Ages from now, giant snails could be one of the lasting signs of human influence on Earth.
Giant African land snails are survivors. Big as a fist, their cone-shaped shells can reach six and a half inches in length. If the place where the snails are living becomes too dry, they can secrete a special mucus over their shell and retreat inside—where they can survive in a resting state for months. They often live on the ground, but they can also climb trees. For invertebrates, they live a long time—five to seven years—which means they’re smart. They might sneak into a trap, eat the bait, and then back out, unapprehended.
They also excel at reproduction. Each giant African land snail has both male and female parts, so any time one dashing snail meets another, they can mate. In a pinch, a single snail can produce more snails on its own. The number of eggs that survive will be low, but each one of those snails, if kept in isolation, can produce another small generation of snails on its own. And as soon as two of those lonely snails get back together—boom, they’ll start producing hundreds of robust eggs again.
“It makes eradication hard, because you have to get every last snail,” says Amy Roda, an entomologist for the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). “They have amazing survival mechanisms.”
All these talents—and our own migrations—have helped the giant snails rapidly colonize the globe over the past two centuries. They have spread so far, so fast that they may be one defining sign of our times. The shells they leave behind can enter the geologic record, and survive for ages to come as a marker ("we were here") in deep time. In the journal Anthropocene, malacologist Hausdorf Bernhard, of the University of Hamburg, writes that Lissachatina fulica, the giant African snail, reveals humans’ impact on the world and will create fossils that are “robust and frequent ... large enough to be rapidly detectable, and characteristic enough to be easily identified.” These snails are part of our lasting legacy on Earth.
Many of the scientists who think about geologic time and the influence of humans on the planet think that the Earth has now left the Holocene, which began around 11,650 years ago with the end of the last glacial age, and entered a new one—the Anthropocene. Geologic eras are defined by the signals they leave in the crust of the Earth, layers that can still be observed millions of years later. A boundary in geologic time might be marked by an important change in the fossil record or a geochemical anomaly. If this is a new era, then, scientists need to identify the markers that define it and that will linger in the ground for eons.
There are all sorts of weird changes currently being recorded in the ground that could signal a new slice of geologic time—changes in carbon isotopes or nitrates, the presence of plastics or fly ash. The most promising candidate, worldwide, is the scattering of plutonium-239 and other radioactive isotopes that spread across the world and settled into the ground at the dawn of the nuclear age. Anywhere on the planet, this chemical signature marks a very specific point in time, and it will linger.
So far in this conversation, animals and plants have played a less prominent role. In the geologic record, sudden appearances and disappearances of certain abundant species are needed to mark a time boundary. “There has perhaps been an assumption that the biological markers are less promising, as they take time to progress around the planet,” says Colin Waters, of the University of Leicester and the British Geological Survey, who studies the stratigraphy of the Anthropocene. “It is difficult to think of examples where there is an almost instantaneous extinction of a species worldwide, or sudden widespread migration of a species that would coincide with the mid-20th century.”
But biological markers may still signal the boundary of profound human influence on the planet, and they have some advantages. Fossils can often be recognized at a glance, which makes them easier to see in the field than a radioisotope. There are a few key criteria that make for strong biological markers. “I want an organism that has a skeleton—the more robust the better,” says Mark Williams, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester. The animal or plant, whatever it is, also needs to have proliferated (or disappeared) quickly, all around the planet. Certain bivalve mollusks are good candidates. They have thick, easily preserved shells, and were rapidly transported around the world as ships started moving from port to port with living invaders clinging to their hulls or tumbling in their bilge. Giant African land snails could be another.
Two hundred years ago these snails—known as both L. fulica and Achatina fulica in the scientific literature—lived only on the coast of East Africa. Starting in the mid-19th century they began to appear much further afield. In 1847, William Benson, a British civil servant and mollusk enthusiast, picked up a few in Mauritius and brought them to India. Gifted to a friend, the snails ended up in a garden near the Asiatic Society Museum in Calcutta, where they began to thrive. Around the turn of the century, they made it to Sri Lanka, and over the next few decades started to spread across Asia—down to the Malay Peninsula, across Thailand, Vietnam, South China, and Taiwan. During World War II, Japanese soldiers brought the snails to Pacific Islands, including the Philippines and New Guinea, with the intention of cultivating them as a food. (They’re often boiled, and are said to have a unique texture.) By the 1980s, the snails were in West Africa and made the jump across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Brazil. In this century, they have taken hold in Central America, Argentina, and Cuba. They are counted as one of the 100 most invasive species on the planet by the Global Invasive Species Database. A recent eradication campaign in Florida eliminated 168,000 of them.
Part of the snails' global triumph comes from the lifts that humans have given them around the world, but their reproductive resiliency is really behind their success. Fair warning, this can get gross. On one Philippine Island, an eradication campaign involved destroying 45 million snails in just seven months. Roda, the APHIS entomologist, once visited a field in Trinidad—a perfect snail environment, she says—where giant African land snails had made themselves at home. “They were crawling up on trees and on the buildings—literally thousands of snails within an acre or so, a small property. They can explode.”
All that, writes Bernhard in the Anthropocene paper, helps make these snails a good candidate for marking this moment in time. “Compared to many other species that needed millennia or longer to spread, the spread of L. fulica around the globe within 200 years with the help of humans can be considered geologically almost instantaneous,” he writes.
“It is a very good potential marker,” says Williams, the paleobiologist, in part because the snail’s arrival in different parts of the world can be dated with a good bit of precision. “In deep time, you can talk about a million years,” he says, and the resolution at which we can date the past grows fuzzier over time. “But in the Anthropocene, in the historical context, we want to be able to talk on an annual basis—we want to recognize 1952.” With snails, in many places, we can do that. Hundreds of years from now, thousands of years from now, and even further into the future, giant snail shells will linger in the ground, announcing not just their presence, but ours—and how we changed everything.
The scent of fresh pastries is one of the world's greatest wonders.
It might not be great for your waistline, but there are few better smelling places to live than near a bakery. Not only do local bakeries help define an area's culinary culture, but they are also the rare businesses that make a neighborhood smell better. We want to hear about your favorite local bakery, and most importantly, what it smells like!
Here in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the Atlas Obscura offices are located, there used to be a small bread kitchen nearby. At night, the bakery would prop open the door to the street to let in fresh air. The scent of the baking bread would flood out and fill the street. It was a clean, slightly sweet, yeasty aroma that somehow smelled warm, like you were inhaling a blanket on a cold winter day. Passersby could often be seen gathering around the open door, hypnotized by the scent as though a cartoon vapor had pulled them there by the nostrils. The bread tasted pretty good, too. That bakery is no longer in business (condos!), but the memory of the smell remains. We want to hear about the bakeries in your area that remain, and the specific smells that you recognize them by.
Fill out the survey below, and tell us about your favorite local bakery and its distinctive scent. Then send an original photo of your favorite bakery to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, "Great Bakeries." We’ll share some of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. It’s time to sniff out the places where the donuts get made.
Water moves in predictable ways across undulating landscapes, but it can be hard to appreciate from a human perspective on the ground. It’s much easier to understand when you’re essentially a giant hovering over the land with the ability to move mountains and make rain.
For the unique opportunity to morph landscapes to your liking—a mountain here, a lake there—see the Augmented Reality Sandbox. As users shift around piles of sand, a colorful elevation map projects over the surface. Different shades of red, yellow, and green show the steep or gradual slopes on the land. When a user hovers their hand over the sand, shimmering blue virtual water appears and starts to flow.
In a way, the visualization shows you what you already know: This pile of sand is the tallest and this hole is the deepest. But when watching the display in action, there’s a lot more to glean about the dynamism of topography and how it interacts with flowing water.
The sandbox was originally developed by Oliver Kreylos, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis, as an interactive way to teach people about freshwater lake and watershed science. The ingredients are relatively simple: sand, a 3D-camera, simulation software developed by Kreylos (which you can download for free), and a projector.
