thrive without much loving care on our part.
Brewer is the owner of Little Gray Farms, named for his stock in trade, the common garden snail, or petit gris. It’s smaller, as the name implies, than the canned escargots that are supposedly French, though they’re more likely processed in France, not grown there. The petit gris is more tender and more palatable, American snail farmers will tell you, and requires less processing.
It’s also healthier for the planet and our bodies than most sources of farmed animal protein. A serving of 100 grams (about three and a half ounces) has only 90 calories, according to the USDA, and snails are lower in fat than salmon. They also require microscopic grazing range—Brewer uses only a half-acre of his property—and the carbon footprint is far lower than for most animals. There’s an exhaustive 2015 Italian study, published in the journal Agricultural Systems, to prove it.
Maybe the best thing about snails as a food for Americans: Like edible weeds, common garden snails are an invasive species, found in about 20 states. Eating them is, in a way, doing a favor for the environment. In fact, Brewer got the idea for his farm after eating snails he’d foraged.
“I tasted my first one way back in high school, in 1981,” he says. His first cooking attempt with fresh snails—tossed in pasta with olive oil, oregano, and salt and pepper—was successful enough to keep him at it. “I was always kind of transfixed with them not only as a dish but as an animal.”
Snails are unusual for sure. They’re hermaphrodites who throw “love darts” (harpoon-shaped spears of calcium carbonate) at each other during their mating sessions. “They can spend about eight hours in courtship and mating,” Brewer says. “They twine around each other to match up the holes in the sides of their heads where their sex organs are.”
Another fascinating snail fact: Earlier this year, UCLA scientists wrote in the journal eNeuro that they had successfully transplanted primitive memories between snails—in a different species than the petit gris—through RNA injections. (Rather than a memory of a snow globe, think of an untrained snail suddenly acting like a trained one.)
At his farm, Brewer shelters the eggs indoors, raising the baby snails, which have shells from the start, until they’re large enough to live in an outdoor shadehouse. The structure is similar to a greenhouse, but with a woven cloth that rain and air can permeate, and perimeter fencing to thwart his snails’ escape attempts and attempts by rats and raccoons to feast on his crop. He feeds the snails organic vegetables that he grows, sharing his food with them. It takes them a year to mature fully. Then he purges them for a week by giving them only water—an important process done with clams too, which clears out their little digestive systems.
“They will eat almost anything,” Brewer says. “I’ve seen them in the wild eating dead baby birds.” Some snail farmers go for the more elegant term of “finishing” the snails; one New York operation uses malt barley, saying it improves the flavor.
Snail farming (and eating) is common in many parts of Europe, Africa, and Australia. In the United States, though, Brewer is one of just a handful or petit-gris pioneers, and he says this tasty, environmentally friendly trend is on ice due to a government-bureaucracy nightmare.
It's this problem—and not a lack of interest from eaters—that's chiefly kept snail farming niche. The “ew” factor that turned off many Americans a few decades ago has dissipated in a more globalized culture that seeks out the newest food thrills, especially those based in traditional cuisines. (Authentic Valencian paella, for example, frequently contains snails and rabbit.) Brewer and a handful of other snail wranglers have no problem finding customers among restaurants and private chefs, even though Brewer’s snails, boiled, shelled, and frozen, sell for about $50 a pound or two dollars a snail.
For one special customer in Seattle, he delivers live snails. Tarsan i Jane, owned by Perfecte and Alia Rocher, serves paella each Sunday. Often, that’s the snail-and-rabbit version that was part of Perfecte’s childhood in Valencia.
“By keeping your roots, you maintain some kind of integrity throughout the dish,” Alia says. A few customers’ eyebrows are raised when they read the ingredients, but they all seem happy in the end.
Still, growing Little Gray Farms into Bigger Gray Farms has proved more frustrating and expensive than Brewer ever imagined.
Because the snails are an agricultural pest, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tightly controls their interstate movement. Brewer can’t ship live snails even to a state that’s already infested. And when he needs more stock, he can’t have the animals shipped to him, even though the pests are established in Washington. He can’t just forage for snails on his property because they prefer groomed gardens and tilled fields. But right now, he can’t get his hands on the snails from places such as California, perhaps the snail capital of the U.S., that would love to get rid of them.
Still, Brewer is determined to make snail farming in America a thing. He’s created the Snail Raising Association of North America, an admittedly tiny trade group, to offer snail-husbandry advice, encourage others to take up gastropod wrangling, and advocate for looser restrictions. This isn’t anything like giant fields of corn, concentrated animal feeding operations, and other large agribusinesses that are better set up to absorb the costs of federal regulatory details and lobby for and receive government support. The USDA needs to think beyond common industrialized monocrops, Brewer says, and look to the foods of the future than can be sustainably raised by microbusinesses.
“In the right areas and with the proper safeguards, snails can be responsibly raised and a good source of nutrition,” he says. The snail isn’t native to Central Europe either, yet snail raising there is a profitable business for small-scale farmers. “While technically USDA will allow snail farming, the obstacles are expensive and unduly stringent.”
To comply with the federal government’s requirements, Brewer has built a fully contained indoor building so that he can receive snails from out of state. They have to be shipped in three containers: a box within a box within a box. The new building has only one door, with a vestibule before the snail area (think a space station airlock) to prevent escapes. Homeland Security required a six-foot-high fence around the building to discourage agricultural terrorism, he says, complete with “Keep Out” signs. Meeting all the rules is costing Brewer around $25,000.
