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The Very Real Search for the Bible's Mythical Manna

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Scholars, soldiers, and scientists have long puzzled over the supernatural substance.

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When the Israelites escape the pharaoh’s army in the Book of Exodus, they are left to wander the desert, half-starving. What is the point of leaving Egypt, they ask themselves, only to perish from hunger in the wilderness? Could dying in freedom really be preferable to living in chains? According to the text, God addresses Moses during this discord, telling him, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.” The next day, “upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”

Manna, the heaven-sent food said to have sustained the Israelites for 40 years, has long captured the imagination of scholars, soldiers, and scientists alike. Many have mined biblical verses for clues about the Old Testament substance. Adding to the puzzle are the other descriptions of the food in the Bible: on hot days, manna melted in the sun. If not gathered quickly enough, it rotted and bred worms. In Exodus, it’s referred to as “like coriander seed, white,” with a taste “like wafers made with honey.” Numbers, on the other hand, likens the flavor to “fresh oil” and describes how the Israelites “ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it.”

In addition to this list of traits and possible culinary applications, manna also had seemingly supernatural qualities as well. It spontaneously regenerated each morning, even in convenient double quantities on the day before the sabbath. According to the Jewish mystical treatise known as the Zohar, the consumption of manna imparted sacred knowledge of the divine. Another Jewish text, The Book of Wisdom, even claims that the flavor of manna magically changed according to the tastes of the person who ate it.

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Commentary on manna is not exclusive to the Jewish tradition. In the New Testament, manna is mentioned in both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. In a sermon delivered shortly after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Jesus compares God’s gift of body-nourishing manna to his own ability to eternally nourish the soul: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.” References to manna are also present in Islamic texts: one Hadith passage has the prophet Muhammad likening desert truffles to manna.

Moses and his followers were apparently befuddled by their strange foodstuff. Exodus relates that they “wist [knew] not what it was” that they were eating. As for what the Israelites said upon first beholding their heavenly sustenance, translators and scholars are deeply divided. The King James Bible renders the phrase "man hu" as “this is manna.” Others parse the Israelites’ words as “This is a gift.” Still others have the Israelites reacting with a quizzical “What is this?”—a confusion that would be shared by those who later endeavored to figure out what manna could be.

Over the years, a number of scientists have also attempted to pin down a real-world analogue for manna. For some, like Israeli entomologist Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer, such an activity was an opportunity to use ancient sources to glean information about little-studied natural phenomena. Biologist Roger S. Wotton, whose study “What Was Manna?” runs through the varied theories surrounding the supernatural substance, believed that the exercise could lead to a more skeptical reading of the Bible.

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The ideas advanced by scholars over the years vary as widely as their motivations. In their book Plants of the Bible, botanists Harold and Alma Moldenke argue that there were several kinds of food collectively known as manna. One of these, they posit, is a swift-growing algae (from the genus Nostoc) known to carpet the desert floor in Sinai when enough dew on the ground allowed it to grow. The Moldenkes also make the case that a number of lichen species (Lecanora affinus, L. esculenta, and L. fruticulosa) native to the Middle East have been known to shrivel up and travel tumbleweed-like on the wind, or even “rain down” when dry. Nomadic pastoralists, they report, use the lichen to make a type of bread.

The lichen theory, the Moldenkes argue, would explain both how the Israelites prepared their manna and why they might have spoken of it as having fallen from heaven. A multi-decade diet exclusively of algae or lichen would certainly explain why the Israelites complain bitterly that the lack of normal food had left them feeling like their very souls had dried away. Cambridge historian R.A. Donkin also notes that L. esculenta was used in the Arab world as a medicine, an additive to honey wine, and a fermentation agent.

The idea of a desert-growing food also had a military application. According to Donkin, the troops of Alexander the Great might have staved off starvation by eating L. esculenta while on campaign. French forces stationed in Algeria in the 19th century experimented with lichen, their candidate for biblical manna. They hoped that a readily available desert foodstuff as a source of nutrition for soldiers and horses in arid areas could allow for the consolidation of colonial power.

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Poking a hole in the lichen theory, however, is the fact that L. esculenta, one of the most commonly cited possibilities for a “manna lichen,” doesn’t grow in Sinai. Instead, the current frontrunner in the manna quest is not lichen or algae but a type of sticky secretion found on common desert plants. Insects that rest on the bark of certain shrubs leave behind a substance that can solidify into pearl-like, sweet-tasting globules. Often referred to as manna, this secretion has both culinary and medicinal uses. In Iranian traditional medicine, one variety is used as a treatment for neonatal jaundice. In his 1947 article “The Manna of Sinai,” Bodenheimer floats the theory that this substance may have been what the ancient Israelites ate as well. He also identifies the species of scale insects and plant lice whose larvae and females produce the so-called “honeydew.”

In recent times, some have gone past trying to pinpoint what manna might be and attempted to taste the biblical food for themselves. Last summer, the Washington Post reported on D.C. chef Todd Gray’s quest to make manna the next big trend in haute cuisine. The manna that Gray and other chefs such as Wylie Dufresne use is a sweet resin imported from Iran that sells for $35 an ounce. But stringent trade sanctions placed upon Iran in recent years have forced Gray to improvise his own ersatz versions (one substitute manna blended sumac, sesame seeds, and fennel pollen). Such legal hurdles add yet another layer of inaccessibility to a substance wondered over and quested after for millennia.


Found: A Ship Once Described By Herodotus

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A wreck discovered in the Nile suggests the ancient Greek historian's description was spot on.

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Herodotus is known as the father of history, but some of his writings have created more questions than answers. In his account of a fifth-century B.C. trip to Egypt, included in his most important work The Histories, the ancient Greek historian describes seeing unusual boats called baris sailing down the Nile. However, no physical evidence was discovered of the ships until now.

A team from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology recently discovered more than 70 sunken vessels in the sunken ancient port-city of Thonis-Heracleion, near the branch of the Nile delta known as the Canopic or Herakleotic branch. As The Guardian reports, one of those ships, ship 17, bears a striking resemblance in design to the boats Herodotus described in The Histories.

In his text, Herodotus describes the cargo vessels in great detail across 23 lines. He writes, “Their boats with which they carry cargoes are made of the acacia of which the form is very like that of the Kyrenian lotus, and its sap is gum.” He continues, describing how the wood is adjoined and cut: “They cut planks two cubits long and arrange them like bricks, building their ships in the following way: on the strong and long tenons they insert two-cubit planks.”

When the researchers discovered ship 17, around 70 percent of its hull was intact and made from planks of acacia, as Herodotus had described. Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, told The Guardian that the technique used to join the planks was unique and has not been seen elsewhere, except in the pages written by Herodotus.

A new book, entitled Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, by the archaeologist Alexander Belov, from the Centre for Egyptological Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, further examines the sunken ship and its place among the shipbuilding traditions of the Nile. It also compares, in greater depth, ship 17’s design to the designs described by Herodotus, bolstering his historical record.

Found: A Historic Trolley Hidden Inside a House

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When Trenton's streetcars came to a halt in the 1930s, one literally found a home.

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When Brandon Breza and Marc Manfredi, buddies since high school, started a real estate venture together, they didn’t expect to find themselves on an adventure in historic preservation.

In August 2018, they purchased a foreclosed house at 31 Smith Avenue in Hamilton, New Jersey, with the idea that they could transform it into an appealing rental unit. The description on the property listing said that the small home had been made out of a former rail car, but on first glance it looked like an ordinary suburban house, though perhaps a little worse for wear.

“I don’t think we’re gonna find a dead conductor or anything here … maybe there’ll be some old train parts or something,” says Breza, of his thinking at the time.

They began work a few days after purchasing the property, bringing down a couple interior walls. But they got a little hammer-happy. “We watched a lot of HGTV and thought, ‘This is awesome, let’s start knocking down walls,’” Breza recalls. “We started thinking, we’d do it the right way and make it more attractive for renters.”

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As they removed a layer of insulation, they found, to their surprise, a hidden set of windows inside a wall. They peeled back drywall and revealed a window shade marked with the year 1912. Behind another wall was a door. Bit by bit, they uncovered piece after piece, until an entire rail car emerged—ensconced smack in the center of the house.

Aside from taking down part of the ceiling, which they didn’t realize was original, they did little damage to the car. Breza and Manfredi began contacting everyone they could think of to find the source of the odd gem, which they thought was from a train, and what could be done with it. At their wit’s end, they decided to post their discovery on Facebook, where news of the discovery went viral.

“There was a guy from Denmark talking about it, producers wanting to make a show about it … it was out of control,” recalls Breza.

The post reached Railway Preservation News, an online magazine with an active forum. Eric Strohmeyer of the CNJ (Central New Jersey) Rail Corporation and fellow preservationist J.R. May contacted Breza and Manfredi and came to Hamilton for a visit. It didn’t come from a train at all, they explained: It was a trolley.

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“They said, “Let’s go to the back corner and find the number of the trolley car,’” says Breza. Sure enough, in the back left corner: “It was almost like National Treasure. You had to shine a light on it and there it was: #288.”

From those three digits, Strohmeyer and Mays ascertained the car’s history. It had been manufactured in Philadelphia by the J.G. Brill Trolley Company in 1914, and made its way to New Jersey, where it was part of the once-extensive trolley system operated by the Trenton & Princeton Traction Company, according to William “Captain Bill” McKelvey, director of Liberty Historic Railway, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about New Jersey transportation history and has taken over the task of restoring #288. The streetcar network had dozens of routes that traversed the city and extended into suburbs—such as Hamilton Township, which neighbors Trenton.

“Trenton was a heavy manufacturing town in those days, and there were literally thousands and thousands of workers that commuted to their jobs everyday from the suburbs,” McKelvey says.

But how does an old trolley end up inside a home?

The Trenton trolley system had screeched to a halt in 1934, and the system’s components were dismantled. The cars, made of wood with steel frames, were sturdy, but, “Ninety-five percent of [them] were simply scrapped,” says McKelvey. “What they typically did was bring them to an empty lot, burn them, and salvage all the metal.” A few escaped this particular fate, having been purchased for use as garden sheds, chicken coops, and even homes.