How it works: The 3D-camera, mounted above the sandbox, detects the distance to the sand below. That data is fed into a computer, and the software spits out a contour map visualization which is projected over the sandy peaks and valleys. At the same time, when the camera detects a hovering hand, the computer simulates how water would interact with the topography—how it would flow if it were a real landscape.
To help the sand keep its shape, and avoid a mess, the exhibit uses a special kind of sand called “kinetic” sand, which is mostly silicon dioxide (regular sand) with a small amount of a polymer called polydimethyl siloxane, which allows the sand to sort of stick to itself.
Beyond being just plain cool, the sandbox teaches some valuable lessons about geology and earth science: When you change the shape of landforms, you realize that the placement and movement of water not only shifts with changing land, but follows a set of predictable biophysical principles. Water acts differently if it’s in a canyon or a basin or in a meandering dip in an otherwise flat area.
Since it was first developed in 2012, the exhibit has been recreated in hundreds of places around the world, on just about every continent, in museums, schools, and universities. Heck, you can make one yourself.
The simulation teaches people about the importance of water on the landscape. After all, the distribution of water, where it flows, where it pools, is an essential underpinning to all life on earth.
The rabbit had looked better. Two days dead, it was swollen and rank, and riddled with holes to let gases escape. Five days later, it swarmed with beetles. Its head had exploded, and the pelt pulled away from its bones. To approximate the result of baking under the desert sun, it had been sitting on a bed of natron, a type of salt, and perched on a laboratory rooftop.
It was 1999, and along with her students at the American University in Cairo, Egyptologist Salima Ikram had been reconstructing ancient techniques for animal mummification. Working on the 1.8-pound rabbit had been more than a little grisly, but that didn’t mean it was going wrong. The team had no reason to believe that, when all was said and done, they would end up with anything other than a mummified rabbit, much like the old objects Ikram had studied. But due to “health and sanitary considerations,” they later wrote, they called the experiment off. The team interred the corpse.
Ikram is an expert in animal mummification and a proponent of experimental archaeology, from which she’s gleaned first-hand knowledge about what it takes to preserve a non-human body. Her team carried some of their other experiments to the end. A few other rabbits were eviscerated, exsanguinated, and wrapped in linen strips sealed with melted resin. The researchers also tried their skills on two ducks and a couple of fish. One of these, a catfish with individually swaddled whiskers, had vanished, after having become “extremely attractive and tempting (still) to a local raptor who flew away with it,” Ikram notes in the book, Divine Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt.
Though scores of scholars have studied mummified human remains, Ikram writes, “less attention has been paid to their animal counterparts.” This is despite the fact that “as many, if not more, variations in mummification technology were practiced on animals compared to humans,” Ikram continues. These techniques included evisceration and desiccation, cleansing the intestines and then packing the body cavity with natron, and injecting oils into the anus to dissolve the viscera from the inside. At least one canine mummy was built from disarticulated bones, and live birds were occasionally plunged into vats of melted resin, pitch, and bitumen, Ikram writes. The submersion killed and preserved them in one stroke.
Ancient Egyptians mummified monkeys, gazelles, crocodiles, bulls, shrews, snakes, and more, and Ikram has studied many of these. So when a slew of mummified scarab beetles were recently found during archaeological work across several Fifth Dynasty tombs in the King Userkaf complex of the Saqqara necropolis, she wasn’t particularly surprised. The linen-wrapped scarabs, which were placed inside a limestone sarcophagus, are “something really unique,” Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters from Reuters and other wire services. “It is something really a bit rare.”
— Ministry of Antiquities-Arab Republic of Egypt (@AntiquitiesOf) November 10, 2018
Mummified beetles may be rare, but they were probably pretty easy to pull off, Ikram says. While she hasn’t conducted experimental work on scarab beetles, she expects that they’d be good and dry after three, four, or five days in the sun. “Not long, basically,” she says. “If it’s a small animal that’s not very fat—like a mouse—a week or 10 days will do it." A hefty bull would require a hundred days, at least.
The larger the animal, the bigger the logistical puzzles of mummification. It boils down to the quantity of fat, and whether or not viscera would need to be removed. In the case of the scarab beetles, “there’s absolutely no need to mess with those poor creatures in that way,” Ikram says. Crocodiles and snakes, on the other hand, are wildcards. Less fleshy and fatty than mammals, and much scalier, it is unclear whether they would have always been eviscerated—as human and larger animals mummies often were—or just left out to dry.
Ikram and other archaeologists have found that there were a number of reasons to mummify animals and arrange them in tombs. Sometimes, mummification was a way of exalting treasured or beloved animals. In most other instances, mummified creatures served as offerings. The animals were raised for this specific purpose and their mummies were sold near temples, sparking a substantial industry—as well as a black market. (Occasionally, sham mummies were packed with little more than feathers, sticks, and clumps of earth.) Like raptors and shrews, Ikram notes, scarab beetles were symbols of Ra, the sun god, and were probably given as offerings to him.
Mummified scarabs didn’t take much effort, but Ikram says the discovery offers valuable insight into funerary traditions. “It’s hard to get into the heads of ancient Egyptians,” she says, and since this tomb appears to have been essentially untouched since 2,500 BC, everything inside it helps researchers puzzle out where things were placed and why. The inventory “helps us piece together what the ancient Egyptians’ intentions were,” Ikram says—one tiny mummy at a time.
From canned beets to milk jugs, each exhibit relates to a wave of deadly disease.
The home-canned beets killed someone. So did the freezer-aisle pot pies. The cheese, breakfast cereal, frozen pizza, tampons, tattoo ink and plastic bags have victims of their own.
These are a handful of the exhibits on display at the International Outbreak Museum in Portland, Oregon, which curators say is the world’s only museum of its kind. It features objects collected from outbreaks of infectious diseases that took place in Oregon and around the globe.
To view the exhibits is to cast eyes on deadly weapons—or the vectors, at least, that carried deadly diseases. Theses instruments of illness help tell the stories of outbreaks and the people behind them.
The museum is a single windowless room in a state office building that’s home to the Oregon Health Authority. This room was once the office of Bill Keene, an internationally respected disease investigator for the State of Oregon who assisted on cases around the world. He officially began collecting the mementos for a museum in 1993, though he started holding onto items a decade or more earlier. After his unexpected death in 2013, his colleagues have continued his efforts.
The small room is crammed with more than 100 exhibits that fill tall glass-encased cabinets and cover every surface. The beets and the box of Rely tampons are authentic. Others, like the papier-mache cantaloupes in a net that hangs from the ceiling, are carefully handcrafted representations.
Not every item in the collection represents a fatal outbreak. But every item hints at ailment: stomach cramps, fevers, chills, rashes—the often-agonizing symptoms that accompany an outbreak. And each exhibit hints at investigators’ quiet, crucial work to unravel the mystery of their cause.
On a shelf along the back wall, some tarot cards and mugs bearing the image of cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh mark a dark chapter for disease detectives, when a cult in rural Antelope, Oregon, perpetrated the largest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history. The goal was to suppress voter turnout in Wasco County, ensuring that cult members, known as Rajneeshees, could overtake locals in the November 1984 elections. They slipped liquid tainted with salmonella into salad-bar offerings at 10 restaurants and several other public places. The attack sickened 751 people, who ranged in age from newborn to 87.
The plastic milk jugs contained in a red plastic crate recall a yearlong case that stumped investigators as they pondered 25 cases of salmonella spread across Oregon, over the course of 12 months, with no clear link. The only detail the cases had in common was milk, which perplexed investigators because the milk was pasteurized. However, a trip to a beloved local dairy in Roseburg, southern Oregon revealed that while the milk itself was fine, a crate-washing machine at the facility was contaminated with salmonella bacteria. So, as crates of milk cartons moved through the facility, they were doused with a salmonella-infused solution. A thorough cleaning of the facility ended the yearlong outbreak.