A USDA spokesman said the agency would respond to Brewer’s critiques, but despite repeated requests, it never did. That said, snail wrangler Frederick Dargenton, owner of SoCal Escargot, sympathizes with Brewer’s problems but doesn’t share them.
Dargenton lives in California, otherwise known as garden-snail heaven. California has the temperate climate snails need, and its vast, irrigated agricultural fields, along with well-watered suburban yards, provides moisture and a feast of edibles. The snails devour citrus and avocado trees, strawberries, you name it. So Dargenton doesn’t need to breed snails; he forages them from organic farms that want these pests removed.
By foraging locally, Dargenton’s business doesn’t need to ship in triple-boxed snails. And while he sells some frozen snails outside of California, living in a state of 40 million means the French former chef—who hates the big, rubbery, tinny flavored snails found canned in supermarkets—has plenty of local customers for his live mollusks.
In contrast, Brewer’s imported snails won’t live in the wild until they are harvested for food. Once the snails arrive from distant origins, they will spend their entire lives in his new building, a little like the Hotel California. They’ll breed there, and their offspring will know no environment beyond its walls. The only way they’re allowed to leave is by dying—and being transformed from marauding mollusk to sustainably raised protein for a new generation.
The iconic, illuminated Silver Slipper has been restored to its original look.
Sinners seeking a taste of old Las Vegas can now get one step closer, thanks to the just-completed restoration and repainting of the iconic Silver Slipper.
For decades the Silver Slipper—a 10-foot-tall, illuminated, rotating piece of ladies' footwear—adorned its eponymous casino with just the right whiff of desert decadence. Originally built in 1950, the Silver Slipper became particularly notorious among Vegas casinos in 1964, when it became the first popular one to be shut down for cheating, on the grounds that it used “flat dice” that made the valuable craps combination of six and one harder to roll.
It eventually reopened, only to draw the ire of eccentric aviation magnate and Vegas kingpin Howard Hughes, who owned the neighboring Desert Inn. The reclusive Hughes feared that a photographer was stalking him from inside the giant shoe. So in 1968 he bought the casino and turned off the slipper for good. The casino was demolished in 1988, and the slipper languished at the Young Electric Sign Company, which then donated it (and many other signs) to the Neon Museum’s “Boneyard” of defunct Vegas signs.
A collaboration between the City of Las Vegas and the Neon Museum, the Las Vegas Signs Project, has brought nine historic signs blazing back to gaudy life along Las Vegas Boulevard, including the slipper. (A single restoration can cost upwards of $50,000, according to the museum.) Since the early 1960s, the bottom and top of the slipper had been painted a very Vegas red, but the restoration team wanted to return the slipper to its original 1950s hues—silver, gold, and blue. Specialists from the Neon Museum selected the specific shade of blue after analyzing photos of the slipper from the 1950s and early 1960s. To ensure maximum accuracy, collections manager Tracey Sprague explains, the team compared paint samples to the photographs under natural sunlight.
The slipper’s restored, cooler blue tone does seem to slightly de-Vegas the shiny high-heel, but it remains a metallic, historic pillar of illicit Americana.
Asbestos mining in Canada stopped only in the past decade.
Hidden in old buildings and under streets, asbestos—once thought of as a “miracle mineral”—is always lurking. Though today it might seem like a relic of the past, under new rules from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. government could approve new uses of asbestos in consumer products going forward, reports Fast Company.
There are still places where asbestos mining is a notable industry: Canada’s asbestos mines—including the mine at Asbestos, Quebec, once the largest in the world—only closed within the last 10 years, and in Russia, the town of Asbest is still a major center of asbestos production.
Asbestos has many strange properties and has been incorporated into manmade products going back thousands of years. Manufactured, it often comes into human environments as a textile or a dangerous powder, but in nature it appears as six different types of natural silicates. Part of what makes it uniquely useful is how its crystals form, into tiny, thin fibers. It can be woven into fabric, it’s resistant to fire, it dampens sound.
Modern asbestos mining started in the 19th century, and Canada became one of the leading producers of asbestos early on. In the 1850s, significant deposits of chrysotile, the most commonly used form of asbestos, were found in Thetford, Quebec, south of Quebec City. By the end of the 19th century, the Jeffrey Mine, about 50 miles southwest, had also become a major source of asbestos, and when workers settled near the mine, they called their town Asbestos.
At the height of asbestos mining, around the 1970s, there were dozens of asbestos mines in the U.S., but about half of the asbestos used around the world was coming from this one mine in Canada. Usually, asbestos mining required several long and linear mines, but because of a rare circular pattern in this deposit, the miners could simply create a pit mine and start digging out the mineral. Over time, as the pit expanded, the workers had to move their town to keep it away from the expanding circumference of the mine.
Of course, there were problems with asbestos mining. By the middle of the 20th century, the health effects of breathing in asbestos fibers, which can cause cancer, were becoming well known. Environmental agencies starting controlling its use more tightly, and workers sickened by their jobs started demanding compensation and greater protections. Still, the mines themselves were slow to close, as there was still demand in India and other parts of the world for the product. The last asbestos mine in the U.S. closed in 2002; Canada shut down its asbestos mines in 2012.