The plot of land that held the home Breza and Manfredi bought in 2018 had been purchased for a dollar by John Guthrie, a local typesetter, in the early 1900s. After his brother William traveled around the United States and came home broke, Guthrie and two of his siblings pooled their funds to purchase an old trolley to house him so he could get back on his feet. William expanded #288 into a proper house with the trolley at its heart, and it was eventually passed on to Evelyn Breece, who moved in with her husband John Breece, the elder Guthrie’s grandson, and their three children in 1952.“My husband inherited the house and at that time it had an outhouse and a pump in the kitchen,” Breece says. “My husband put the bathroom in before we moved in, and we made two additions.”

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The family lived in the house, expanded to 650 square feet, for a decade. Breece and her daughter Jackie Thomas still live in the neighborhood, only two blocks away. “There were parts of [the trolley] that were exposed,” Thomas says. “The ceilings were kind of curved in parts of the house, and we had a closet door that was original to the trolley. It’s disappeared, but it was there when we lived there.” The house then passed through more hands, of Guthrie descendants and strangers, until Breza and Manfredi bought it, started opening up the walls, and eventually demolished the house to free the trolley.

Now the trolley is sitting in a Southampton, New Jersey recycling yard, shrink-wrapped to protect it from the weather as it awaits restoration by Liberty Historic Railway.

Though it’s now out of his hands, Breza wishes the trolley well. “I had an emotional attachment to it, he says. “The hope is to preserve it, restore it, and see it in a museum one day.”

How DNA From a 200-Year-Old Pipe Connects Maryland and Sierra Leone

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Genetics has many stories to tell about enslaved people.

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Maryland Route 178, also known as Generals Highway, is an eight-mile thoroughfare loosely connecting Baltimore and Annapolis. Before it had exits for shopping malls, the historic road was used by George Washington for his journey from New York to Annapolis, which was the capital of the United States for parts of 1783 and 1784.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, nearby Chesapeake Bay was a major port for the trade of enslaved people recently brought from Africa. Plantations started popping up along Generals Highway, and the enslaved people there tended to labor-intensive tobacco for export to Europe. Recently, scientists studying the area for clues into the lives of Africans living in Maryland at the time made a relatively minor discovery—a tobacco pipe—that held extraordinary evidence of the life of an enslaved woman 200 years ago.

Pipes are fairly ubiquitous finds on archaeological sites from the period. This one was found in the slave quarters at Belvoir, a historic house in Crownsville, Maryland, that belonged to the grandmother of Francis Scott Key (of “Star Spangled Banner” fame). The slave quarters, about 500 feet downhill from the manor house, were found somewhat accidentally, as researchers were looking for French commander Rochambeau’s Revolution-era campsite when they stumbled upon the large stone foundation.

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A team from the Maryland Department of Transportation, State Highway Administration, began excavating the 32-by-32-foot building in 2014. Julie Schablitsky, chief archaeologist with the department, noticed a pipe stem sticking out of the brick floor and subsequently dated other artifacts in the soil layer to determine its age, somewhere between 150 and 200 years old. But a more thrilling detail emerged upon further analysis. Schablitsky and her team tested the tobacco pipe stem for human DNA, and found direct evidence that it belonged to a woman. Not only that, the DNA most closely matched that of the Mende people of Sierra Leone.

“Since the Belvoir quarter supported a large kitchen and fireplace, it is probably the cook—an enslaved woman—[who] lived in that space,” Schablitsky says. Tobacco was enjoyed by both men and women at the time, and naturally the pipe would have been held in the mouth of the smoker. “The pipes would have been exposed to body fluids such as saliva and even blood,” she adds, "[and] the porous nature of low-fired clay would have facilitated absorption of fluid, thereby trapping DNA.”

There is a firmly established relationship between Sierra Leone, a country on the southwest coast of West Africa, and Maryland, two places separated by 4,500 miles of ocean. Historical documents show that ships from the London Company transported African people from Sierra Leone directly to the Chesapeake Bay. The origin of the pipe's owner may not be a surprise, but the discovery is still pivotal—in part because tobacco pipes are so commonly found at archaeological sites. “This new application of DNA in archaeology allows us the potential to begin to assign ancestry to specific sites,” says Schablitsky. “If archaeologists wanted to know if a home site was occupied by people of African descent or European descent, they now have this power. If archaeologists begin to test personal artifacts that contain human DNA, we may be able to answer specific questions about ancestry across not only Maryland, but the region and beyond.”

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This work has the potential to reveal patterns in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as how African culture impacted specific communities in 18th-century America. These data may also allow scientists to study genetic distinctions between enslaved people in the Chesapeake and other neighboring areas.

Over the course of the excavation, Schablitsky and her colleagues have been working alongside known descendants of those who lived on the property. Wanda Watts, a resident of Baltimore City, has been involved. In a statement, she said, “We have our third great-grandmother’s manumission papers, which are freedom papers. We have all the history about her and her children on the land. We found that all the men in our family were free, their wives were all slaves, and they had to buy their freedom.” However, her ancestry indicates no links to Sierra Leone—so her ancestor likely was not the pipe owner.

Working with descendants increases the impact of this kind of research for Maryland communities. “The descendants, like Wanda Watts, remind us that archaeology is done not only to further our quest for historical knowledge,” Schablitsky says, “but to pause and reflect upon the lives of these ancestors who persevered, despite enslavement.”

The Smallest Museum in Switzerland Is a Window in a 600-Year-Old House

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Two collectors display their favorite memorabilia in this two-foot-by-two-foot display.

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Every few months, a new assembly of items appears in the window of the door at 31 Imbergässlein (Ginger Alley) in Basel, Switzerland. At the beginning of 2019, it was Paris-themed, or really, Eiffel Tower-themed: A plastic snow globe with a miniature Montmartre and a tiny Eiffel Tower sat above a glass Eiffel Tower filled with colored sand. Matted photos of the landmark hung behind brass and plastic Eiffel Towers of varying sizes, Eiffel Tower key chains, and an Eiffel Tower-embossed pocket watch. In December 2018, the window held Magi figurines. Five months before that, there were rows of green knitting needles.

Welcome to the Hoosesagg Museeum, which translates to the Pants Pocket Museum in English. There’s no admission fee, but there’s also no admission. The entire museum is contained within the two-foot-by-two-foot window in the door of Dagmar and Matthias Vergeat’s 600-year-old house, located in a narrow pedestrian alley in Basel’s Old Town. The Vergeats have run what is likely Switzerland's smallest museum for 24 years, and while many of the displays come from the couple’s own assemblage of memorabilia, they welcome anyone with a collection of 30 or more items to submit it for consideration.

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Dagmar’s love of collecting is a lifelong one. As a child, she started by amassing a variety of Swiss cowbells. “I like to collect because I don’t like to throw things away,” she says in German.

A look into the room behind the Pocket Museum door makes that clear. There are countless objects lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling, and arranged in display cases. Wristwatches surround bottle stoppers with carved faces. There are tea eggs, a spectrum of plastic sunglasses, Rubik’s cubes, toy televisions, and Dagmar’s childhood collection of bells. The collectibles room used to be the Vergeats’ oldest daughter’s bedroom. When she moved out, the couple moved all their collections inside. Dagmar has not cataloged her items but guesses there are several thousand. “Each individual object is not really worth that much, but all the objects together make one great picture,” Dagmar says.

But back in 1995, people trying to see that picture were starting to annoy Dagmar. According to her, several groups of walking tours have climbed Ginger Alley’s stairs nearly every day since she and her husband moved into their house in 1986. The house has historical value: Basel’s first midwife lived in number 31, but the tours also stopped outside to study the structure’s painted facade. Rust-colored paintings of rectangles and faded black circles cover the house’s six stories, distinguishing it from the other white, half-timbered, medieval homes in the alley. Near the third-floor windows, just below the exposed beams of the upper floors, a painted St. Christopher carries the baby Jesus.

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While most tourists kept their eyes on St. Christopher, Dagmar discovered that others couldn’t stop themselves from peering into the house’s ground-floor windows. Instead of blocking the view with curtains, the Vergeats decided to build a display case that fit over the window pane in the door.

Dagmar first tried using her new display case to sell old Carnival masks, ice skates, and other second-hand items. When no one rang the doorbell to ask about the goods, she put one of her collections in the window.

“The first display was schnapps glasses,” she says. “We left [them] for three, four, five months, and then thought, ‘It’s boring, always having the same thing.’” So the Vergeats started rotating other “schnickschnack,” as tchotchkes are known in Swiss German, through their window. Since most items displayed could fit in a pocket, they named the display the Pants Pocket Museum.

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After about six months, people started ringing the doorbell to ask if they could show their collections. In the beginning, the Pants Pocket Museum featured lots of animal-themed collections, like elephants, rubber ducks, donkeys. "Unfortunately, I didn’t write it all down,” Dagmar says. “Who would have thought this idea would last more than 20 years?”

Today, those interested in showcasing their collections email Dagmar photos of their objects. If approved—Dagmar estimates a 95 percent acceptance rate—they bring her around 50 items, and she selects between 30 and 35 to create the exhibit. Collectors have traveled from Zurich and Germany with their thimbles, Pokémon, porcelain shoes, and tiny perfume bottles. In the summer of 2019, a Lichtensteiner will show a portion of her doll collection.

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Dagmar recalls one person she turned away: “He collected condoms and… dildos. Dildies? Dildas? What are they called? He brought all that nonsense, so I had to say ‘No, hello!' He had such a collection."

Beyond curating the tiny window, Dagmar works a part-time office job, spends time with her grandchildren, gardens, skis, and during Carnival, runs a bistro behind the house. She also hosts cocktail hours and the occasional dinner for up to eight people in that cabinet of wonders, the collection room behind the Pocket Museum door. Matthias used to paint lanterns and masks for some of Basel’s Carnival cliques, which are similar to New Orleanian krewes. Now he mainly lends his artistic skills to Dagmar’s clique, the Weather Witches, and to designing, creating, and installing Pocket Museum exhibits. “I’m the management, he’s the creative director,” Dagmar says.

The Vergeats have slowed their own collecting, because they’re running out of space. The collections are creeping upstairs—silver cake forms frame a kitchen window and Carnival-themed art lines the stairwell. “I find joy in old, beautiful things,” Dagmar says. "If I had more space, I would have many, many, many more things.”