The Outbreak Museum’s peanut-laced products including granola bars, cookies, and crackers serve as a reminder of Stewart Parnell, a corporate peanut peddler who was sentenced to 28 years in prison for knowingly selling contaminated products. Parnell, the CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America, famously wrote in an email, “Just ship it,” when he learned a shipment had been delayed pending salmonella testing. The shipped peanut-butter paste was linked to a 2008 outbreak that killed nine people and sickened more than 700 others.
In isolation, the stuff that fills this one-room museum is the same ordinary stuff that fills trash and recycling bins. It’s waxy paper boxes printed with company slogans and plastic wrappers bearing logos and nutrition facts. In some cases it’s convincing reproductions of raw meat you’d find shrink-wrapped and refrigerated in the grocery store or fresh strawberries you’d buy from a farmer’s market.
But in Bill Keene’s world, each exhibit stands for a smoking gun. This museum is the evidence of real, everyday items that harmed or killed—and that could have gone on to hurt more, if not for the scientists who solved these mysteries. Even before it was a museum, this room was a place where other investigators drew inspiration.
“You could come in here when you needed a break from your work, sit here and ask him about anything,” epidemiologist Tasha Poissant says.
Keene wanted this museum to commemorate the successes, remember the failures and demonstrate the importance of this work, Poissant says. He understood that outbreaks affect people’s lives in intimate and powerful ways, which means they also have the power to educate, to influence public opinion and change policy.
“When Bill passed away, we all wondered what are we going to do with this museum?” epidemiologist Hillary Booth says. “He didn’t get a chance to make it into the proper museum he wanted to.”
So his colleagues and family stepped in to bring some order to the collection he’d amassed. They installed the display cabinets in his office and catalogued exhibits on the museum website. They continue to collect artifacts, from their own work as well as from cases around the world. While the museum isn’t open to the general public, the curators show it off whenever the opportunity arises—when a public health conference comes to town or guests visit the office.
They hope to build it into the place Keene envisioned because as much as it showcases their profession, it’s also a tribute to his memory.
“It was really important to me to see his legacy continue,” Booth says. “To teach people—just the joy he taught us of epidemiology.”
Memorabilia from Keene’s work spills out of the museum and covers the walls leading to its door. Newspaper clippings, photos from his field work and quotes from Keene (Keene-isms) decorate the cubicle walls just outside.
“Your diarrhea is our bread and butter,” one quote reads.
Poissant offers a correction: What Keene actually said was, “Your vomit and diarrhea is our bread and butter.”
Either way, Keene’s words capture a genuine passion for this line of work that in some cases saves lives but almost always remains invisible.
During the Bronze Age, around 4,000 years ago, in what is now Afghanistan, an artisan from the Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization made a ceramic pot. The four-inch-tall vessel was distinguished by a doe-eyed antelope painted across its flank. We’ll never know who used it, or for what—at least before 2013.
That’s when Karl Martin, a valuer at Hansons Auctioneers in Derbyshire, England, purchased the pot at a car boot sale, a kind of English flea market. And why not? He got it and another pot for a total of £4—or, £1 for every thousand years since it had been made.
Of course Martin didn’t know at the time that he was buying an authentic artifact from one of the cradles of civilization. All he knew, he said in a Hansons release, was that he “liked it straight away,” so he gave it a place of honor in his household where he would see it every day. It was in the bathroom, where it held his toothbrush and toothpaste. There it sat for years.
And there it would have stayed, if not for the fact that Martin often encounters antiquities in his line of work. One day, he was helping a Hansons colleague unload some items headed for the block when he spotted some familiar-looking pottery, coated with patterns and animals like those on his toothbrush-holder. He brought his holder to the colleague, James-Seymour Brenchley, Hansons’ Head of Ancient Art, Antiquities & Classical Coins. Brenchley was able to link the pot’s painting style to that of other Indus Valley artifacts. He speculates that the pot had arrived in the United Kingdom via British tourists. Martin decided to put it up for auction at Hansons, where it sold this week for £80—“not a fortune,” Martin admits, but still a 1,900 percent profit, not adjusting for inflation.
The Indus Valley Civilization flourished in the northwestern part of South Asia between 2600 and 1900 BC, across parts of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Its most distinctive artifacts are probably carved seals used to mark trade goods with symbols that may or may not represent one of mankind's earliest written languages. (The Indus script is the subject of much heated scholarly debate.)
But the Indus Valley pot is not the only antiquated item in the United Kingdom that had been unintentionally repurposed for modern times. Earlier this week, researchers realized that Henry VII’s unidentified bed was used to decorate film and television sets between the 1970s and 1990s. That's at least two items for a first-class master bedroom suite.
In the 16th century, Spain conquered the powerful Maya empire, which spanned present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Belize, and northern Costa Rica. The native Mayan language was lost, along with all but four of their thousands of texts. Before the Spanish language (and thus Roman alphabet) was forced onto their tongues, the Maya had a sophisticated writing system of over 800 hieroglyphs that decorated everything from their sun-soaked temples to their bark-paper Dresden Codex. Unsurprisingly, the glyphs’ meanings proved difficult to decipher in the centuries following Spanish colonial occupation of Mesoamerica. But one man’s eventual decoding of the highly developed script would be remembered in spades.
After 500 years of scholars theorizing over the ancient symbols, Yuriy Knorozov cracked a significant piece of the Maya code in 1952. The Soviet linguist, ethnographer, and epigrapher surmised that the glyphs in question were syllables—and not letters or purely pictorial as previously thought. To this end, Knorozov published a paper called "Ancient Writing of Central America" in which he suggested that Maya script represented phonetic sounds and thus could be interpreted similarly to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. One of the comparative linguist’s conclusions, for example, was that “because ‘west,’ in spoken Maya, is ‘chik'in,’ and ‘k'in’ is the word for sun, the hand represents the syllable ‘chi.’ ”
Though Knorozov’s paper advanced the world’s understanding of Maya script considerably, it was published at the height of the Cold War, and therefore criticized for allegedly being influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology. (It wasn’t.) Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s reputation benefited from producing a man who made significant academic contributions to the field of ancient languages and writing systems. So much so, that today scholars worldwide can read more than 90 percent of the Maya glyphs.
To honor Knorozov’s seismic discovery, the USSR issued a special deck of playing cards in 1975 featuring ancient Mayan iconography. In Soviet Russia, the only playing-card vendor was the Soviet State. But that didn’t mean the decks they issued were boring. These particular cards were inspired by original Mayan artworks found in Mexico and designed by Russian artist Viktor Mihajlovich Sveshnikov, who also designed a deck featuring Russian opera scenes and another dedicated to the Neva River, which flows through St. Petersburg.
The King of Hearts card in the Maya deck features a nearly direct replica of the figure represented in Yaxchilan Lintel 24, a Mayan sculpture that depicts a religious ritual being performed by Lady Xoc, one of the Maya civilization’s most storied and powerful women. The detail on each card is evident: Sveshnikov even included Tzolkin glyphs from the Mayan calendar on both sides of several cards.
The state-controlled Colour Printing Plant specialized in customized, artistic decks of cards, unlike the United States’ primary focus on developing conventional decks for casinos and magicians. The Maya-centric cards were only printed for a short time. But though the plant has folded, fear not: Sveshnikov’s unique deck can still be found on eBay for around $180 should you want to play a game of poker with a rare, culture-colliding set of Soviet Mayan playing cards.
Corn farmers in eastern Nebraska have long claimed weather patterns are changing, but in an unexpected way.