Today, the town of Asbestos, Quebec, is still tied to its mineral legacy. A local brewery has named its beers Mineur (Miner); Spello, a mining term, and L’Or Blanc—white gold, as asbestos was known. The brewery also made a pale ale with water drawn from the bottom of the mine. They tested the water, one brewer told the BBC, and it was “perfect.” There’s also an Asbestos Mineral Museum, and it’s possible to tour the old mine or see it from a platform at the museum.
The cucumber straightener was a marvel of British horticulture.
In the mid-19th century, England was no country for crooked cucumbers. A curly, misshapen, or discolored specimen might be tossed to the pigs, who certainly wouldn’t mind. But by 1845, more perfect cucurbits were within reach. To straighten out a wayward cucumber, a 19th-century British gardener might have told you, you just needed to give it a little love. And maybe a giant glass straightjacket.
Long, tubular, and made of glass, the cucumber straightener is perhaps the most simple and superfluous gardening tool in history. But in the eyes of British gardeners, it rectified an intolerable perversity: a hooking, twisting cucumber.
Long before England was obsessed with straight cucumbers, it was disgusted by them. The first cucumbers made their way to Great Britain in the 1300s, and inspired great disdain among the English that persisted for centuries. According to 18th-century British writer Samuel Johnson, it was commonly said among English physicians that a cucumber "should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” The vine-growing fruit was even dubbed the “cowcumber,” suggesting the vegetable was so vile it only ought to touch the lips of livestock.
It wasn’t until the iconic cucumber sandwich became popular among Queen Victoria's family that the produce began to gain prestige. Subsequently, the delicate sandwich became an iconic teatime snack in British high society, and the cucumber, suddenly, was in vogue. To ensure the fruit could be slipped easily between slices of bread, it needed to be sliced thinly and evenly. Which called for a straighter cucumber.
This might not seem like a big deal, but growing straight cukes is no simple task. Cucumbers begin to curve for a number of reasons, from humidity and temperature shifts to poor pollination. Some varieties of cucumbers curl easier than others, too. So unless gardeners really knew what they were doing, they’d likely end up tossing some of the harvest to the hogs.
For British engineer George Stephenson, however, leaving a cucumber’s fate up to chance wasn’t an option. A tinkerer from an early age, Stephenson spent most of his life working on the first British railway system. Best known for creating the “Rocket,” an early steam locomotive, and the first public inter-city line for locomotives, he became renowned as the “Father of the Railways.” But he was also a horticulturist at heart, and as his locomotive career wound down, Stephenson took the innovation and perseverance that helped him excel on the tracks into the garden.
Stephenson was no leisurely gardener. Out of passion (and fierce rivalry with his friend Paxton, the gardener for the Duke of Devonshire), he began erecting vineries, pineries, apiaries, melon houses, and forcing houses, where he grew tropical fruits and vegetables. He vowed to grow pineapples the size of pumpkins, and engineered melon baskets from wire gauze to assist their growth. He was largely successful, too, winning a prize for his pines, and growing nationally acclaimed grapes.
His cucumbers, however, gave him trouble. Despite adjusting temperature, light, and the position from which they would grow, Stephenson’s cucumbers would relentlessly curl. Frustrated, the civil engineer crafted hollow glass cylinders in his Newcastle steam engine factory for his Tapton House garden.
The device was a long, delicate, glass tube that fit a growing cucumber like a giant glove. According to landscape artist and historian Mark Morrison, a wire was strung through the top of the contraption to hang the straighteners in the garden or greenhouse. As the cucumbers grew, the vine would be fed through the tube, so that the cucumber hung vertically like a giant, green, phallic ornament within the narrow glass brace.
When Stephenson removed his cucumbers from the tube, he was pleasantly surprised. The cucumbers, indeed, had grown to fit the straight mold of the glass cylinders they had grown inside. It was said that he showed off the final product to a group of visitors and declared, “I think I have bothered them noo!”
An enterprising lad through and through, Stephenson patented the big glass tube, which became a popular tool for well-to-do Victorian gardeners and farmers. Using straightening glasses was likely a common tactic among those entering cucumber competitions all about size and curvature—or lack thereof. According to the Gardener’s Chronicle, the winner of the 1848 Stockport Cucumber Show clocked in at 22.5 inches long and, most importantly, was “perfectly straight and level as the barrel of a gun.”
However, as 19th-century writer Isabella Beeton pointed out, using a cucumber straightener did not come without risk. “When the tubes are used, it is sometimes necessary to watch them,” she wrote, “in order that, during the swelling of the fruit, they are not wedged into the tubes so tightly that they are difficult to withdraw.”
Eventually, the glass straighteners went out of style. According to Morrison, they died out, like many Victorian-era tools, as the Industrial Revolution hit full stride. “Years ago, all the cucumber straighteners were blown, and all the tools were made by hand by a local blacksmith," he says. "Once the Industrial Revolution hit and manufacturing started, a lot of the art was lost.” The blown glass tubes were costly, labor-intensive, and, perhaps, not wholly necessary. Morrison points out that simply hanging the cucumbers vertically produces a relatively straight fruit. In the end, the glass tubes were likely replaced by vertical farming methods and the non-curving varietals many cucumber farmers use today.
But even as Stephenson’s glass straighteners disappeared, the desire for straight cucumbers persisted. Largely, Morrison points out, this was a relic of the times and a society structured around royalty. “We joke, of course, the royal family could never eat a crooked cucumber,” he says. But he also notes that there was a practical application: The curvier the cukes, the fewer could fit in a crate or a shipping container.