Edible Book Festivals Are for Pun and Food Lovers

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It's been widely celebrated for almost 20 years.

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This year, dozens of libraries, universities, and book art centers across the United States are providing a space for voracious readers to show off their literary knowledge, culinary skills, and pun-making chops. The medium is food, and participants construct edible displays based on literary works. Some are gloriously decorated cakes that wouldn’t be out of place on a Food Network baking show. Others are less appetizing, and more focused on clever wordplay.

Both are welcome at the UC Berkeley Library Edible Book Festival. In its third year, it’s organized by Susan Powell, a map and geospatial data librarian who encountered an Edible Book Festival while a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington. “I had a great time visiting the ones that I went to," she says, "and it's something that fits within the scope of what a library is." The only rule is that every entry "needs to be edible": that is, made out of something that, in theory, you could eat.

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The UC Berkeley Library Edible Book Festival, held this year on March 18, takes the form of a contest, with prize categories such as Punniest, Eye Candy, and Least Edible. Last year’s Festival featured “The Handmaid’s Tamale,” a riff on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, and “Gravy Teas Rainbow,” a curved array of teacups filled with different colors of gravy (winner of 2018’s “Least Edible”). This year, entries included "The Communist Antipasto," "The Tails of Two Kitties," and "Infinite Zest." Berkeley’s edible books, Powell says, tend to be less gorgeously decorated cakes and more punny, plated displays. Literature-wise, most of the books represented are well-loved classics and popular, recent publications.

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This year, judges include a rare book curator, a representative from the Berkeley Food Institute, and several professors. For the last few years, many participants have been UC Berkeley staff. “That's who we can reach out to and who tends to have time in the middle of the semester,” says Powell. But she’s excited that half of this year's participants are students. 2019’s Edible Book Festival is the largest yet, with 24 participants registered to bring edible creations for the Berkeley community to admire and eat. (I spoke to Powell before this year's Festival.)

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UC Berkeley's event is just one of many Edible Book Festivals that have proliferated since it was conceived over Thanksgiving dinner by the late Judith A. Hoffberg, an art librarian from Southern California. Together with Béatrice Coron, an artist who specializes in elaborate paper art, the two contacted book art centers around the world. The idea, says Coron, was to “create artist books and share them in a convivial way.” On and around April 1, 2000, artists created elaborate edible projects that they shared at events held everywhere from Australia to Arizona State University. Coron still remembers a book-shaped apple pie covered in the digits of pi, made for 2003’s Edible Book Festival in New York. “I had the privilege to eat that book,” she recalls, “and it was delicious.”

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Eating the delectable foods described in books can bring readers closer to their favorite texts: Recipes abound online for lembas (Lord of the Rings) and cauldron cakes (Harry Potter). Perhaps this helps explain the popularity of Edible Book Festivals, which have been held every year—on or around April 1—since the inaugural 2000 event. While UC Berkeley’s Edible Book Festival is fairly new, other institutions, such as Cleveland’s Loganberry Books and the Western New York Book Arts Center, have held yearly festivals for more than a decade. And while many Edible Book Festival creations are violently pun-based, the date is not about April Fools' Day. Instead, it’s a loving paean to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who was born on April 1, 1755. A French lawyer, Brillat-Savarin penned the now-classic book The Physiology of Taste, which explored the joys and science of eating. Long celebrated as a witty gastronomic masterpiece, it’s also the source of the famous aphorism,“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

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The Festival has evolved as it spread, and until 2006, Coron ran a website, Books2Eat, which documented the event’s proliferation. While the first year saw Edible Book Festivals at book art centers, galleries, and universities, the concept quickly spread to libraries. Sometimes, organizers held high teas where the creations could be consumed. Others auctioned off the edible books to raise funds.

These days, Coron is no longer involved with the Edible Books Festival, and Hoffberg passed away in 2009. Yet the idea has endured. “It was designed from the beginning to be open source for anybody interested in making their own event,” explains Coron. She wishes more artists would participate in today's Edible Book Festivals, but also notes that Hoffberg liked the idea of the Festival taking on a life of its own. “It is really nice that the Festival is celebrated in many ways and that people can enjoy it through their libraries.”

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Though reading is often solitary and eating is ideally communal, a combination of the two creates a kind of magic. For Coron, the Festival was “a perfect laboratory to reflect on nutrition of body and mind.” But for Powell, the Festival evokes fun. “Even though we've had it in the busiest time of the semester, everyone, all the participants, all the judges, everybody who comes just leaves with this giant smile on their face,” says Powell.

Found: The First Egg Inside a Bird Fossil

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Everything’s better with an egg on (or in) it.

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Around 110 million years ago, a sparrow-sized bird died in northwestern China with an entire, imperfectly formed egg in its abdomen. After paleontologists dug up the bird’s preserved remains in the mid-2000s, this unidentified fossil gathered dust for over a decade in storage at China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. So in 2018, when the researcher Alida Bailleul was combing through specimens in IVPP’s archives in search of soft tissue samples, she didn’t expect to find much, according to a report from National Geographic. After noticing a squashed and leathery lump in the fossil’s abdomen, Bailluel analyzed the membrane-like mass only to discover the lump was an unlaid egg, preserved within the bones of a prehistoric bird.

This remarkable specimen marks the first time scientists have found an egg inside a fossilized bird. It is therefore one of the most notable bird fossils discovered from the Cretaceous Era—especially considering that adult birds only retain fully formed eggs for around 24 hours. Bailleul and her team published their findings on this newly described species, Avimaia schweitzerae, this week in Nature Communications. The team named the specimen in tribute to the paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer, who helped establish the field of molecular paleontology and once used soft tissues to identify a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil as a pregnant female.

This egg doesn’t just hold Avimaia’s claim to fame. It might also explain how she died. Most of the shell contained an abnormal two layers (normal bird eggs just have one), with a second layer that lacks a necessary eggshell cuticle. This evidence indicates that the bird held the egg inside its body for far too long. Due to this aberration, the researchers believe the bird suffered from a common condition called “egg-binding,” in which an egg becomes stuck inside an animal. This trauma can lead the bird to add additional shells around the egg, which can suffocate the embryo and even kill the mother. If the researchers’ egg-binding theory is correct, Avimaia would represent the oldest documented case of this reproductive disorder.

It’s not easy to sex bird or dinosaur fossils, making the egg a gift that keeps on giving. When preparing to lay eggs, modern birds fill the empty spaces of their skeleton with a calcium reservoir called medullary bone. Finding this substance in a fossil would ordinarily confirm the specimen was female. But despite its name, medullary bone is a tissue, not a bone, and therefore often doesn’t survive a 110-million-year burial. While Bailleul found layers that resembled medullary bone in the specimen, the physical presence of an egg offers incontrovertible proof that the bird was female, allowing scientists to model sex-specific hypotheses on Avimaia. For example, the fossil lacks elongated tail feathers typical of males of other species of the Avimaia’s bird group enantiornithines, suggesting the species exhibits possible sexual dimorphism. It’s as the saying goes—everything’s better with an egg on it.

Sold: A Pigeon, for $1.4 Million

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Meet Armando, a champion racer.

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In many cities around the world, feral pigeons are a dime a dozen. They roost on roofs, they coo from wires, and they peck outside bakeries, waiting for day-old handouts. Pigeons that are domesticated and bred for racing are birds of a fancier feather—and one buyer recently shelled out $1.4 million to add a little guy named Armando to their roster of winged competitors.

The Belgian breeder Joël Verschoot put Armando up for sale on the pigeon auction site PIPA, where several bidders scrambled to nab him. When bidding closed on March 18, 2019, Armando’s price had inched above €1.2 million (more than $1.4 million, in U.S. dollars). Seven of Armando’s offspring were also up for sale, and they’ll fan out across Belgium, Turkey, Germany, The Netherlands, and China. Armando will be heading to China, too, where the sport of pigeon racing has boomed in recent years. On the mainland, where most forms of gambling are prohibited, pigeon racing gets a pass, and there are at least 100,000 pigeon breeders in Beijing alone, CNN reported.

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Many wildlife groups and rehabilitators are fundamentally opposed to pigeon racing, arguing that the birds face a barrage of challenges before, during, and after the events, which sometimes span hundreds of miles. “We think this is a flawed situation right from the beginning,” says Elizabeth Young, founding director of Palomacy, a pigeon rescue organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. Young’s group works with domestic pigeons who find themselves in the wild, including ones that were grounded during races, often because they were struck by hawks, outmatched by the wind, or ran out of energy.

From a purchaser’s perspective, this bird had several things working in his favor, says Tim Heidrich, secretary of the National Pigeon Association, a bird fanciers’ group. Armando has already soared past the competition in several long-distance races, and delivered sterling performances in Belgium, Heinrich says, where competition is stiff. Selecting a racing pigeon can be similar to selecting champion dogs or thoroughbred race horses, says Deone Roberts, sport development manager at the American Racing Pigeon Union. “Pedigree can be important for the owner who may be hoping for genetic transmission of the most desired qualities,” Roberts says. Armando is also young enough to be bred several times over the years, Heidrich says, “thus maximizing the investment in him.”

While other top birds have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past—and despite Armando's bona fides—"I think the price got very much out of hand," Heidrich writes in an email. “You probably had a couple of billionaires bidding with their egos instead of their brains.” Still, Heidrich adds, "Like a great race horse, he's worth what someone is willing to pay."


What It’s Like to Care for Parrots in Washington, D.C.

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Caring for these birds is a big responsibility.

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I can hear the piercing squawks from the parking lot. It’s as if I’ve entered the African jungle or the Amazon rainforest. But I’m much closer to home at Garuda Aviary, a lifetime sanctuary for neglected and abused parrots in Poolesville, Maryland.

As I approach, a chorus of “hellos” and “hi’s” provide a polite greeting. In front of me is an enclosure with about four dozen flapping, cawing parrots as vibrant as a box of crayons. They range in size from a couple of inches to a few feet. The cacophony builds until a soothing human voice creeps in to calm the brightly colored birds. It belongs to Christopher Zeoli, who’s run the sanctuary for 12 years. He likes to call himself “the parrot whisperer.”