“It’s something I’ve talked about with my dad and grandad many times,” says fifth-generation corn farmer Brandon Hunnicutt. Along with his father and brother, the 45-year-old lives in the 400-person village of Giltner and grows about 2,000 acres of corn each year. From above, the area looks like a blip of homes surrounded by an expansive grid of circular fields. Though Brandon’s grandfather is retired, he takes an active interest in the business. “Contrary to what you’d think should be happening, both him and my dad swear up and down [that] droughts used to come more often and be a lot worse,” says Hunnicutt. “Considering it’s been 30 years since we had a really bad one, I’ve started kind of taking them at their word.”
This is not the only noticeable development—University of Nebraska climatologists say the growing season has gotten 10-14 days longer since 1980. Hunnicutt now waits until the first weeks of November to pilot his 40-foot-wide, dump-truck-sized combine through the farm’s widely arching, seemingly endless rows of corn—enough to cover 800 city blocks.
Though subtle, the Hunnicutts have noticed these changes and more.
“To be successful in this business, you’ve got to pay close attention to the weather,” explains Brandon. In the past 20 years, on top of the above, he’s noted a gradual decrease in 100-degree days during the summer. “That missing digit isn’t something you overlook,” he asserts with a laugh. “High temperatures create a lot of anxiety. If they go on long enough, they’ll scorch your corn and put a hurtin’ on your bottom line!”
A 2018 report issued by climate researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims to have solved the mystery and verified farmers’ suspicions: Namely, that large-scale corn production has changed the weather.
Over the past 70 years, farmers in America’s midwestern Corn Belt have made vast leaps in production. From 1950 to 2010, annual harvests increased by more than 400 percent, jumping from 2 billion to 10 billion bushels. In addition to making the area the world’s most productive agricultural region, climate scientists at MIT say the boom has created its own weather patterns.
“We studied data from the past 30 years and found that the intensification of corn production has increased average summer rainfalls by about 35 percent and decreased [average summer] temperatures by as much as one degree Celsius,” says former MIT researcher Ross E. Alter, now a research meteorologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Alter was the lead author of a 2018 report published in the journal of the American Geophysical Union that demonstrated how land use has impacted the region’s climate more than greenhouse gas emissions. “What makes these findings so fascinating is that, while global temperatures have risen, areas like eastern Nebraska have actually cooled,” continues Alter, referring to yearly averages. “We think it’s likely heavy agriculture counteracted rising summer temperatures that might have otherwise resulted from increasing greenhouse gases.”
In other words, the man-made shift has been helpful. By increasing yields, farmers have unintentionally created weather patterns that seem to be protecting their crops and helping them grow more corn. (Of course, burning fossil fuels to plant, cultivate, harvest, process, and ship farm products has been shown to be a major contributor to rising levels of greenhouse gases.)
Though similar effects have to some degree been observed in the rice-growing regions of eastern China, the report marks the first time the effects of agriculture on regional climate change in the central U.S. have undergone comprehensive analysis. The findings document the most significant man-made regional climate shift in world history.
“On a global level, this research is important because it proves the influence of agricultural intensification is really an independent problem from greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Alter.
By comparing observed historical trends in the Corn Belt’s climate to those predicted by a variety of global simulations used by the World Climate Research Program, which coordinates climate research sponsored by various international organizations, the report showed the models were inaccurate for the region (they predicted summer temperatures would rise and rainfall would increase by just four percent). Though the WCRP models accounted for greenhouse gas emissions and other human and natural factors, they did not consider agricultural intensification.
“Our findings are a bit different from what people thought about the mechanisms of climate change,” says Alter. He believes that accurately simulating and understanding climate change at the local level will require a look at cases of agricultural intensification like Nebraska’s corn boom.
But how, specifically, has growing more corn changed the climate? Nebraska associate state climatologist Al Dutcher says it’s complicated.
On one hand, it has to do with what Hunnicutt and other farmers refer to as “corn sweat.” This happens when photosynthesis boosts the amount of water vapor in the air.
“When a plant’s pores, called stomata, open to allow carbon dioxide to enter, they simultaneously allow water to escape,” writes Kimberly Hickok, who covers climate change for Science Magazine and reviewed the report. Known as transpiration, the process cools the plant and surrounding air, and increases the amount of water going into the atmosphere and returning as rainfall. As Hickok notes, “the cycle may continue” as that additional rainwater evaporates back into the atmosphere and causes rainfall on other farms and towns downwind.
Put another way: More corn means more transpiration. Which, in turn, produces slightly cooler temperatures and increased precipitation. The fact that corn is a non-native species boosts the effect.
“The predominant native vegetation in central and eastern Nebraska is grass,” explains Dutcher. Farmers have replaced the area’s vast seas of grass with more than nine million acres of corn, which transpires at a rate 20 percent higher than indigenous grasses. “Agriculture is literally funneling moisture into the atmosphere, and all that humidity has created a kind of protective bubble against rising temperatures.”
Dutcher and Hunnicutt say growing more corn—and thus, creating more transpiration—would have been impossible without advances in farming efficiency. The introduction of high-yielding varieties, better irrigation, and soil management techniques, along with the ability to use computer sensors to closely monitor field conditions, have all contributed to soaring yields.
“One of the biggest factors is the widespread use of cover crops, crop residue management, and no-till farming methods,” writes University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources extension engineer Paul Jasa. Together, the practices have erased the need for conventional tillage, dramatically increased organic matter in the soil, reduced evaporation and runoff, and lowered summer surface temperatures. “With time, the [native clay-based] soil has become much healthier and better at retaining water,” Jasa continues. “This has made crops more resilient to traumatic weather events and, in general, much more productive.”
Hunnicutt says automated irrigation has helped boost overall production and allowed him to grow corn in pivot corners where his grandfather could not. Upward of 340 acres that formerly yielded nothing now contribute as much as 180 bushels per acre. In his tenure as a farmer, full-field yields have grown by more than 50 bushels an acre.
“I can get minute-to-minute weather predictions and tell you moisture levels anywhere in our fields just by glancing at my phone,” says Hunnicutt. “In the 1950s, my grandad was using a Farmers’ Almanac. Back then, if they thought the soil was too dry, they just dumped water on it. Now, I know exactly what my plants need and when to apply it.”
As might be expected, Alter’s report has a dark side. And that dark side has global implications.
“In terms of the Corn Belt, the degree of agricultural intensification we’ve seen in the last 30 years isn’t sustainable,” he says. “It’s projected to soon come to an end and may even decline.” And if that happens, the mitigating effect of agriculture will disappear, and global temperatures will rise even faster.
Though studies have yet to be conducted around the world, Alter says that areas that have experienced substantial agricultural intensification have likely experienced similar benefits: more rainfall and cooler average temperatures during the summers. Like Nebraska, the effects have probably masked negative changes and will eventually be overwhelmed.
“I know some of the anti-climate change folks will probably poo-poo this, but it’s something my family takes very seriously,” says Hunnicutt. “We’ve been in this business for five generations, and I hope to see my children and grandchildren carry on that tradition. We’re doing everything we can to reduce fuel consumption and increase efficiency. Our hope is these [mitigatory effects] will give us enough of a window to make adjustments and prepare for what’s coming.”
In the meantime, he hopes the world gets its act together and curbs emissions before it’s too late.
J.B. Leonis stored his whiskey in exactly the fashion you’d want a pre-Prohibition booze magnate and land developer to keep his liquor: in a secret vault, secured by a bank door, hidden behind a bookshelf.
Leonis came to California in the late 19th century, after his uncle Miguel, a fearsome French-speaking immigrant rancher, with questionable allegiance to the law, beckoned him to the quickly developing area around Los Angeles. Miguel would dominate the western part of the San Fernando Valley; J.B. helped found his own city. Vernon started as an industrial zone, just south of the L.A. city limits. Soon, it would be known as one of the wildest places for entertainment in southern California.
In Vernon, men could find boxing, baseball, and all manner of other diversions. But booze was one of the main draws. The Vernon Country Club was one of the city’s first night clubs, where the new stars of Hollywood would misbehave. Jack Doyle’s Center Bar boasted of having the longest bar in the world—100 feet of counter space manned by 37 bartenders. When Los Angeles went dry, the allure of Vernon only became more powerful.