In fact, as of quite recently, E.U. regulations discouraged dramatic curvature in cucumbers. Until 2008, it was required by law that all Class I cucumbers sold across Europe be “practically straight,” and “bent with a gradient of no more than 1/10.” Though the technology has changed, the appetite for aesthetically pleasing produce hasn’t.
The Skovshoved gas station, in Denmark, is an unbelievably glamorous-looking place to fill up your car. Designed by Arne Jacobsen, it features an elegant, rounded concrete awning, which is supported by a single column. Gas pumps sit neatly on either side. The main building is covered in white ceramic tiles, and its only decoration is a large clock face.
Gas stations like this one are a testament to the concept that even the most functional places can be beautiful. While service stations can often be regarded as a soulless necessity—a place to refuel the car and grab a fast meal on the way to somewhere better—Gestalten's new book It’s a Gas!: The Allure of the Gas Station reveals that these seemingly mundane structures can also be landmarks and architectural icons.
The Bomber gas station in Milwaukie, Oregon, was certainly the latter. After World War II, its owner, Art Lacey, purchased a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber from an Air Force base in Oklahoma. For decades, the B-17 sat perched above the gas pumps, its vast wings providing shade and, of course, a photo opportunity. (The above image was taken by John Margolies, the photographer and notable roadside attraction enthusiast, in 1980.) But today, it's no longer watching over a gas station—the plane is now being restored with the hope that it will fly once again.
In the early to mid-20th century, American gas stations could take quirky forms, everything from teapots to seashells. But today, gas stations in general are in decline. (The Gestalten book includes a section on abandoned gas stations, featuring signs that once beckoned drivers in neon or hand-painted lettering now rusty and faded.) Electric cars need charging stations, not gas pumps. In Europe, Shell has responded by incorporating EV charging facilities into its stations. As electric cars proliferate, traditional gas stations are likely to need a considerable overhaul, and we may need far fewer of them.
For now, however, linger over this selection of images from It's a Gas!
For decades, these retreats have offered so much more than outdoor fun.
Summer camp might advertise itself as a simple return to nature, some healthy fresh air and wholesome fun, but there is not now and never has been anything simple about it. American Jewish summer camp in particular has a very long and winding ideological history, one dotted with racism, socialism, political protest, and above all a sense that summer camp is a well of power, a resource to be optimized.
Jews attend summer camp at a higher rate than Americans as a whole, though not nearly as high a rate as Mormons, but the particulars of the Jewish camping experience—begun due to exclusion, changing rapidly due to politics and social movements and the Holocaust—put it in a unique place.
Summer camping in the United States began as a movement in the late 19th century, a sort of rebellion against increasing urbanization and industrialization. By the late 1920s, Jewish summer camps had gotten explicitly ideological: socialist, communist, anarchist, Zionist, Yiddish. Despite this, they were, and remained until after World War II, almost entirely secular. The Yiddish camps focused on Yiddish language and culture, and the Zionist camps on building, farming, and a connection to Israel; neither put much of an emphasis on religion.
A socialist summer camp would have no individual money, and any packages a camper received from home would be divided equally to the rest of the camp. Labor was highly valued; a punishment for bad behavior would never be, say, cleaning the bathrooms, because bathroom duty was a noble and important role in the camp society.
Zionist summer camps prepared kids to move to Palestine (which they sometimes called EY, which stands for Eretz Yisrael, or “the land of Israel”). The kids were taught to farm and build, and focused on Jewish arts and music, including would come to be called Israeli folk dancing. Yiddish camps, which often included a nearby camp for parents, taught Yiddish language and history. Israel, or Palestine, or Jewish history, mostly replaced the weird often-fake American Indian mythology that was and remains so prevalent in non-Jewish summer camps. But everything changed with World War II.
Before the Second World War, American Jews had never seen themselves as the center of the Jewish world: that was in Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Hungary. American Jews were unsettled, immature. They hadn’t unpacked in their new home yet. But following the Holocaust, the weight of leading Jewish culture settled on the shoulders of the Americans. Summer camp was a vital part of this effort. Such camps had for decades been seen by various groups—the labor socialists, cultural Zionists—as a fundamental tool for shaping the youth. “Camp leaders were decidedly critical of ‘suburban Judaism’ that they took to be an inadequate Jewish life created by their campers’ parents who, to their minds, had limited education and too little understanding of Judaism,” writes Prell in an article on the history of Jewish summer camps. There was also, says Prell, a major concern that the parents of baby boomers had been too focused on assimilation rather than developing and maintaining a distinct American Jewish culture.
Summer camp had already proven a valuable place to shape the youth in non-religious molds, as seen in the socialist and Zionist camps from past decades. But in the wake of genocide, some of these Jews in positions of power within Jewish communities—prominent rabbis, organizers, spokespeople—decided that those tools should be applied to Jewish religion and culture.
This is when the first religious Jewish summer camps began. Camp Massad—the word means “foundation” in Hebrew—launched in 1941, servicing the New York area, first in the Catskills and then across the Pennsylvania border in the Poconos. (The Poconos and Catskills are the same mountain range; they just have different names in Pennsylvania and New York.) Massad was the first major summer camp to use the Hebrew language exclusively; it also brought in a contingent of Jewish campers from what would shortly become Israel to promote the possibility of a Jewish state, and emphasize the importance of the idea of Israel to American Jews.
Massad was extremely influential not just for Jewish summer camps but also for worldwide Judaism. Hebrew, until this point, was not widely spoken, with Jews speaking either English or various localized languages like Yiddish. Many modern Hebrew words, like those for sports, were actually invented at Massad.