He takes me on a tour of the sanctuary and introduces me to a few of the feathery residents. Each one has a distinct personality.

“This is Coco Two,” Zeoli points out a white umbrella cockatoo who stands on a perch giving us a weary eye. “He was pulled out of a dumpster. Coco Two dances when he’s not sure what to do… which I think is the best solution for so many problems.”

On cue, the parrot does a little two-step.

A Sanctuary for Birds in Need

Zeoli says he gets up to three requests per week from people wanting to abandon their parrots. But space is limited, so he prioritizes the most desperate cases. Garuda is a lifetime sanctuary, meaning the birds are never adopted out. They stay here for the rest of their lives, which can be a very long time. “Sixty years is a good average age for most parrot breeds,” Zeoli says. “One of the reasons they are abandoned so frequently is that they often outlive their owners.”

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That’s not the only reason people end up ditching their parrots. They are intelligent and social creatures who bond easily with humans, but they need a lot. That includes places to exercise, toys to play with, sunlight, and the ability to socialize with other parrots. “Without these enrichments, a bird’s life is boring, and it will just become depressed and anxious,” Zeoli says.

And, of course, they can be loud. Very loud.

It comes as no surprise that caring for the sanctuary’s 52 parrots is more than a full-time job for Zeoli, even with about 14 volunteers. His goal is to help the parrots act naturally and feel protected. That’s why the sanctuary is called Garuda.

“In Tibetan Buddhism, the Garuda is a fierce protector bird,” he says. I ask him if that’s what he is—the parrots’ Garuda. "Not so fierce,” Zeoli laughs, “but protective.”

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Parenting a Parrot

In the United States, there are more than 20 million pet birds. That includes Murray, a Meyer’s parrot who lives with Sheila Riley and Ned Kraft in an apartment in Washington, D.C. Murray is 13 years old, and stands eight inches tall. He’s green, gray, and yellow with a touch of turquoise under his wings.

On a cool afternoon, Murray hops out of his cage and flutters around the apartment before sticking a landing on Kraft’s shoulder. The bird joined the family about 10 years ago.

“How other people talk about their kids or their grandkids, we talk about Murray—just as long with as many stories,” Kraft says. “So, yeah, we are the crazy bird people.”

The couple takes Murray on regular walks in a specially designed backpack. Riley sings to Murray every morning, and Kraft knows his favorite spot for a head scratch. The parrot seems to have bonded to the couple. While we talk, Murray sits on Kraft’s shoulder chirping away and showing affection. He’s known to hand out kisses.

“It’s just a bump of the beak on the lips,” Kraft says.

“His first words were ‘kiss, kiss,’” Riley adds.

Despite the love, they admit it took time to learn how to care for and live with a parrot. “I don’t know if I would get a bird again,” Riley says, “mainly because they live so long and how old am I going to be? I’d want to see a bird through to their life span.”

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Meyer’s parrots typically live about 25 years, a shorter life span than most breeds. So, it’s likely that Kraft and Riley, who are both in their 60s, will outlive Murray. However, the thought of finding Murray a new home in case of an emergency worries them.

“We don’t have too many people lined up [to take him],” Riley says. “We have one girlfriend who adores him, but she’s older than us, so that’s not going to work out.”

For the moment they are content and so, it appears, is Murray. Throughout our conversation, he chirps away on Kraft’s shoulder, lightly pecking at his glasses.

“I like it best when he does his nuzzling,” Kraft says, miming the action. “He’ll sit on my chest and put his head up underneath my chin. I’ll cup him with my hands and he’ll just stay there and I know he’s happy.”

The Hard Questions

Lisa Carr, an exotic pet veterinarian in Rockville, Maryland, has cared for Garuda’s parrots for about a decade. “[I] get the distinct honor of getting all the sick ones that no one else can figure out what’s going on with,” she says.

Carr says parrots can fast become part of the family due to their intellect and social skills, but that doesn’t mean they make great house pets. “We have a hard time providing them what they need,” Carr says. “They are designed to fly and… be in really large territories and environments. The house is not really conducive to that.”

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Being stuck in a cage all day, Carr says, can lead to behavioral issues and physical disorders, particularly in larger birds. She says she wishes people would do more research to fully understand the responsibility that comes with having a pet parrot. She suggested taking classes through rescue organizations or even watching nature shows.

“It’s about reading a bird… seeing how they move and interact,” she says. “[Those things] help you understand what your bird is telling you.”

Even doing that, Carr still questions the cost of keeping one in the family. “We really like having pretty things and birds are amazing creatures and fascinating,” Carr says. “But is it the best thing for us as a family? Is it the best thing for the bird?”

The hard answer might be no.

Zeoli has come to a similar conclusion. He loves his parrots, but he’s honest about his—or anyone else’s—ability to properly care for them. “Even in the most ideal conditions,” Zeoli says, “you cannot provide for a parrot the kind of life that they’ve naturally evolved for.”

Not even in a lifelong sanctuary in the woods of Poolesville, Maryland.

This story is part of Hidden City, a collaborative partnership of WAMU and Atlas Obscura. You can listen to the accompanying audio story on WAMU’s site.

For Sale: A Penny That Stopped a Bullet and Saved a Life

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It's not the only everyday object to have done so on the battlefield.

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Of the three Trickett brothers who left their home in Lincolnshire, in eastern England, to fight for the United Kingdom in the First World War, only John would survive. Horace and Billy were among the more than eight million soldiers killed in the Great War, which saw casualties on an unprecedented scale due to the advent of new, more advanced weapons. John, however, was saved by the most ordinary and rudimentary equipment on the entire battlefield: a penny in his breast pocket that deflected a bullet intended for his heart.

The penny, issued in 1889 (10 years before John was born) and severely bent from the bullet’s impact, will be sold on March 22, 2019, in Hansons Auctioneers’ Medals and Militaria Auction. At press time, the highest bid was £1,700 (more than 2,200 dollars), vastly exceeding Hansons’s initial estimate of between £100 and £200 (or, 130 to 260 dollars). The lot includes a British victory medal as well as Trickett’s 1918 discharge certificate, among other items.

While we don’t know precisely when and where Private Trickett had his brush with death, Adrian Stevenson, Hansons’s militaria expert, says that the incident occurred in 1917, on the war’s Western Front. The bullet, fired by a German soldier, ricocheted off Trickett’s penny and traveled up through Trickett’s nose, exiting through his left ear. Trickett lost hearing in that ear for the rest of his life, his granddaughter Maureen Coulson told Hansons. Trickett received an honorable discharge from the military in September 1918. After coming home, he got married, had eight children, and worked as a postmaster and switchboard operator.

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Coulson answered a Hansons advertisement for a routine valuation event, bringing the penny and Trickett’s other effects to Stevenson. Ironically, the coin was “one of those real impossible things to value,” says Stevenson, who eventually settled on a relatively low estimate for the item due to the “very modest” value of the metal itself. It’s not the first time in Stevenson’s career that he’s heard of an everyday item blocking a bullet and making the difference between life and death. Bibles, shaving mirrors, and cigarette cases, he says, have all done the same—and during the war, some manufacturers even began advertising thicker mirrors, explicitly pitching their life-saving potential.

“It’s strange to think,” said Coulson, “that, but for that penny, [Trickett’s] children would not have been born and I wouldn’t be here.” There could be many more families throughout the world who could say the same about other objects: Since Coulson delivered the coin to Hansons, the auction house has also acquired a shrapnel-damaged flask and belt buckle that may have saved their carriers.

Locks of an Ethiopian Emperor's Hair Are Returning Home From London

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Years after having been taken from his dead body after a brutal defeat.

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Snatched away from Ethiopia nearly 200 years ago, two locks of hair from emperor Tewodros II, one of Ethiopia’s most beloved icons, will be returning home. The hair was cut from the leader's dead body by an English military officer after the 1868 Battle of Maqdala, between the United Kingdom and what was then known as Abyssinia. Ethiopia has been asking for their heritage to be repatriated for years.

The hairs were handed to Hirut Kassaw, Ethiopia’s minister of culture, during a March 20 ceremony at the National Army Museum in London, where they had been held since 1959. Kassaw remarked then that “for Ethiopians, these are not simply artifacts or treasures, but constitute a fundamental part of the existential fabric of Ethiopia and its people,” adding that items like these in museum collections “are of far greater significance to Ethiopians than to those who removed them.”

Emperor Tewodros II ruled the Ethiopian empire of Abyssinia from 1855 until his death at the Battle of Maqdala. During his reign, he unified the various Ethiopian kingdoms into a single empire, and attempted to abolish the ruling feudal class and replace it with a meritocracy. As he engaged in this unification project, he put European missionaries and explorers already on Ethiopian soil to work building a cannon, and commissioned weapons from England. After some of his requests for military assistance were ignored, Tewodros imprisoned English missionaries and other representatives. The English sent military forces, led by Robert Napier, to free them. Even after Tewodros released the prisoners, Napier’s army continued their assault, heading to the fortress in Maqdala. Rather than be taken prisoner, Tewodros committed suicide on April 13, 1868, with a gun that had been gifted to him by Queen Victoria herself.

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It is said that following the battle, the British used 15 elephants and 200 mules to cart thousands of artifacts to the coast, about 350 miles away. The loot included 500 manuscripts, two gold crowns, replicas of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, and a royal wedding dress. Tewodros’s seven-year-old son, Prince Alemayehu, was also taken. He died in England at the age of 18 and is buried at Windsor Castle. The nation of Ethiopia has also called for the repatriation of his remains.

According to The Art Newspaper, Lieutenant Frank James cut the locks of Tewodros’s hair while painting the deceased emperor's likeness. James’s descendants later donated the locks to the museum, along with watercolor renderings of the battle. A spokesperson at the National Army Museum told the BBC that they would not be sharing photographs of the hair with the public as a sign of respect and sensitivity.

Ephrem Amare, director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, told The Art Newspaper that after being flown to Addis Ababa, the locks of hair will be buried with Tewodros’s cremated remains at the Mahbere Selassie monastery in Qwara, in northern Ethiopia.