Leonis, who controlled the city behind the scenes, was responsible for much of this revelry. He owned, for instance, the property that Jack Doyle’s bar was built on, and he supplied it with liquor. According to one businessman of the time, the way to get a proposition approved was to hand it over to Leonis. If he liked it, it’d pass.
But in time, the Prohibition era came for Vernon, too. It seems only natural that a man who’d made part of his fortune selling liquor would want to stockpile it. In his vaults—one in a house in Hancock, California, another at his ranch in Little Tujunga Cavern—Leonis stored pints of Hermitage whiskey, bottles of Old Crow, and dozens of other samples of whiskey made before the United States gave up alcohol.
As sometimes happens when you store your alcohol in a vault behind a bookcase, the secret of the liquor’s location faded out of memory. The properties passed to J.B.’s grandson, Leonis Malburg, a powerhouse of Vernon politics in his own right. (Malburg was mayor of Vernon from 1974 to 2009, when criminal convictions forced him from office.) When Malburg died in 2017, the family rediscovered the vaults.
Those secret stores of liquor are now being sold at auction at Christie’s. These whiskies, according to the Christie’s curators, “are indeed special, supremely unique—especially when sampled alongside their modern iteration.” In recent years, pre-Prohibition whiskies have become popular items at auctions. These are listed at prices ranging from $500, for a quart of Old Taylor Bourbon from 1911, to $10,000 for 12 quarts of Old Crow Bourbon distilled in 1912 and bottled in 1918.
Elizabeth Cushee’s elegant 1745 orb was boundary-pushing at the time.
Around 1745, Elizabeth Cushee shrank the entire world onto a wee little globe measuring just three inches across. Fashioned from paper gores curved and pasted onto a hollow wooden orb, the globe weighs no more than a few ounces. It fits snugly inside a fish-skin case, the scaly exterior of which evokes the celestial confetti of the night sky. A smattering of colorful constellations are pasted onto the inside of the case, where they loom over land and sea. Continents and cosmos mingle in a curio the size of a plum.
Pocket globes had been circulating since the 1600s, especially among sailors and students of cartography, write science journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller in their recent book, All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey. At the time, cartographic works ran the gamut from erudite and accessible, both in content and price. Lavishly illustrated atlases and star charts were designed for a lay audience, while comprehensive catalogues helped astronomers and navigators get more precise bearings. Cushee’s fell somewhere in between.
Other 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and English pocket globes sold for 6 guilders and 15 shillings, respectively, Miller says—roughly $75 or $100 today. Globes like Cushee’s “weren't affordable for everyone, but they weren't only for the super-rich either,” Miller says. “They were the sort of thing a middle-class person might buy to project a certain air of worldliness and sophistication. I can totally see an 18th-century social climber whipping one out at a garden party to impress his friends, or maybe to mansplain the cosmos to a lady.”
Cushee didn’t need to be condescended to. Her edition was an improvement upon one made by her late husband, Richard, a British surveyor, in 1731. Elizabeth updated Richard’s version to be in line with the cartographic knowledge of the time, Mason and Miller explain. She added arrows to mark the path of the trade winds, and attached California to the coast of North America (previously, it had floated as an island). She also mapped the route of George Anson, a Brit who had been cheered as a hero when he had returned home the previous year, following four years of sailing around the world, pestering Spanish ships, and fracturing trade routes.
The Cushees also tweaked the way the constellations were oriented. Most globes and celestial charts of the era depicted the constellations from the perspective of a distant god gazing down at Earth, Miller says. On both Richard and Elizabeth's versions, Ursa Major, the bear, faces to the right, the way we see it when we look skyward. Some things are a little off—where’s the other half of Australia?—but squeezing all of this detail and information into so small a package was a feat.
While Miller hasn’t been able to dredge up much information about Elizabeth Cushee’s life, “It wasn’t uncommon for women to be involved in the family mapmaking business back then,” he says, “even if they didn’t always get credit for it.” Cushee's cartographic creativity places her among a smattering of women who have charted the Earth and helped make sense of the heavens—often with little earthly fanfare.
People have been inventing myths about food for about as long as they've been preparing meals. Common culinary folklore can range from relatively sensible cautionary tales to far more inventive notions—and damn, can they be silly.
Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us the most memorable food myths they'd ever heard, and we got hundreds of amazing responses. Did you know, for instance, that you aren't supposed to eat tuna and ice cream on the same day? Or that eating peanuts at a NASCAR race is bad luck? And don't even get us started on all the ways milk can supposedly be turned into deadly poison when combined with other foods.
“Cut off the tips of cucumbers and rub them against the rest of the cucumber to remove the poison.” — Kimberley, Montreal, Quebec
“That reheated spinach produces dangerous levels of nitrate that could even kill you. My mother told me this. I like spinach, so rarely do we have leftovers but still, I hate throwing food away. But in this case…” — Mascha, The Netherlands
“If you eat mushrooms late in the day, you'll have crazy dreams that night. My mother [got it] from her mother before her, etc. It sticks with me because it seems to have some truth to it… or else I've attributed any weird dreams that I may have had that night to any mushrooms I've eaten earlier that day, because of what she said!” — Stacey Coy, Conroe, Texas
“That eating carrots will improve your vision. As a child, I recall my grandmother telling us to ‘eat all your carrots if you want to have good eyesight,’ followed with ‘you never see a rabbit wearing glasses!’” — Scott Carey, San Francisco, California
“If you don’t wash inside and behind your ears, potatoes will grow out of them. My grandmother told us this as she checked our ears for cleanliness. It was so scary and she seemed so sure of it, that I believed it for too long!” — Peg Steinmann, Cincinnati, Ohio
“A hot potato placed on the head will cure a headache. It was an old Mexican folk medicine remedy I heard about from kids in school. Seemed funny. As an adult, suffering from migraines, I found salt helped me. My infusion of choice was a plate of salty French fries. I then realized I was using a hot potato to cure a headache! LOL!” — Kitty, Arizona
“That worms can be found in intact cherries, despite there being no holes or imperfections in the fruit. My mother always sliced cherries in half because of this. So I grew up doing the same. Do you know how hard it is to remove cherry stains from fingers and nails?” — Nica Sharshon, Big Bend, West Virginia
Dairy Tales
“Butter will soothe a burn. Ouch. Later in life, I found out that it actually fries you even more. A nextdoor neighbor did this to me as a child. She really did think it would help.” — Mary Ellen Francis, New York
“If you get butter in the honey jar, the honey will go off. Until she was a grown-up, my mum (who grew up in the Black Forest region in Germany) always believed that if you got butter in the honey jar, the honey would go off. Her father had told her this when she was a child, because he hated flecks of butter mixed with his honey, and she believed it for decades!” — Esther, United Kingdom
“My dad told me, 'White cows give milk. Brown cows give cocoa. Black cows give coffee, black and white cows, coffee with milk.' It sounded quite reasonable. I think about it every time I see cows (which is quite often).” — Kerstin, Germany
"Eggs can only be balanced on a particular day of the year. I first heard this in Malaysia, during Chinese New Year. My Chinese-Malaysian friends were all taking photos of balanced eggs, seemingly unaware that it can be done any day of the year. Even when I balanced one in front of them the next day, they were still unconvinced.” — Graham Moore, Toronto
Milk Doesn't Go With Anything
“You should not drink milk when eating tomatoes. It was an old family belief. The idea was that the acid in tomatoes would curdle the milk and cause you stomach distress. I didn’t mind because that belief meant I could have a glass of juice or soda when we had spaghetti for dinner." — Mary Gow, Brooklyn, New York