Among the Massad campers were the young Chicagoan founders of what would become Camp Ramah, one of the most important Jewish summer camps in history. Unlike most other Jewish camps, Ramah was (and is) a network of camps under a centralized deciding force, in this case the Conservative movement.
As a quick primer for those unfamiliar: American religious Judaism is split up into several branches usually called denominations. The four biggest are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, and they differ mostly in the level of observance (roughly those are in descending order), in addition to a bunch of smaller liturgical issues.
Ramah was set up and owned by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the dominant force in Conservative Judaism, during the early 1940s, specifically as a tool for Jewish education. The first Ramah opened in Conover, Wisconsin in 1947, and swiftly expanded. Today they have locations in Wisconsin, Ontario, the Berkshires, Georgia, Colorado, California, and elsewhere. There were often in areas without large Jewish populations; Wisconsin was also home to an important Reform camp. I asked Sarna whether it was difficult for Jewish camps to set up in non-Jewish areas. He said there weren’t really any conflicts. “Many of these places where there were summer camps, they were perfectly happy to have Jews in the summer,” he said. “As long as they left.”
The JTS was a little hesitant at first to spend all this money on summer camps, but this was a dramatic time for the Jewish people, and they were convinced that summer camps might be the best and only hope for Jewish survival. “Jewish education represented both a defensive response to adversity and a form of cultural resistance, a resolve to maintain Judaism in the face of opposition and danger,” wrote Jonathan Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, in an article on the topic. “It also promised to prepare the community for the new responsibilities that it faced in the wake of the European Jewish catastrophe.”
The camp founders felt a weight on their shoulders. “They're overwhelmingly contemptuous of the parents of the baby boom, who were raised in America and who know almost nothing about Jewish life,” says Prell. “They just didn't have the upbringing, because their parents were immigrants and didn't know how to translate their old life.”
Ramah, and the camps that would follow, were focused on addressing this issue. A phrase you see again and again, says Prell, is this: “The whole day will be ours.” Post-Holocaust American Jews realized what the socialist and Zionist camps before them realized: summer camp is the only place where they can have unfettered access to Jewish kids, the best opportunity to shape young minds for the future. “There is this sense that we can take clay and mold it into a meaningful Jewish life for these kids,” says Prell. “And we can do it because we have them all day, and we can do it because we can get them away from their parents. We can get them away from transistor radios, and the suburbs, which is fairly new to Jews.” That shaping took various forms: instilling a sense of history, pride, and knowledge, but also social justice and civil rights, and a desire to form Jewish families and raise more Jewish kids.
This began a wildly experimental phase for Jewish summer camps, one that would last into the 1970s. The 1940s and 1950s were focused on making American Jewish kids understand that they lived in two worlds, the Jewish world and the American world, and that both were vital. America as a whole at this time, and especially in the Jewish community, was very into American triumphalism; We beat the Nazis! These camps, while they kept Kosher and observed Shabbat, also celebrated the Fourth of July.
But the coming of the 1960s meant a huge upheaval in the American social fabric. Camp Ramah was centrally owned, but the Reform summer camps were all independent, and the entire system was much more fluid than it might seem. Jews in the 1960s were heavily involved in the anti-war effort, in the civil rights movement, in equal rights for women, in immigration, anti-racism, drug legalization, sex positivity, all kinds of progressive movements. Many of the young counselors at Jewish summer camps were, during the non-summer months, organizers and protestors in college, and their work assuredly did not stop once they went out to Wisconsin or the Catskills for the summer. This wasn’t necessarily unique to Jewish counselors, but the Jewish history of activism and Jewish participation in the civil rights movement made it pretty likely that Jewish camps would follow suit.
In some camps, counselors would perform role-playing. They’d come into the mess hall during breakfast and, without saying anything, gather up all the kids with a certain hair color or eye color. Those kids would be separated from the group for a day or more, made to eat different food, do different activities. Then they’d be reunited and the entire camp would discuss. What does it mean to be a member of an ethnic minority? How does this apply to the Holocaust and to race relations in America? What responsibility do American Jews have to stamp out racial injustice?
Role-playing extended to simpler messages as well, attempting to get Jewish kids to embrace their Jewishness and make Jewish choices. These efforts could sometimes be clumsy, and even offensive. One former camper, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled a role-playing game in which young campers—she was seven years old at the time—were given an egg, representing their “future child,” and a box. The egg would be placed into a box and rolled down a hill; the materials given for padding would vary based on their answers to questions. Pick the right answer and you’d get some protective padding. The wrong one? Rocks and sticks, which would cause the eggbaby to break.
“The question I remember is: Your kid is going to kindergarten and you are considering two schools,” says the former camper. “One is a secular school with computers (a big deal in 1994 or whenever this was) and one is a Jewish school with no computers.” She picked the secular school with computers and was promptly given a rock.
“These are camps not concerned just with summer fun,” says Prell. “These are camps that are trying to teach, as many left-wing camps at the time were trying to teach, what these issues have to do with us, what is our responsibility and how are we going to act on it.” Camp Ramah instituted a program for the older campers called American Seminar, in which campers were required to go to nearby cities and register voters, or volunteer in mental hospitals, or help repaint the houses of black Americans. “Camp is where I first learned about social justice and activism and that I, as a young person, could actually do something,” says Valerie Weisler, who attended a Ramah day camp and then worked there as a counselor.