American School Lunch Is Becoming More Diverse, Like It Was in the 1910s

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The cafeteria program started in immigrant communities.

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Alana Dao couldn’t figure out which was worse: going to school with a lunch box full of hummus, or pulling out Chinese pork floss buns in front of her classmates. In the 1990s, Sugar Land, Texas, was a steak and potatoes kind of place. In contrast, Dao’s parents were Buddhist vegetarians from China, who prepared traditional foods such as Cantonese eggs and meatless staples such as the Middle Eastern chickpea spread.

A food writer and restaurant professional, Dao now loves the cuisine she was once embarrassed by. Yet her writing sears with recollections of her childhood anxiety. In a sea of peanut butter sandwiches, her lunches marked her as racially different when she only wanted to fit in. “It’s pointing out difference at a time in your life when you don’t necessarily want to be different,” she says.

There’s a phrase for Dao’s experience: the lunchbox moment. While the food in these stories is diverse, from Filipino lumpia Shanghai to Cameroon peanut sauce, the emotional experience is similar: self-consciousness about cuisine whose supposedly “stinky” flavors signal racial and cultural difference. In these accounts, school cafeteria meatloaf and tater tots are symbols of a white American culture that rejects immigrant children.

The alienating symbolism of cafeteria food is as old as the National School Lunch Program. But it wasn’t always that way. While the National School Lunch Act was signed in 1946, the country’s first school food programs began decades earlier, in the immigrant tenements of turn-of-the-century cities. In these early lunchrooms, diversity ruled.

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In 1908, Mabel Hyde Kittredge founded one of the nation’s first school lunch programs in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. While Manhattan’s Lower East Side is now home to haute couture and exclusive real estate, at the time, the neighborhood consisted of cramped tenements brimming with poor immigrants. From 1880 to 1920, more than 20 million immigrants entered America, most of them from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Thousands of them settled on the Lower East Side.

At the same time, progressive reformers were devoting themselves to the plight of the urban poor. Armed with new scientific theories about health, and inspired by the shocking revelations of muckraking journalists, these reformers—many of them middle class white women trained in domestic science—set about bringing modern nutrition to the slums.

Yet early efforts to establish food programs in these impoverished communities failed. The programs were based on the latest nutritional science, but they lacked one thing: flavor. “Regard seemed not to have been paid to the religious and national customs of the children,” wrote activist Lillian Wald.

When Kittredge founded the private School Lunch Committee in 1909, she did something different: She adapted her vision of modern nutrition to the flavors of the Lower East Side’s Jewish, Irish, and Italian kitchens. At the time, students were expected to go home for lunch—a difficult proposition for parents whose paltry factory incomes were barely enough to feed the family. Children who didn’t go home often purchased food from unsanitary street carts. As a result, kids in these communities were widely malnourished and often ill. Kittredge’s SLC changed that by offering low-cost and nourishing meals that tasted like home cooking.

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In majority-Italian schools, the SLC offered macaroni and used garlic and oil. In Jewish schools, the SLC invited rabbis to inspect the kitchens. When American cooks failed to capture cuisines’ authentic flavors (“You Americans take all the nerve out of our macaroni,” an Italian girl told Kittredge), the program hired Italian and Jewish cooks instead.

At first, immigrant families were wary of the new program. “The mothers would come in large numbers to watch the food service to make sure the food was okay,” says Michelle Moon, Chief Program Officer at New York City’s Tenement Museum. But soon, families began to trust the cooks and even take home recipes. For poor people far away from their native ingredients, these programs became a kind of culinary exchange.

The approach worked. By 1915, the SLC was providing 80,000 free or low-cost meals in 60 schools across New York City. Educators reported their charges were healthier and more attentive in class.

But the success didn’t last long. When New York City officials, long reluctant to make school lunch a public service, took over the program in 1917, they dramatically cut the funding. By 1919, the city had cut the program to just 14 schools, with food provided by private contractors.

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The government program imposed one menu on the entire city—and it was stubbornly, blandly American. Whereas children had previously enjoyed Kosher food and minestrone, they were now served a uniform, city-wide menu of baked beans, pea soup, and oatmeal cookies. For immigrant families, the shift was abrupt. Italian immigrant Leonard Covello writes in his memoir that when his school gave him a bag of oatmeal to take home, his father thought it was animal feed. “What kind of school is this?” Covello’s father shouted. “They give us the food of animals to eat and send it home with our children!” (Covello had his own lunch box moment when he hid his Italian-bread-and-salami sandwiches for fear his friends “of the white-bread-and-ham upbringing” would make fun of him.)

While this shift was partly motivated by finances, says Andrew Ruis, a University of Wisconsin researcher who wrote a history of school lunch, it also reflected growing anti-immigrant sentiment. Nativist prejudice against Italians, Irish, Jews, and all non-Europeans had long been apparent in laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. It grew worse during World War I. The Immigration Act of 1917 imposed a literacy requirement and banned Asian immigration almost entirely. The Immigration Act of 1924 established nationality quotas that vastly favored Northern Europeans.

When the National School Lunch Program became law in 1946, this anti-immigrant legacy came with it. During World War II, the federal government had formed the Committee on Food Habits, headed by famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, to determine best practices for a national school lunch program. While ethnic diversity was fundamental to America, Mead asserted, the school lunch program should create a unified national identity. Instead of eating their own ethnic cuisines, students should “eat democracy.”

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Democracy was rather bland. Mead recommended that school lunch menus consist of “food that is fairly innocuous and has low emotional value.” Spicy foods, cream sauce, and strong flavors were out; meat pies, plain soups, and boiled vegetables were in. The only seasoning would be salt.

Mead’s vision of “innocuous food” had a fatal flaw: lack of seasoning doesn’t actually mean neutrality. Although Mead's guidelines payed lip service to diversity, their imposition of a standard diet ultimately implied that bland foods were properly “American,” while other foods—whether spicy or “stinky”—were alien. Seven decades after the National School Lunch Program became law, immigrant kids continue to face prejudice for eating food their peers consider "too ethnic." Their lunch box moments are reminders of an assimilationist legacy.

This is starting to change. Over the past decades, activists and school districts have increasingly promoted scratch cooking and locally sourced foods. Meanwhile, cafeterias are modeling menus after the cultures of the kids they serve. With USDA support, indigenous Hawaiian children are being served taro and Native Alaskans are eating local fish. In Austin, public schools are serving local Mexican cuisine. In Des Moines, “flavor bars” allow students to customize their food—from pinto beans to sweet and sour chicken—with familiar spices. In Burlington, a student-run food truck draws on the diverse community's culinary suggestions and skills.

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Dao’s own relationship to food and heritage remains complex. While she now treasures the Cantonese eggs and pork buns she once hid, the effects of prejudice linger. Some days, she hesitates before packing her daughter’s lunch with food she fears other children will consider stinky. “I don’t want to embarrass her,” she says.

In the past couple years, though, Dao has found herself feeling less apologetic. She wants her two daughters to be strong and unashamed. “This is who we are,” she says. Recently, Dao’s grade school-aged daughter asked to take smoked oysters to school. Remembering her own childhood discomfort, Dao’s first instinct was to say no. But her daughter insisted, and Dao relented. When her daughter returned in the evening, Dao nervously asked her about lunch. But her daughter was nonchalant—it was just another school day. As for the lunchbox? “It came back empty—and smelly,” Dao says. Only now, that scent was something to celebrate.

Found: Papers Hidden in the Floors and Rafters of Van Gogh's Old Boarding House

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There's still a brittle wad of paper to open up and examine.

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Before Vincent van Gogh embarked on some 2,100 paintings—Starry Night, Sunflowers, and many self-portaits among them—the Dutch post-Impressionist worked a myriad of jobs across Europe, including as an art dealer for the Goupil gallery, headquartered in Paris. The company had agents stationed everywhere from Brussels to Vienna to New York, but Van Gogh was transferred from The Hague branch to the London outpost on Southampton Street. Shortly after his arrival in 1873, Van Gogh moved into a house at 87 Hackford Road, Stockwell. In an 1873 letter to his younger brother Theo, Vincent wrote: "I’ve come by a boarding-house that suits me very well for the present. I live in one of the suburbs of London, where it’s comparatively quiet." Now, nearly 150 years later, conservation efforts have revealed hidden papers in the floorboards and rafters a 20-year-old Van Gogh once walked across.

The three-story Georgian home was built in 1824 and owned at the time by Ursula Loyer. In 2012, former violinist Jian (James) Wang and his wife, Alice Childs, bought the house at auction. According to Childs, Wang and his generation of creatives in China were all inspired by Van Gogh, and “he was surprised at how dilapidated the house had become and wanted to honor the legacy.” The Van Gogh House London, it is called, is now being repurposed for artist residencies and exhibitions, partnering with the nearby San Mei Gallery. Wang and Childs have worked in cultural exchange between China and England, and directed residencies throughout their careers, so this historic purchase was a marriage of their interests. “The house is very small and allowing artists to use it to make a living in their lifetime has always been the aim,” Childs says. Forming plans and gathering permissions for the renovation took several years, and actual work officially began in June 2018. This is the first time the house has been restored in 70 years (it underwent minimal work following some damage from World War II), so most of the original floorboards and interior fittings remained intact.

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During the work, conservators unearthed several objects from Van Gogh’s time there, which only lasted a year. “House insurance documents and a prayer book were found in the rafters,” says Childs. Two insurance documents are clearly marked with landlady Loyer’s name, and are dated 1873 and 1874, in a careful hand. They indicate that the house was valued at £100 and was protected in the case of fire for three shillings and six pence. And the prayer book is an 1867 edition of the seminal A Penny Pocket Book of Prayers & Hymns, published by Frederick Wayne. While it’s not clear that this hymnal belonged to Van Gogh, it’s thought he probably read it, given his eventual work as missionary and preacher (in the Borinage mining region of Belgium) after his art dealing career collapsed.

Some of the objects found, such as children’s toys, predate the Dutch artist's time, but even more intriguing discoveries have been made. “In the Van Gogh bedroom more papers were found under different sections of the floorboards,” Childs says. “In the garden we found a ‘blacking pot’ and clay pipe.” The old papers were decorated with watercolor paintings of flowers. It seemed promising, but the style does not match his, and he didn’t really use watercolors. (He did, however, have a habit of drawing the houses he lived in, so when a journalist met with a descendant of Van Gogh’s former landlady in 1973 and noticed a withered, tea-stained sketch in the bottom of a box, he had a strong feeling about it. Turns out he was right—a Van Gogh.)