“Cherries and milk are poison. I must have been about 6 or 7 when I first heard this one. It was common knowledge among the kids in my neighborhood. We all believed the two were deadly poison when combined. And some of the kids in school claimed they knew somebody who heard it from someone that a third grader once dropped dead in the school lunchroom when he dropped some cherries into his carton of milk and drank it. One summer, my brother and I were visiting our grandparents. One morning my brother got mad at me and dropped a couple of maraschino cherries into my glass of milk. I drank most of the milk before I found the deadly fruit. The oft-repeated family story states that I went hysterical when I found them. My grandma laughed and told me that I wasn't going to die. To prove her point, she drank the rest of the milk and ate the cherries. My grandpa scolded her, ‘Now, Ruth, don't go drinking poison in front of the children! You'll give them ideas!’” — David Hall, Spokane, Washington
“Not absolutely sure where this comes from, but my mom apparently believed that you can’t drink milk with fish. She would serve battered fish fillets with mashed potatoes and peas, and at that meal we’d get cola to drink instead of milk. I never really heard about it except that my mom wouldn’t serve milk when we had fish. As I grew older, I decided it was a kind of derivative of 1) the culinary tradition that cheese doesn’t mix with seafood, and 2) popular misconceptions of religious dietary practices during Lent (we weren’t Catholic, but local restaurants would have Friday fish specials during Lent).” — Karen, Indiana
“If you drink milk while you have a fever it will curdle in your stomach. I lived in West Virginia for two years and heard a lot of superstitious stuff. Working in a hospital I couldn’t believe how many of the more educated medical people still lived by this rule.” — Tara Oakes, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Perils of the Sea
“The ‘R’ rule for shellfish (i.e. don't eat shellfish in months without an ‘R’). This stemmed from eating raw oysters and worries about red tide and spawning season, but it is all but obsolete in the modern world. Red tides are closely monitored, and shellfish can be processed after harvesting. My family has a summer house on Cape Cod and shellfishing is an enormously huge thing out there. It sticks with me because red tide and shellfish poisoning can do terrible things to the human body and I was always afraid of them.” — Grey Maier, Providence, Rhode Island
“You can't eat raw oysters and drink vodka at the same time. It will kill you. An elderly woman admonished me for doing it. It's so stupid and I am still here.” — Don Starr, New Orleans, Louisiana
“You can’t eat tuna and ice cream on the same day. Mom told me this one when I was a child. I’m 50 now... and I still cannot eat tuna and ice cream on the same day.” — David Murdock, Attalla, Alabama
“Any fish bone will kill you. Growing up in Wyoming, we ate a lot of trout. Each time, with wide-eyed fear, my mother would ominously forewarn us, ‘BEWARE THE BONES!’ as she scooped up a virtual plate of death. Apparently, she believed ANY fish bone would become lodged in our throats, so the tension would build throughout the dinner as we waited to see who would get an emergency tracheotomy. I still can’t enjoy freshwater fish.” — Kris Weaver, Seattle, Washington
Bread and Hair
“Burnt toast will put hairs on your chest. My auntie told me.” — Gillian Browne, Scotland
“Eating your sandwich crusts will make your hair grow curly. My nan and my mum always told me this as I had the straightest hair ever and would have loved to have had curly hair. Needless to say, I still have the straightest hair, despite many thousands of crusts eaten over the last 30 years!” — Sinead B., Truro, United Kingdom
Cookie Dough Disasters
“It's dangerous to eat raw chocolate chip cookie dough and go outside in the heat. The dough will cook in your stomach and rise and your stomach will expand, or worse… [I heard this] from a knowledgeable and wise 6-year-old who shared this important information with me when I was 4 years old. Clearly this kind of important information stays with us for life!” — Wendy Merron, Wayne, Pennsylvania
“Raw cookie dough will give you worms. My grandma warned my dad and he made sure to try to protect me from the dangers of raw cookie dough. I was willing to take the risk and still eat it.” — Shawn Clark, Michigan
Stay Out of the Water
“According to this myth, after having lunch on the beach, you have to wait at least a couple of hours before taking a bath (either in the sea, in a lake, in a bathtub, etc.), otherwise you'll potentially die by congestion. Some say two hours, some say three, some say exactly two and a half. It's something that all Italians have heard at least once in their life, from their mothers during summer holidays at sea. If it was real, each summer there would be lots of casualties on Italian shores.” — Pietro, Italy
“Tap water has fleas in it. My German grandma warned me never to drink water straight from a tap as it had fleas in it! Years later we holidayed in a cottage in the Lake District and there was a note saying, ‘The water from the kitchen tap comes straight from a spring on the hill above and may have sweet water shrimp in it. These are completely harmless and are a sign the water is super clean.’ It made me wonder whether someone had shown my granny a picture of these microscopic critters and traumatized her for life.” — Renate Watts, U.K.
“You can't go swimming for 30 minutes after eating. When I was growing up, and went to the beach with my family, there was a strong admonition not to go into the water for 30 minutes after eating or you would get cramps and drown. Apparently, the human body had to focus on digesting the food and was not capable of surviving even wading into the surf up to your knees! I've also heard this same myth from other families.” — Dianne, United States
Lady Killers
“You can't can food if you are having your period. It will spoil. Grandmother told us.” — Iris Gallagher, Tennessee
“Sauerkraut detects pregnancy. My grandmother used to find out if her daughter-in-laws or potential daughter-in-laws were pregnant by having them drink sauerkraut juice. If they were pregnant it would make them sick. I don't know where she got the sauerkraut juice. Now I see all over the internet how good sauerkraut is for pregnant women.” — Sharon Villines,Washington D.C.
“Eating chili peppers will injure a woman's uterus. My mother and I were enjoying our first backyard planting of Shishito peppers when she said that she was not allowed to eat chili peppers when she was growing up on her uncle's farm. Her male relatives told her that eating chili peppers would injure her uterus. I replied that they probably said that so they would not have to share the chili peppers with the women.” — Susan Hikida, Carson, California
“At summer camp, I swallowed a seed and was told I would have a watermelon baby so at 6 or 8 years old I feared that pregnancy.” — Angela, New York City, New York
“That highly spiced foods lead to an overstimulation of the emotions and in particular those associated with sex. The spicier the food, the more impure and excitable thoughts, lust, and potential violence it generates. My mother, who was a very Victorian lady, did not believe in spices beyond salt and pepper. It didn't stick with me and I eat spicy food all the time. LOL!” — Jack Montgomery, Kentucky
“The myth that eating cabbage can help increase breast size. It’s a popular joke in my surroundings, often people give advice to eat more cabbage to girls who have an inferiority complex about their femininity.” — Anastasia, Belarus, Minsk
Good Luck With That
“Eating peanuts causes bad luck at NASCAR races. I grew up in Southern Virginia where both peanuts and NASCAR are a big thing. Apparently if you eat peanuts in the shell at a NASCAR race, it will bring bad luck to the drivers, resulting in a crash. (Or maybe bad luck to you if you're betting...) I don't go to NASCAR races anymore but I do still think twice before cracking open a peanut if there's a game on TV or I'm at some kind of event.” — Tim, Miami Beach, Florida
“If you don't eat all the rice in your bowl, you would be poor all your life and/or marry someone with acne on their face.” — Irene, Australia
“Eating black-eyed peas and cornbread on New Year’s Day brings good luck all year. I was born and raised in Texas and have heard this all my life.” — Candace, Dallas, Texas
“Eating sushi on a rainy day is bad luck! I discovered sushi in 1999 while at university. I quickly became obsessed and began eating at sushi restaurants several times a week with my roommate. One day, we invited a third friend to join us. She was horrified. She said she couldn't do it because it was raining, and it would bring bad luck to us all. And anyway, how could we eat ‘barely dead fish’ when we were surrounded by water? I never figured out the origin of this myth, but I also was never able to forget it!” — Catherine, Bologna, Italy
“If you eat peas and greens on New Year's Day, you'll have money for the rest of the year. If you don't eat them... no money. My mom cooks peas and greens every New Year's Day and always tells everyone to ‘at least take a bite’ or else we won't have money in the New Year. As a person who despises peas and greens, I've always refused to eat them despite my mother's warning. I don't think she really believes in the old wives' tale, but it's a Southern tradition that she's always participated in.” — Angela, Sylacauga, Alabama