It’s also worth noting that there was, and remains, a wide variety of Jewish summer camp experiences: not just in the type of ideology, but also in degree. Many Jewish summer camps were, even during the 1960s, pretty low-key. “I really don’t think a lot of the counselors’ political views were rubbed off on us,” says Barbara Berger, who attended a Jewish camp called Camp Oquago starting in 1969. But Berger, who grew up fairly non-observant in a very Jewish suburb of New York, and ended up raising kids in a Pennsylvania suburb with few Jews, says Jewish summer camp affected her feelings about Judaism. “It made me realize that, moving out here ... that I wanted for my kids to make Jewish friends, and have a connection that way. I always lit the candles on Friday nights when the kids were young, because I knew I had to make an extra effort out here.”
Summer camp suffered a downturn in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s in general, and Jewish summer camps found themselves in a tricky situation. Jews were now assimilated enough that many Jewish kids attended a non-Jewish camp. (I myself went to a YMCA camp in the early 2000s; despite the “Young Men’s Christian Association” thing, my camp was heavily Jewish.) Today, camps are rising in popularity again, but Jewish summer camps have entirely new issues to deal with. The reign of Trump, rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the U.S., and above all the issue of the Israeli occupation of Palestine are major topics that counselors are attempting to address. In 2018, the effects of the #MeToo movement have many Jewish camps looking into sexual harassment; a minor scandal found Camp Ramah refusing to allow what it called “anti-Israel educational messages” at camp.
“Campers are definitely taught to love Israel unconditionally, which can be rather controversial now,” says Ivy Cohen, who attended a Reform summer camp in Massachusetts. “I do feel like as I got older, more frequently we were given various sides of an issue as well as different perspectives, and encouraged to form our own beliefs.”
Summer camps in the U.S. have never, ever been simple. Whether an attempt to fight urbanization or raise good socialists, Zionists, American Jews, or progressives, summer camps have power. They provide a place where children and teenagers can encounter viewpoints and education that don’t exist in their normal lives, but could shape their futures. In some cases, that can provoke conflict at home. Jewish kids might come back from summer camp and wonder why their parents don’t keep Kosher, why they don’t go to synagogue every week, why nobody talks about moving to Israel. In some cases, Jewish camp culture influenced non-camp religion; Israeli culture and folk art became prominent in Reform synagogues where it had never been before, and even the actual music changed, with a new form of folk-influenced religious music that came from campers.
On the whole, Jewish summer camps really did work in some ways; many Jewish homes became more religious. A study found that Camp Ramah alums are much more likely than other Jews to spend time in or “feel an emotional attachment to” Israel, attend synagogue regularly, and marry within the faith. These studies have focused on religious Judaism; there is not a corpus of data about the secular effects of Jewish summer camp. Are alums of Jewish summer camp more likely to donate to charity, vote for progressive candidates, take part in protests? We don’t really know. But those have been goals of Jewish summer camps, whether or not they’re explicitly stated. Says Weisler: “Jewish camping molded me as a Jewish person, and a person, period.”
Tell us about all the alluring (or disgusting?) scents that always transport you.
Scent is one of the most powerful memory triggers we have. It’s so powerful that sometimes I can more easily remember what my childhood home smelled like than what it actually looked like. For me, the slightly musty/dusty smell of freshly vacuumed shag carpet and the aging timbers of my family’s small fixer-upper bring back a stronger sense of home than any picture or video. What smells remind you of that specific place you call home? We want to hear about them.
Maybe it’s the smell of a roaring fireplace or the scent of a special family recipe cooking on the stove. Is it a loved one’s favorite perfume or a fruit tree in the backyard (just inventing these scents is making me write like I’m in a Thomas Kinkade painting...)? Maybe it’s just new paint or a specific cleaning product. Whatever that combination of smells is that transports you back to that specific place in your memory, we want to hear about it.
Use the form below to tell us about the smells that remind you of home, in as descriptive detail as you can. What experiences do you associate with the scents that make them so evocative for you? We can’t wait to hear about what you smell!
Born out of Prohibition speakeasies, they're getting a second wind.
From the outside, a Midwestern "supper club" might seem like a typical, if slightly old-fashioned, restaurant. But these establishments, especially concentrated in Wisconsin, are their own genre. They’re distinguished by taxidermy, dark wood, and their location: romantically remote, on the borders of lakes or forests. The specials have a cheerful regularity—fish fries on Friday, chicken on Sunday—and on other nights, customers feast on steaks, seafood, bread, soup, and complimentary relish trays of cheese, salads, and pickled vegetables. Washed down with cocktails and boozy ice cream drinks, it's a bountiful eating experience. It's also one with an inextricable whiff of the past about it, something that has both helped and hurt the supper club tradition.
For many diners, their love of supper clubs is partly nostalgia. Documentary filmmaker and supper club-chronicler Ron Faiola remembers going with his grandfather during fishing trips. "Growing up in Wisconsin, that's something you do," he says. Supper clubs are grandfatherly restaurants—their heyday was the post-war time of plenty. But, Faiola says, the supper-club's model goes back further, to Prohibition-era New York "in the speakeasies," where people furtively drank during dinner. "Under your table, there'd be a bottle."