Among the amateur paintings was another brittle, balled-up set of documents that conservators from the Camberwell College of Arts are trying to separate and decipher. There’s a strong sense among the team that the papers are significant, given that they were intentionally tucked under floorboards.

According to Childs, renovations to the house will be completed soon, and guided tours will start soon after. Small, pre-booked groups will have the chance to see all of these items the craftsmen and conservators unearthed, and learn about the social history of the home. “Also, we will be having an ‘objects’ residency showing the works of designers and artists throughout the house,” Childs says, along with an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art.

10 Stories About the Things You've Found While Moving

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Moving is a pain, but it can lead to interesting surprises.

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Let's face it. Moving is stressful. But you find things you forgot you have as you pack your life into boxes or clean out a desk, and there can be a surprising sense of discovery upon arriving at your new home. Whether it's an unexpected feature of your new abode, or strange remnants left behind by the previous occupants, or something of your own you never knew you had, these surprises can sometimes offset the unpleasant realities of moving itself. Over on our Community forums, we recently asked our readers to tell us about the greatest things they've discovered after moving, and the stories were, well, kind of moving!

Check out some our favorite responses below, and if you have a great discovery of your own that you'd like to share, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going!


Unexpected Shrine

“I lived in Austin, Texas for a little while. The house right next to mine wasn’t lived in, but while walking through the neighborhood, I realized that the property had some sort of shrine on it. It ended up being this crucifix in a mosaic grotto. It was so unexpected and so beautiful. I’m not religious, but I loved having it right next door.” allisonkc


Hidden Patio

“When I moved into my first home, its yard had been neglected for a number of years and the English ivy had taken over. The first project I decided to tackle was uncovering the brick walk in the backyard that led to the bird bath, and as I was peeling back the ivy, the ‘walk’ got bigger and bigger until I uncovered a whole brick patio. Been my favorite place to hang out since. Still needs a little work but it was definitely a pleasant find.” meganleighscott


Portrait Behind the Walls

“In 1990 I bought a crumbling old building in Helena, Montana, to use as my art studio. It had been built 100 years previously by a Catholic order, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, as a ‘Home for Wayward Women.’ After the nuns sold it in 1905 to move to bigger digs, the building served as a furniture warehouse and neighborhood eyesore until I bought it. During renovations, I was dismantling a wall when I ran my crowbar through a cardboard patch and realized there was something intriguing hidden behind it. What I then carefully extracted from the mess was this gorgeous portrait of what I’m sure was one of the early residents of the home. Were it not for the rip of my crowbar, the photo would be pristine. What’s so remarkable is her shining smile, a real rarity for the time! ‘Wayward’? Perhaps. But not unhappy! Ever since, ‘Our Foundress’ has presided over my gorgeous historic gallery at Tim Holmes Studio 14.” TimHolmes

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Confederate Cash

“In the early 1980s, my sister and her hubby bought their first house in Raleigh, North Carolina. The house was more than 100 years old. Being good new homeowners, and as instructed by all the first-time buyer’s classes, they required the seller to prove the fireplace worked or provide a credit to make it working. Usually this is great advice to any home-buyer—make the seller fix it first. Sigh. At closing, the seller demonstrated a great (pun intended) working fireplace, and the seller said, ‘Thank you. You were right, the fireplace wouldn’t work because the flue was clogged. Clogged with a huge amount of Confederate money.” The seller was smiling the smile of someone who had just found and converted a treasure trove to substantial cash.” Oss


Heirloom From an Ancestor

“Helping my parents move from my childhood home (this was over 15 years ago and it is still a fresh memory, childhood home, you get it), we discovered an old steamer trunk in the attic that no one remembered owning. We opened it up and inside there was a large plastic bag with a note taped to it that read, ‘For Alice Io and Molly Callisto, from your Great Aunt’—my and my sister’s names. We opened the bag and inside were two huge, beautiful, hand-made quilts! One was a tumbling block pattern and the other, a log cabin design, which is the one I chose. My parents had no recollection of receiving the quilts, or even an idea of which great aunt might have written that note. I thought how cool it was to own a bit of family history and craftsmanship even if details were missing. Last March, I took the quilt to an event for National Quilting Day hosted by the Southern Highland Craft Guild, where member Connie Brown was providing appraisals and tips on repair and preservation for family heirloom quilts. I placed the quilt on her table and told her I thought my great aunt had made it. She responded, ‘Not unless you are over 100 years old.’ Turns out my quilt was made in 1870-1880! My great aunt was passing along a true family heirloom. I wish I knew more about who made it and where, but at least now I know what a true treasure I have and how to make the repairs necessary to ensure it is around to hand off to my niece.” Aliceio

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Razor Refuse

“I haven’t come across this myself, but I have heard a lot of stories about people tearing down their houses to find the bathroom walls full of razor blades. Apparently it used to be common to have a slit for razor blade disposal inside medicine cabinets back in the day, and the blades would just start to accumulate inside the wall!” maren


Decorating Advice

“The kitchen in our first home had a drop ceiling with a large fluorescent light fixture. On closing day, I left the lawyer’s office and went straight to the house, took down the light, and tore out the drop ceiling to reveal the wooden beams that ran throughout the rest of the house. ‘What this kitchen needs,’ I thought to myself, ‘are a couple of retro pendant lights. I’ll go to the big box home improvement store, and see if I can find a couple later.’ After cleaning up my demo mess, I went out to the storage room off the carport to leave my tools, and there, on the workbench in the back, were two pendant lights matching exactly what was in my head. All they needed was a good cleaning and a fresh coat of spray enamel to brighten them up.” bobsawyer


Weird Windows

“My husband and I bought our first home in 2009, in Round Rock, Texas. About two months after we moved in, I went out to get the mail, and as I headed back to the front door, I noticed that two of the front windows of the house had white curtains. I thought, that’s weird, I didn’t think we had any white curtains in the house. Well, after some investigation, I realized the two windows, complete with glass, screens, and curtains, were backed by drywall! One is in front of a bedroom closet, and the other is in front of a bathroom! They can’t be accessed from the inside of the house. I just wish I knew what on Earth happened there! So weird.” leahkorn

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Birthday Surprise

“When I was looking for a new home, I found a house built in 1935, where the original owners had tried to insulate the foundation sill by using folded newspapers. One of my first jobs after moving in was to remove all those newspapers, and the first one I pulled out … was from my birthday!” bjprays


Peace Offering

“When I was in sixth grade at a Catholic school for girls, I got into a serious fight with another kid in my class. Each student in my class had a little shelf to store their books and writing materials when they weren’t needed. My shelf was—a habit that unfortunately hasn’t changed until today—terribly untidy, it was full of unnecessary stuff and crumpled paper, and nothing was properly stacked, I usually just threw stuff on top of the messy pile and hoped it wouldn’t collapse. The head girl of my class, in my objective opinion back then, a neurotic, named Cosima, took offense at this sight. She kept nagging that I should tidy it up and keep the sloppy mass of school materials in order. I refused. The conflict got more and more tense, until she finally threatened to auction off my stuff. Cosima only got halfway through shouting ‘Who wants a horse-shaped eraser?’ toward a group of our classmates when she was interrupted by the splashing sound of ten-year-old me hitting her in the face as hard as I could.

Since we were attending, as I mentioned, a Catholic school for girls, this was (while extremely satisfying for me) quite the scandal. The teacher called my parents, there were several serious conversations about nonviolent communication, and as I normally was a happy and friendly kid that didn’t solve conflicts with physical force, I soon felt sorry for hurting Cosima (even though it did have the pleasant effect that this persnickety nitwit never bothered me again). I was too proud to apologize, but during lunchtime I did my best to make a nice stack of the wrinkly math and latin exercise sheets on my shelf, and put a piece of paper on Cosima’s desk. I had painted the word ‘Peace?’ on it, in big and colorful letters. A little later, everyone got cardboard boxes for their things, so any mess became invisible. Cosima and I never spoke again and pretty much avoided each other for the rest of the year, so I never knew if she had found the paper and how she reacted. The following summer my family moved to a different town, and I had to change to a new school. I didn’t want to leave my friends and teachers and classmates behind, so I waited on emptying my shelf until the very last moment. When I couldn’t possibly push it any further away and had to take my things from the cardboard box, on it’s very bottom I found the peace offering I had put on Cosima’s desk months ago. She had scribbled a single word into the corner: ‘Yes.’”Lemony

Found: York’s First Railway Station

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Workers uncovered evidence from a pivotal moment in the city's modern history.

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During construction work on a new housing development in the historic English city of York, crews unearthed the remains of the city’s very first railroad station.

According to Minster FM, a team from LS Archaeology, along with workers from Squibb Demolition, oversaw excavation of a layer of the site containing remnants of the historic structure, including platforms, train turntables, auxiliary buildings, and drainage systems. The station was built in the 1840s, mostly from wood. The more durable remains were buried and preserved beneath more recent development.

Although the structure represented the vision of the 19th-century architect George Townsend Andrews, a man named George Hudson was the primary force behind the establishment of the station. Known as “The Railway King,” Hudson was pivotal in framing and developing York as a transportation hub.

In 1833, Hudson became the largest shareholder in a railway line that would link his city to Leeds and Selby. With this influence, he was able to route the line heading from Newcastle to London so that it passed through York. Passengers would no longer simply bypass the walled city—a boon for its economic prospects. By 1837, Hudson had become the chairman of the York & North Midland Railway Company, and within seven years, he controlled more than 1,000 miles of tracks.

The station eventually became obsolete; a new station was built around 1877. One of the more pristine artifacts unearthed at the site, a train turntable, used to rotate entire locomotives and cars to go back the way they came or shuffle them off in another direction, will be included in the final landscaping of the new development.


The Restaurant Reconstructing Recipes That Died With the Ottoman Empire

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Eating like a sultan takes lots of detective work.