“Eating pork and sauerkraut on New Year's Day assures good luck for the following year. This was my entire family's New Year's Day ritual, begun by the Pennsylvania Dutch in my area. This was a fine ritual until I discovered drinking alcohol in large quantities on New Year's Eve as a young adult. After that, I began my own ritual of eating chicken noodle soup on New Year's Day in the hope that my tradition would bring me good luck, starting with assuring that the food would stay in my stomach. My great grandparents started this tradition before I was born. I still prefer my chicken noodle soup ritual which has indeed brought me luck in keeping food down each January 1.” — Kristi, Quakertown, Pennsylvania
“A loaf of bread placed upside-down is bad luck. My mother was neurotic about this. If we carelessly left a loaf of bread sitting upside-down, she would damn near race to the kitchen to correct it.” — Ryan Johnson, Los Angeles, California
Persimmon Madness
“Growing up, my mom frequently warned me: never eat persimmons and crab together or you will die! I thought it was an odd combination, probably one I would never come across. Still, I always looked out for it when eating out at restaurants, so I could warn them the same and demand it be removed from the menu.” — Clover Oak, Los Angeles, California
“If you cut open the seeds of a persimmon along its ridge (not an easy task) and open the seed from top to bottom like a tiny book, inside there will be one of three little white shapes: a two-tined fork, a spoon, or a knife. These shapes foretell one of three outcomes for the coming winter. The spoon represents a deep, snowy winter (lots of shoveling, hopefully not with a spoon). The fork represents a winter of mixed snow and ice and rain, basically a winter that can’t decide what it wants. And the knife signifies a winter so cold that it ‘cuts.’ My great grandmother told me this myth when I was a little girl, and every year we cut open the seeds to foretell the coming winter conditions. We find it to be true more often than not.” — Bee Phillips, Maryland
“That eating persimmons will give you bezoars. A friend of our parents used to tell my dad this, but she pronounced it ‘bay-sores.’” — Jeff Miller, Colorado
Gumming Up the Works
“If you swallow that bubble gum it will give you gas and you will blow bubbles out of your butthole. My mother [told me that]. I remember everything my mother told me not to do that I did anyway. Most all of it involved the butt and the belt.” — Frank, Alabama
“Gum stays in your body for seven years. I had heard it at a very young age, but when my grandfather once asked me, ‘Where's your gum?’ and I told him I'd swallowed it, he put his finger on my abdomen and said, ‘Well, we are going to have to go right in there and get it.’ Wouldn't be concerning to most, but my grandfather happened to be a surgeon!” — Bart, Minneapolis
“If you swallow your chewing gum it will tangle itself around your ribs and you will be a hunchback for the rest of your life. My mother [told me]. It sticks with me because for years if I accidentally swallowed my gum, I would worry for days. Until I grew old enough to realize that it was just an old wives' tale. Even now at 61-years-old, the memories of my mother having a panic if I swallowed gum stay with me.” — Baxter Clark, South Africa
Proof That Almost Anything Can Be Mythologized
“Tapping a soda can stops it from fizzing over. This seems to be a universal one, but I first heard it in primary school. As far as I can tell from my research, there may be a physical reason why it might work, but in practice, it definitely doesn't. This doesn't stop everyone I know from always tapping their drinks beforehand, convinced that a shaken can will be rendered inert before opening, usually with messy results.” — Graham Moore, Toronto
“My great grandmother use to scream at the tamale pot when she was cooking them. This is supposed to help with the cooking to have delicious tamales! My mother told me this story and I think it’s great to keep those curious anecdotes alive.” — Edgar Santos, Mexico
“Eating too much lengua (cow's tongue) will result in verbal incontinence. My best friend's family, immigrants from Mexico City, always told me this food-related myth whilst gorging myself on lengua tacos. I have verbal incontinence regardless, so it may not be a myth after all.” — John B., United States
“French fries take two weeks to digest. I read in one of my mom’s quack diet books that it takes two weeks for your body to digest french fries. I recall staring down a plate of fries and finally deciding that two weeks of carrying this stuff around was very worth it. I believed this myth for about a decade until I mentioned it to a friend in nursing school, who challenged me to read any kid’s book on digestion and get back to her. Can’t believe it took me that long to figure it out!” — Camille G., Texas
“That the haggis, Scotland’s national dish, is actually a small animal that lives on hillsides in the Scottish highlands. According to the myth, the wild haggis has two legs of uneven length, allowing the haggis to easily run around the hillside and retain balance. I had a summer job at university working in a kilt shop in Edinburgh. The shop was packed with tourists through the summer months due to the Edinburgh Festival. We stocked all kinds of souvenirs, including stuffed ‘wild haggis’ toys for children and other merchandise featuring the wild haggis. My colleagues and I would occasionally relay the myth to customers, some of whom left the store still unaware of the truth.” — Iain Shaw, St. Louis, Missouri
“Using hot water makes ice cubes freeze faster. Grew up with grandmother swearing by this! If nothing else I figured it killed any germs in the water.” — Taryn, Springfield, Oregon
“I actually have two. One is that the specks in vanilla ice cream are actually dirt. The other is that the balls in tapioca pudding are actually fish eyes. I had a big brother who liked both of these foods and he told me those stories so I wouldn't eat them, leaving more for him.” — D. Campion, Thailand
Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Tiny marine wood-eaters might help us dig into our biofuel future.
Say hello to the gribbles. With their translucent bodies and circular black eyes, these minute marine crustaceans are like sheet ghosts—only crunchier—who burrow through pieces of wood gliding around the world’s waters. There, they systematically feed on the sugars lodged within planks and logs, and are perennial thorns in the sides of ships and docks.
But these pests may prove essential to stifling climate change, as their creative, unique digestive systems provide a model for harnessing clean energy. A new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, builds on years of research to detail how gribbles manage to liberate the nutrients hiding out in wood. Their natural mechanism could provide a blueprint for technology that does the same, says Katrin Besser, a biologist at the University of York and lead author of the study.
According to Besser, gribbles became interesting to researchers because of their unusually sterile digestive systems. The crustaceans don’t rely on bacteria to help them digest, as just about every other animal does. Rather, they produce the necessary enzymes themselves. The question researchers wanted to answer, says Besser, was how gribbles can “do this without any help …” A simpler system, involving just one organism, is not only easier to study, but also easier to imitate in industrial designs.
So, using gribbles from the southern English coasts of Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, the team homed in on the “hind gut,” and observed how proteins called hemocyanins break down lignin, the near-impermeable polyphenol coating surrounding those coveted wood sugars. Besser calls the process a “pretreatment” for digestion. In other words, we knew that gribbles feed on potential biofuels, we just didn’t know how they unlocked them. It’s a simple process of oxidation, something hemocyanins are well practiced in. In order to carry oxygen through the gribbles' tiny bodies, the hemocyanins bind to it with copper atoms, turning the invertebrates’ blood blue (compared to red blood, which gets its color from a reaction between oxygen and iron).
Using gribbles as a model to extract biofuels from wood could prove a game-changer in the quest to turn to alternative energy sources, and not only because the process is cleaner and cheaper than existing industrial techniques. “Woody plant biomass,” the team explains in a release, “is the most abundant renewable carbon resource on the planet …” Better yet, it doesn’t even interfere with human food resources, like other sources of biological energy sources, such as corn, do.
Gribbles. Between the name, the doe-eyes, and the environmentalism, they kind of make ravenous marine wood-borers look pretty good.
A ranger initially mistook the clumps for wads of wet toilet paper.