These establishments became entrenched in Wisconsin for several reasons. For one, out-of-the-way restaurants were great places to drink clandestinely. For another, booze was more plentiful near the Canadian border. And while New Yorkers no longer needed clubs to dine and drink after Prohibition, supper clubs remained important social gathering places in small Wisconsin towns. Upscale entertainment spots as well as restaurants, they’ve always hosted birthday parties, anniversaries, and events.
While many have a woodsy theme, one long-gone supper club built in 1961 was famously shaped like a pyramid and filled with pseudo-Egyptian decor. But many still-existing supper clubs depend on their surroundings as an attraction. "It overlooks the water and has beautiful sunsets," Faiola says of the supper club Ishnala in Wisconsin Dells, where live trees grow through the dining room. One corner table with a superlative view is constantly booked for engagements.
Apart from the food and decor, supper clubs also function differently from typical restaurants. Many are only open for dinner, or "supper" in Midwestern parlance. They tend to be owned by families, who may even live on the premises. "You're in their house, basically," Faiola says. Employees are family members, or stick around long enough to become family. Supper clubs have unusual hours, based on the family's schedule, and tend to be passed from generation to generation. That's the case with Don Petersilka, owner of the Mill Supper Club, an establishment that Faiola says has the "Holy Trinity" of supper club decor: taxidermy, twinkly lights, and dark wood. "My grandparents bought the Mill in March of 1963," Petersilka says, and he bought it from his parents in 1991.
Many supper clubs are resolutely classic. One famed supper club, Milwaukee Five O'Clock Steakhouse, proudly announces on its website that it is "Rich in Tradition and Free of Trends." That applies to the menu offerings, as well as the decor. While food is always made from scratch and varies slightly from club to club, Faiola says the only way to describe the meat-and-seafood heavy meals is "American cuisine," and a lot of it. The brandy Old-Fashioned, served sweet, is a mainstay. "Wisconsin loves brandy," Faiola laughs.
But the changing restaurant scene has left some supper clubs behind. There are more alternatives, and chains offering quick, conveninet dinners have established themselves in city centers. The bar is the heart of the supper club, dispensing martinis and brandy Old-Fashioneds (it's even where customers place their dinner orders). But drunk-driving campaigns have spurred people to drink closer to home. "Places used to be open until one or two in the morning; now they're closed at nine," Faiola says. Aging owners, clientele, and even buildings have spelled the end of supper clubs—Faiola says many burned down.
The 2008 recession compounded these problems. For Faiola, it was especially vivid. His video production and photography work dried up, and he decided to travel Wisconsin, gathering material for what became a documentary on supper clubs, followed by two books. "Supper club owners, they didn't know what the economy was going to do," he says. "People weren't going out to dinner anywhere, really." Business slowed, and supper clubs closed.
Help came from an unlikely source: the television show Mad Men, which Faiola says promoted a "retro-cocktail" vogue. "People wanted to go back to these restaurants of yesteryear." When the economy began to recover, several new clubs opened, and old ones renovated. In 2016, the state of Wisconsin made supper clubs a highlight of its annual tourism campaign, and in 2017, governor Scott Walker declared August 31 "Supper Club Day." Faiola says he's met people using his books to visit new supper clubs, one by one, and reckons there are hundreds across the state.
Business still isn't easy post-recession. Supper clubs’ decadent, multi-course meals remain a rare treat for most diners (not a weekly occurrence), food costs have climbed, and staff is hard to find. But both Faiola and Petersilka say that supper clubs won't change. Tradition is what makes them special: the ritual of driving to a beautiful place, sitting with a drink under the glassy eye of a taxidermy deer, and eating until you burst.
From Dumbo to the Haunted Mansion, and much much more.
For years, the Southern California home of Richard Kraft, an agent for film and theater composers, was known as Kraftland or, sometimes, “The Happiest Place in Encino.” It was filled with bits and pieces of Disneyland—posters, art, toys, even parts of old rides. For years, Kraft was one of the world’s most avid collectors of Disneyland memorabilia, but now he’s ready to let it all go.
Before the collection is auctioned off at the end of August, though, it’s on exhibit in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles. “That’s From Disneyland!” has it all—carriages from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, original drawings from early in the park’s conception, the animatronic parrot that once lived in the Tiki Room.
Kraft started his collection after his older brother David died in 1993. Their childhood visits to Disneyland had been a highlight of their lives. The first item he bought was a poster of Autopia in Tomorrowland, and then the collection just grew and grew, until it started to take over the house.
“There was a ‘PeopleMover’ vehicle decorating the backyard, the ‘Submarine Voyage’ Sea Serpent lounged by the pool, a ‘Mr. Toad’ car plonked in the library, six ‘It’s a Small World’ dolls gyrated in the foyer, a ‘Snow White’s Scary Adventures’ mine car adorned the front yard, a ‘Rocket Rods’ vehicle parked in the garage, and a ‘Dumbo’ ride vehicle soared victoriously over the living room,” Kraft recalls. (That Dumbo item was the most expensive piece in the collection—Kraft bought it for $35,000 at auction.)
Bees make honey on the rooftops of the Notre Dame and Musée d'Orsay.
The story of Jean Paucton, the Parisian beekeeper, reads like a cross between a children’s book and an urban legend. It starts in the 1980s when the novice beekeeper—who also happens to be the property master for the famed Opéra Garnier—gets his first beekeeping kit. Surprised to learn that the bees can only be kept alive in a sealed hive for 48 hours, he realizes he’s going to have to find temporary accommodations for them until he can drive them to their intended home, his country house outside Paris.