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Here’s a basic shopping list if you’re chef to the Ottoman sultan: The dried glands of a musk deer, a bushel of violets, ambergris from whale bellies, and handfuls of desert-harvested frankincense.

The Ottoman Empire once extended from Istanbul all the way to Arabian deserts and Caucasian glaciers. Sultans craved delicacies sourced from every corner of their lands, and palace chefs wove those far-flung ingredients into a distinctive cuisine. It must have seemed like both their power and their cuisine would prove eternal. After all, the Ottoman dynasty did endure for more than 600 years. But when the empire fell after the First World War, palace cuisine disappeared as well.

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A few miles away from Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, once home to many Ottoman sultans, Asitane Restaurant is on a quest to bring that palace cuisine back. According to owner Batur Durmay, Turkish cooking didn’t have much cachet when his parents opened the family restaurant in 1991. “At that time,” says Durmay, “if you wanted to go out for a nice meal you ate French or Italian food.”

The Durmay family decided that Istanbul deserved a restaurant worthy of the city’s imperial past. They founded one themselves, calling it Asitane as a tribute to one of Istanbul’s many historic names. “Since they had no idea where to start,” says Durmay, “they hired researchers to figure out how to make classical Ottoman dishes.”

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There was more to the quest than digging up old cookbooks. In her recent book, Bountiful Empire: A History of Ottoman Cuisine, historian Priscilla Mary Isin describes a closed guild system of cooks during the Ottoman Empire that guarded culinary secrets and forbade members from writing recipes down. To make matters worse for these food detectives, what was recorded is now illegible to almost everyone. While modern-day Turkish is written in the Latin alphabet, Ottoman Turkish was written in Arabic script. Just decrypting a shopping list from the Ottoman era requires a scholar.

With few recipes to guide them, Durmay’s family relied on researchers and academics to search for menus detailing historic feasts held by sultans, records of food purchased for palace kitchens, and written accounts by foreign travelers. Isin, who used similar sources when researching her book, writes that even people who wouldn’t document their meals at home elaborated on food they ate on the road. One traveler, the French chef Alexis Soyer, secured an invitation to an elegant garden banquet held in 1856. The meal featured two entire sheep and two entire lambs, their grilled entrails, and 31 other dishes that went from stuffed vegetables to a sequence of desserts. “Apicius would have gone to Turkey to dine,” wrote Soyer, evoking the ancient world’s most famous gourmand, “had he known such delicacies were to be obtained there.”

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In some cases, Durmay explained, these diverse sources proved invaluable for cross-referencing their findings. One strategy was to take a list of the dishes served at a notable feast, check those items against the week’s palace receipts, and look for descriptions from anyone who’d attended the feast. The result of this culinary sleuthing is a collection of hundreds of recipes that the kitchen rotates with the changing seasons. Now, nearly every dish on the menu is inspired by findings from the Ottoman era. On a recent afternoon in Istanbul, I ate an almond soup brightened by vivid pomegranate seeds based on an Ottoman dish recorded in 1539. Next, a grainy scoop of crushed chickpeas arrived alongside bread rolls made with gum mastic. Durmay believes that the chickpea spread, created using records from 1469, is the ancestor of hummus. Enriched with cinnamon, pine nuts, and currants, it’s an aromatic version that balances sweet and savory flavors.

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Then I tasted fried beef and lamb liver rissoles from the 17th century, swabbing each bite in a syrupy relish of red onions and pomegranate molasses. Next, I cracked open a whisper-thin bread crust to reveal roasted goose and almond pilaf, and sliced into a roasted quince stuffed with beef, lamb, currants, and pine nuts. Voicing a complaint that any sultan’s chef might have sympathized with, Durmay noted the difficulty of sourcing large, unblemished quince for this latter dish, which appears on the menu each winter. Isin writes that the sultans made it illegal to sell food in Istanbul before the palace was fully supplied. Without the powers of an autocrat, Durmay just pays fruit vendors extra to reserve him the most perfect specimens.

After that hard-earned quince was cleared away, the meal concluded with almond halva and sembuse, a fried turnover from 1650 filled with pounded almonds, walnuts, and musk. The perfumed sembuse, which requires painstaking preparation, helps explain why Ottoman palace cuisine disappeared when the empire fell.

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In her book, Isin writes that chefs in the sultan’s palace were highly paid and highly specialized. To produce the intricate, multi-step dishes that were so prized, a chef might limit themselves to the art of kebabs, or perhaps stick to pilaf, preserves, dolma, or desserts. The knowledge of how to prepare each dish was passed from cook to cook, with no single member of the palace kitchen responsible for safeguarding or recording the cuisine.

The early years of the 20th century brought enormous turbulence to the Ottoman Empire, when the Balkan Wars were quickly followed by the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence. Those conflicts destabilized the empire and emptied kitchens. Isin writes that cooks were drafted into the army or simply left unemployed, breaking the chain of apprenticeship and teaching that had developed palace cuisine into a deeply specialized art.

The changes that swept through Ottoman kitchens went beyond recipes, ingredients, and feasts. Food was political, and the politics of Istanbul were transformed by the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the modern Turkish state in 1923 with a firm commitment to secularism and modernization. “The Ottoman period was cast as a time of backwardness and conservatism,” writes Isin, “and traditional culture was often blackened with the same brush.” She notes that cooking schools gave up local foods in favor of French cuisine, and that Turkish dishes disappeared from upscale restaurants and pastry shops. Even when Durmay’s parents first opened Asitane in 1991, he says that many considered the idea of elevating Ottoman culture unusual.

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But Turkey has changed in the nearly three decades since the restaurant was founded, and the Ottomans are back. Now, the former empire’s name is emblazoned on everything from kebab shops to carpet stores. It’s a symptom of a broader shift in Turkish culture. Under President Recep Erdogan, a political and cultural trend sometimes called Neo-Ottomanism has stoked nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire’s power and piety. It is a celebration of the past, but it also evokes a time when Istanbul’s influence stretched far beyond the borders of modern-day Turkey.

When I asked Durmay to choose a favorite Ottoman feast, though, it wasn’t a royal banquet from the empire’s apex. Instead, he settled on a meal that was held in 1898 inside Yildiz Palace as a celebration of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Istanbul. Then the German Emperor and the King of Prussia, Wilhelm had a great, swooping mustache and military bearing; he liked to pose for portraits in the pointed helmet of the Prussian army. His Ottoman counterpart was Sultan Abdülhamid II, who preferred an elegant fez.

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To honor the meeting of two great empires, the menu blended European dishes with Ottoman specialties. Dishes included venison pâté, two kinds of börek, a type of filled savory pastry, then pheasant kebab, quail, and roasted legs of lamb. After rice pilaf was whisked from the table, servers laid down platters of turkey, mushrooms, and white truffles. The guests must have been full to bursting as the meal concluded with sweet almond butter and ice cream. They might not have known as they lingered over dessert and conversation, but that night’s invitees were dining in the twilight of an era.

Wilhelm II was the last of his kind. After him there would be no more German emperors, no more kings of Prussia. His wasn’t the only empire coming to an end. Eleven years after the tables were cleared, Sultan Abdülhamid II was deposed, leaving hundreds of palace chefs out of a job. When they packed up their tools, they left for restaurants, joined the army, or simply abandoned Istanbul to look for work in the provinces. The knowledge they took with them would never return to the palace kitchens of Istanbul. Much was lost forever. But enough of their shopping lists, menus, and stories were saved to tantalize historians—and to serve as inspiration for Istanbul’s food detectives.

A Peek Inside the Extremely Metal Life of Lava Crickets

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The volcanic bugs survive on dead plants, sea foam, and a dangerous sex life.

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After a volcano erupts, lava crickets are the first on the scene. These insects make their home on the brittle surfaces of cooled lava flows that host no other multicellular life. Lava crickets survive by eating decaying plants swept in by the wind and by drinking sea foam, which contains a protein-like compound similar to what is found in egg whites. By the time green tufts of plants finally begin to sprout in the volcanic rock, the crickets have already moved on—in search of something more barren. In other words, lava crickets are extremely metal pioneers.

The dire lifestyle of the lava cricket—Caconemobius fori, or 'ūhini nēnē pele in Hawaiian—remains a mystery to entomologists, writes Michael Price in a new feature for Science. Local Hawaiians had long been aware of the crickets’ sudden, post-volcanic presence, but they didn’t appear in scientific journals until 1978, four years after a team from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum spotted the insects while exploring Kilauea’s lava fields.

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With such a short tenure in a brutal environment, the crickets haven’t exactly been easy to study. But now, a year after Kilauea’s three-month-long eruption, a team of scientists is stationed at the volcano’s lava fields to learn all they can before the crickets while they’re still in residence.

Led by Marlene Zuk, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, the team hopes to understand how these insects have come to be such effective colonists in a hostile environment. Most pioneer species—the first to colonize an ecosystem that was previously disturbed or somehow too harsh to support most forms of life—are skilled generalists that can survive anywhere, and can move, eat, and breed easily.

Despite their apparent success, lava crickets don’t fit this bill. They have no wings, they can’t sing, and they only live on lava flows, making it near impossible for the crickets to move quickly or find mates. And on top of that, the crickets have a strangely dangerous mating quirk in which the female sucks fluid from the male’s leg during copulation, a process that can take out up to 8 percent of his body mass. While having fluids in one’s body is generally important for living things, it’s especially vital in the severe heat of a lava field. So either lava crickets have some secret and surprising adaptations, or scientists will need to rework their definition of what a pioneer species can be, Zuk told Science.

Before you can actually study lava crickets, you have to catch them. Zuk and her team rely on a pungently epicurean trap: spoiled bits of cheese in empty wine bottles. They hope to unravel some of the lava cricket’s secrets, such as how the animals meet up in the lava cracks and whether they travel solo or in packs. The researchers also hope to capture some pregnant crickets to maintain a colony in their lab for ongoing testing. As Zuk wrote in an email, “the project is just getting started.”

The Race to Put Thousands of Miles of English Walking Paths Back on the Map

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Corpse roads are among the country's traditional trails.