Then, a colleague of Paucton’s, who had apparently been raising trout inside the Opéra's famed reservoir, recommended he keep the bees on the building’s roof. There, the hive could be opened and the bees would be free to buzz around without hurting anyone. Paucton did, and he soon became a preeminent figure of the French beekeeping set, selling his homemade honey in the theater’s gift shop alongside souvenir keychains and recordings of “Carmen.” Although he packed up his Opéra rooftop hives in 2013, he seems to have helped make beekeeping on the roofs of Paris landmarks a bit of a thing.
Since then, Parisian beekeepers, or apiculteurs, have quietly kept hundreds of hives on the rooftops of some of the most famous buildings in Paris—often without the general public knowing anything about it. The Opéra Garnier, the Musée d'Orsay, the École Militaire, Notre Dame, the Grand Palais, and the Institut de France are just a handful of major monuments where area beekeepers raise their colonies. Privately owned buildings, such as the famed jewelry store Boucheron and La Tour d’Argent (the restaurant that claims to have introduced the fork to the French), also allow beekeepers to practice their métier, or job, on their roofs.
“Each site is different,” Audric de Campeau, a beekeeper of Le Miel de Paris (The Honey of Paris) explains in an email. “For most of them, mostly at the beginning, I just approached them and asked. For some of them I just have a handshake, for some others, a contract.” That said, the growing practice is not without its obstacles. The more popular beekeeping becomes, the more regulated it gets, and modern-day urban beekeepers are encountering old-fashioned bureaucracy.
As many of the marquee hives are situated on publicly owned rooftops, paperwork and red tape are becoming a serious nuisance, if not an outright deterrent for other beekeepers to join the fold. “It is much faster and easier to deal with private companies, who in addition often buy crops made on their establishment,” writes Bruno Petit, of Un Apiculteur Près Chez Vous (A Beekeeper Near You). “The public sector has only disadvantages.” That said, beekeeping is unquestionably on the upswing. According to Mathilde Wadoux, a PR representative for one of these beekeeping landmarks, the Grand Palais, there were approximately 300 hives in Paris at the start of this decade, while there are over 700 today.
But people’s eagerness to become urban beekeepers has also posed its own set of problems. “Certain districts of Paris and Montreuil are totally saturated in hives,” Petit adds. “This represents a risk of famine for the hives of these neighborhoods. The flora is no longer sufficient to feed [them].”
And then there’s the question of the bees themselves. Petit recalls how some of his fellow beekeepers were asked to remove hives from the roof of Fouquet's, one of the city’s most famous restaurants, when their bees started drinking out of the flower vases adorning dining tables. Petit says he was asked by the Pasteur Institute to take his bees off a roof when they were found drinking stagnant water. Surprisingly, pollution isn’t an issue for Parisian beekeepers and, as Petit notes, air pollution doesn’t appear to affect urban honey’s quality. “We had hives on the roofs of two Monoprix stores in Paris,” he adds. “For each crop (over a period of three years), they analyzed about 30 pollutants and found nothing abnormal in the honey.”
Urban bees tend to be overachievers, producing higher honey yields than their rural counterparts. This is thought to be due to the fact that Parisian bees feed mostly on window box flowers, apartment terrace foliage, and flora in local parks. That means they’re not privy to the same neonicotinoid pesticides that their country cousins have been exposed to for years. Another factor is the city temperature, which tends to run slightly higher than surrounding rural areas.
True to form, Paris also offers its bees an exceptional variety of meal options, which greatly contributes to the increase in production. “The difference in yield comes mainly from the floral diversity in Paris,” Petit says. “Orange trees, jasmine, and other exotic plants can be found on the Paris terraces.” That diversity is also said to be responsible for Paris-produced honey’s unusual taste, which people have likened to cherry and bubble gum.
Unfortunately, while the yields are high, so are the prices. Although Parisian bees are more prolific honey producers, there are fewer of them than in the country. Which means that city honey can run about 122 Euros per kilogram, or approximately $65 per pound. In comparison, the average cost of high-quality honey produced in the country goes for about 23 to 50 Euros per kilogram (or around $12 to $23 per pound).
In recent years, city honey has gone from being a gift shop novelty to engrained in Parisian culture, a phenomenon that can be traced in its acceptance by the town’s notoriously revered and discerning dining rooms. De Campeau has worked with the likes of Guy Savoy and Thierry Marx, and in 2016, Michelin-starred chef Jérôme Banctel started incorporating his honey in the dishes he serves at the restaurants of La Réserve hotel. “Parisians love more and more to buy local,” de Campeau says. “And the honey is really delicious, it's not a marketing thing ... [it’s] a real prestigious recognition of our work.”
This acceptance is no small feat in a city that boasts entire supermarket aisles devoted to honey. Visitors to Le Bon Marché’s La Grande Épicerie Paris food hall, a store that is to food what a showroom is to cars, can now find local honey varieties on the shelves. The department store Au Printemps installed hives on their roofs last year and plans to sell its honey in Printemps du Goût, their new gastronomy department dedicated to French food products.
The craze comes full circle, given that the bee has been a symbol of France since Napoleon adopted it as his personal emblem. The tiny insect adorns everything from the façade of the Musée de Louvre to the perfume bottles of Guerlain, a storied French perfume house that started a “Bee University” conference in 2017 to discuss declining bee populations and potential solutions. Now, thanks to some very dedicated people, Parisians have come to value the honey as much as the iconic insect that makes it.