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The heathery heaths, muddy moors, and chalky downs of England are criss-crossed by tens of thousands of miles of public walking paths. Tramping along these lightly beaten paths over fields and uncultivated land is integral to the fabric of English society—and protected by a 2000 law that established the “right to roam” freely over the countryside and along ancient roads, even when the land is in private hands. But although 140,000 miles of paths are already established as public “rights of way,” there are many thousands more that could be accessible to the public, but haven’t yet been added to official maps. Though many of these paths have been used for centuries, if they aren’t documented by an impending deadline, the right to walk them could be lost.

“They became rights of way because ordinary people used those routes over hundreds and hundreds of years,” says Jack Cornish, who manages the “Don’t Lose Your Way” campaign for the Ramblers, a U.K. charity that is currently on a mission to record these byways. The practice of roaming freely has led to many clashes over the years, usually with landowners, so the government has determined that every historic byway and thoroughfare must be mapped by 2026, or private land rights will take precedence over traditional mobility.

Now, people are delving into archives and poring over old maps in search of footpaths, and submitting them to local councils for review so they can be added to official national Ordnance Survey maps. But not any old track through the heather will do. Paths can be added by virtue of current use, showing evidence, for example, that people have commonly used a route without meeting resistance over the past 20 years. Or a private landowner can concede a public right of way on their own land. Most commonly, a path can be made a public right of way by history—some variation of all the collected customs by which, across centuries, walkers have asserted their rights to get from here to there. One of the most curious of these historical precedents is known as the “corpse road.”

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The dead don’t walk or talk, but they do have a history of laying down paths in England. Corpse roads—also called coffin routes, bier ways, lychways, burial roads, or church ways—were traditionally formed when the living passed a dead body over fields, moors, burns (little trickling streams), fells, and fens as the remains were transported from home, where people usually died, to their final resting places in a church’s burial grounds. Sometimes these routes were long. For centuries, only at particular “mother churches” was the ground properly consecrated for burial.

“The heyday for corpse roads was probably early medieval times,” says Alan Cleaver, who researched these old routes extensively with his partner Lesley Park for their book The Corpse Roads of Cumbria. (Not until the 18th century had most local churches successfully petitioned for the right to bury the dead on their own.) In those days, “you could sing hymns and worship in your little local church, but if you wanted to get married or have a funeral you would have to go to the mother church,” he adds. Getting to one could require a journey as long as 10 miles, and take days of trekking through all kinds of inclement weather and uneven terrain with a dead body on the back of a slow horse, wrapped in a shroud.

While carrying a body so far was an inconvenience for the living, that burden was thought of as a kind of gift, a final tour for the dead. Those bearing the body understood the journey was "this person’s last farewell,”says Cleaver. “We’ll go through this village and that village, and let them pay their last respects.” By common law, the paths a corpse traveled to its final rest became public footpaths, a kind of spiritual paving in which a folk tradition carried real functional weight. A description of one decision about the path by which to carry a body to church, related in 1906 by Henry Penfold, a member of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archeological Society, illustrates the lasting impact of such a choice:

“A death took place in 1905 at the hamlet of Crooked Holme, only some six minutes’ walk from the Old Church. Between the two places there is a public right-of-way for foot passengers and also an occupation [private] road between farms. When the funeral day came it was decided to go round by the Longtown road, as it was deemed that taking the short cut would create a public-right-of-way for driving purposes.”

At Crooked Holme, a longer, more arduous route on a public road was chosen over a shortcut to prevent the private road from being made public—from the simple act of being used while bearing a corpse. The funeral party’s caution was well warranted. “The Irton footpath case” was a landmark case in 1899 that dragged on for four years and definitively enshrined the custom of public corpse roads into legal precedent.

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Thomas Brocklebank, owner of Irton Hall in England’s verdant lake district, sealed off a preexisting footpath that went right past his manor windows, to the chagrin of local resident John Thompson, who argued that he had the right to walk that way, windows be damned. It was a corpse road, Thompson argued, already used for centuries, and was evidenced both in local accounts and on an 1860 Ordnance Survey map. So the presiding judge declared it an official public thoroughfare. “The path had been used as a right for as long back as living memory extended,” the judge, a Justice Joyce, wrote in his decision, and so those rights should continue. It was a class issue, too, giving tenants rights that landowners had to respect, whether they liked it or not.

There was, however, a loophole—a private path could be made available to a funeral procession and remain private if the bereaved paid a token fee to acknowledge the owner’s rights. In a March 1938 edition of the Somerset County Herald, one Isabel Wyatt related that if a “toll, usually paid either in pins or pennies, [was levied] on the funeral procession: it was then believed that though the corpse was carried over the path, it did not become a right-of-way." The fight to make and keep footpaths accessible has been continued by the modern Ramblers organization, who emerged out of the activism of radical walkers movements of the late 19th century and 1930s. They campaigned for the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, which secured public access to open spaces and allowed members of the public to submit paths for inclusion on official maps. Evidence for the public use of these paths can be drawn from pretty far back; historical time in the United Kingdom begins in 1160—precedent set from then on can be employed to define policy today. The only catch? A ticking clock. All these missing trails must be recorded, and established as historic, by 2026, the government decided, which might not be long enough; an estimated 10,000 miles of pathways are still undocumented. The Ramblers guess there are at least twice as many. A glut of applications for recognizing paths—more than 5,000—are waiting to be processed by local governments, and some claims have already been sitting in bureaucratic purgatory for a decade.

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In the United Kingdom, there is more at stake than a walk in the park. Dozens of walking clubs and path preservation societies fought—sometimes bitterly—for the rights they have now.

In 1932, hundreds of walkers staged a watershed mass trespass at Kinder Scout, the highest hill in England’s Peak District, resulting in scuffles and arrests. In 1999, landlord Nicholas Van Hoogstraten (who had hired thugs to stab, shoot, and firebomb business rivals) blocked a public right of way on his East Sussex estate with a wall of refrigerators and barbed wire, and described Ramblers as “the scum of the earth” and “a bunch of disenfranchised perverts.”

“The 2000 act was a bit of a compromise at the time,” says Cornish. “The landowning lobby was saying, ‘But we want a cutoff point for when you can add these historic rights of way to the map.’”

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So the Ramblers and others must establish the historic record of these half-forgotten rights of way. Forgotten pathways such as old corpse roads are fair additions, and the documentation to establish them can be composed of verbal descriptions as well as cartography. One citizen submitted an account of a footpath on the south coast of England culled from Virginia Woolf’s diaries for consideration. The path led from her home, Monk’s House, to a hut called Muggery Pope.

And Cleaver recently submitted a description of an old corpse road for review. Although he couldn’t walk it himself—it’s on private land—he visited on a bleak March day to get a feel for the landscape it traverses. Through hail and frigid winds, he could see the lay of the land matched the old corpse road description, another provided by Henry Penfold. In northwestern England, near Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border, the path leads from Ellery Cleugh—an old hamlet that no longer graces any present-day map—to the old mother church in Bewcastle. This part of England “is about as remote as you can get,” says Cleaver. There are rough footpaths tracking across the moorland, through villages and farms. Cleaver didn’t see a soul except for a lone farmer working despite the winter weather.

Penfold’s description lays out a series of names and waymarkers—limekilns, farmhouses, fields, streams, and junctions. “This is taken down verbatim,” he said in a 1906 speech to other members of his antiquarian society, “and is a good example of an ancient corpse-road—a road which was only a corpse-road, over which no other right-of-way save burials existed, and which through being a corpse-road became a public footpath.”

If Cleaver’s petition is approved, the path may not see much more traffic, but it will be a right-of-way in perpetuity—a map carved into the landscape, inscribed by the passage of feet.

"A lot of [the paths] are quite mundane in a lot of ways, I suppose, but they show how ordinary people went to work, or walked to the shops, or to the pub for a night out,” Cornish says. “All these rights of way are a part of history—they show how people have moved around, how people have walked in history. To me they’re as important as big cathedrals or castles.”

See the Aftermath of a Fireball Meteor Exploding Above the Clouds

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Just 33 feet wide, with the power of 10 atomic bombs.

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In December 2018, over the Bering Sea along eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a fireball meteor exploded with a force of more than 10 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The exploding meteor, or bolide, was the third most powerful recorded since 1900, and we should thank the stars that it streaked in over the water: In February 2013, an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, shattering windows across over 200 square miles and injuring more than 1,600 people. (Thankfully, no deaths were attributed to the explosion.)

So, if a meteor explodes over the water and no one is there to see it, does it even make a blaze? That (among other things) is what NASA is for. Newly released images from the Terra satellite’s Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) capture the view from above the clouds just minutes after the explosion took place. The shots capture the shadow of the meteor’s trail across the top of the clouds, as well as the burnt, glowing aura it left after cruising through the air at around 70,000 miles per hour. This animation contains images from five of the Terra MISR’s nine cameras:

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According to ScienceAlert, meteor physicist Peter Brown of Western University, in Canada, has used the available data to measure the meteor's diameter at about 33 feet, and its mass at about 1,400 tons. That places the meteor comfortably below NASA’s threshold for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)—140 meters or about 460 feet—but the highly destructive Chelyabinsk asteroid was similarly small—itself only about 55 feet in diameter, according to Brown.

Fireballs—or meteors brighter in the sky than Venus—are actually not especially rare, and NASA has recorded 775 of them since April 15, 1988. As that map shows, they’re hardly exclusive to Russian airspace. But getting to see one relatively up close what happens just as it barrels through the atmosphere? That's special.

What It's Like to Work in a Synthetic Cadaver Factory

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Bodybuilding, for real.

Tampa, Florida-based SynDaver Labs uses a unique formula of water, salt, and other ingredients to create incredibly lifelike synthetic human tissue and organs. Paired with "bones" constructed by 3-D printers, workers at SynDaver carefully sew the fake body parts together with mint dental floss.

These exceptional synthetic cadavers are meant to inspire more empathy compared to traditional medical training devices. They can be made to breathe or bleed, and are customizable for a variety of needs. The firm's least expensive synthetic cadaver costs $45,000. That price tag might seem steep, but compared to human cadavers, these models can reduce costs over time. Crucially, they can be used repeatedly, and broken parts can be replaced.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura takes a closer look inside the facility where SynDaver’s synthetic cadavers are made. To learn more about SynDaver, read our recent feature story.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

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