At first, Dawn Weaver thought she was looking at wind-tousled trash. It was the end of November, just before sunrise, and Weaver—a ranger and park manager at Musgrove Mill, a South Carolina historic site where a Revolutionary War battle once took place—was on her morning patrol route. When she rounded a curb in her park-issued pickup and spied little white blobs strewn near the roads running beside the Enoree River, Weaver assumed she’d have to go back for her bucket and pinchers. “I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s toilet paper,” she says.
She put her flashers on and climbed out of the car for a closer look. That’s when she noticed it wasn’t trash at all: She was looking at swirls of ice, comprised of strands less than a millimeter wide.
This is a fleeting phenomenon often known as “hair ice.” From a distance, the frozen whorls can look like the fuzzy, puffy guts of a mattress turned out atop leaf litter. Up close, they appeared even lighter and more gossamer—like bunches of tulle, or a clump of cotton candy.
The curious sprouts emerge only when conditions are just right. In 2015, a team of German and Swiss researchers reported that the ice mainly forms in broadleaf forests between 45 and 55°N—a band that includes portions of the United States and Canada, and much of Europe. They tend to occur when a landscape is humid and temperatures hover just around freezing. A particular fungus appears to be a crucial ingredient, too. Writing in the journal Biogeosciences, from the European Geosciences Union, the researchers reported that the fungus Exidiopsis effusa was present in all of the swirling samples they analyzed. (This evidence supported a hypothesis that had been kicking around for a century.)
Hair ice previously had been documented in Scotland and New York—and wherever it's found, this natural wonder isn't built to last. “Hair ice grows mostly during the night and melts again when the sun rises,” said Gisela Preuß, co-author of the Biogeosciences paper, back in 2015.
Weaver spotted hair ice on two recent mornings, following days of rain and a spell of nights during which temperatures hovered around 30 or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The blobs clustered near stalks of Verbesina encelioides, a type of aster also known as golden crownbeard.
Hair ice is an uncommon sight in South Carolina, Weaver says, and it didn't linger long. As the sun came up and chased the shadows from the shade, the icy filaments melted away. The vanishing act only took minutes, Weaver says, and temperatures have since rebounded up to 70 degrees. But while the ice lasted, she adds, “It was pretty cool—both literally and figuratively.”
Tell us about the tunes that capture where you've been.
Who doesn’t love that moment when you hear the name of a place you’ve been, mentioned in a song? Whether it’s your hometown or just a place you visited once, in the best cases, songs about recognizable places can make you feel like you’re part of a bigger, shared experience.
Myself, I often think of the song “Salt Lake City” by the Beach Boys. Growing up in Salt Lake City, I could never imagine why someone would want to write a song about the city I wanted so badly to get away from. But they mention our local amusement park, Lagoon! And Park City (sort of)! Realizing that these iconic musicians were referencing some of the same places I haunted as a kid made my own experience feel a bit more important. To this day, despite not really liking the Beach Boys, I’ll always listen to that song.
What’s your favorite song about a place? Fill out the form below to tell us about it, and we’ll collect our favorite responses in an upcoming article, complete with a playlist of some the greatest place-based songs of all time. Let us know what songs just take you there (and where "there" actually is).
Wafa Ghnaim is introducing people to "tatreez" through her workshops.
In a big-windowed lecture room, Wafa Ghnaim, author of a self-published book on Palestinian embroidery (known as tatreez) and founder of the nonprofit teaching initiative Taztreez & Tea, kicks off a three-hour needlework workshop with a heated primer on the perfect cross-stitch.
“Palestinians, we have a way for everything, even cutting our bread,” the 35-year-old entrepreneur, dressed in an intricate, hand-threaded maxi skirt, explains.
Whereas Japanese needlework, for example, focuses “on the way each stitch lays on top of each other,” Ghnaim says, Palestinian embroidery emphasizes the “cleanliness on the back of the cloth” and the ability to make out the motif on both sides. Eventually, she assures the class, “you’ll have a clear front and back.”
At least, that’s the goal. The larger mission of Ghnaim’s workshops, lectures, and publications—produced with backing from the Brooklyn Arts Council—is to revitalize the art of Palestinian embroidery, reaching new fans in the diaspora.
Ghnaim, who was born and raised in Oregon, is the daughter of the acclaimed embroiderer Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, the 2018 recipient of a National Heritage award fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (“She even got a letter from Donald Trump,” chuckles Ghnaim. “He didn’t look that [her work] was Palestinian.”) She grew up apprenticing for her mother, who in 1948 fled war-torn Safad, now a town in present-day northern Israel.
The age-old craft of tatreez, a folk art practiced by rural women for centuries, serves as a window into the history of Palestinian exile. Mothers and grandmothers used to pass down designs, with different motifs associated with each village. After the founding of Israel in 1948, 750,000 Palestinian residents—roughly half the population—were forced into exile, an event remembered in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Another disruption took place in 1967 during the Six-Day War—known as the Naksa, or defeat—when Israeli forces first occupied the West Bank. Basic survival superseded the role of craft traditions and place-based practices were upended.
“When Palestinians were exiled in 1948 and 1967, they weren’t carrying a pattern book. They were carrying their baby and running out the door,” Ghnaim says.
Yet in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, refugee camps also became vehicles of exchange as communities from all over Palestine converged. “There was a lot of sharing,” adds Ghnaim, as together women “had to recall and recreate their motifs.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) revived folk traditions to promote Palestinian national heritage. According to Rachel Dedman, a London-based art critic who curated a show on the political history of Palestinian embroidery, tatreez became “a key signifier” of “endurance in the face of Israeli erasure and violence.” By the late 1980s, when the First Intifada erupted, embroidery emerged as a potent expression of resistance. The traditionally feminine craft spread as Palestinian men, languishing under Israeli lock-up, began honing their skills, explains Dedman.
In Ghnaim’s classes, men now typically make up a modest portion of the attendees. “I think that gendered aspect is breaking down, which is necessary for this art to stay alive,” she says. “I see in my classes a whole wide mix of people. I don’t just see Palestinian women and Palestinian men. I see non-Palestinian women. I see non-Palestinian men.”
Ghnaim’s educational events began running in Brooklyn and will soon move to Washington, D.C. On the day that I attend in October 2018, the pop-up is running alongside the D.C. Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, an annual lineup of Palestinian cultural offerings that features a richly embroidered tatreez design as its logo. Today, the assignment given to the 17 workshop attendees is to reproduce a delicate cypress motif, known as the “Tree of Life.”
The room grows quiet with concentration, and the afternoon passes quickly. Unlike other species, the cypress tree “stays green and survives,” explains Ghnaim. “It gives until it dies and that’s the purpose of life. You give until your last day.” In the time it takes me to throw together a few rows of practice cross-stitches, Razan Sahuri, a Jordanian-born nutritionist, has already shown off a tiny, pristinely-stitched cypress tree.
“I think most Palestinians, when we see the embroidery, it feels like home,” says Sahuri, who moved to D.C. three years ago from Dubai, and grew up feeling caught between cultures. “I’m Palestinian but I’ve never been to Palestine. When it’s so far away, you want a thread to hang onto your culture. Pun intended!”
Caught between home and exile, past and present, the meticulously crafted stitches seem almost suspended somewhere between time and space. Dedman, the London curator, explains that embroidery is “by nature labored, private, and slow.” Far from a spontaneous public expression, the time-intensive pieces nonetheless form a quieter form of protest, with an “extended temporality” that spans its own steady, thread-by-thread creation.
Sahuri finds comfort in this measured, repetitive motion. “It’s like meditation. You can’t think of anything else,” she says. “I don’t know if mind numbing is the right word?”
The scale on each piece is minuscule—each hole on the cloth just about the size of a period—and the work is eye-wateringly intensive. I have to pull apart my mangled tatreez stitches three times to start over. Though I had seen embroidered garments and souvenirs many times during my stays in Ramallah, it was only in attempting my own tatreez creation that I began to grasp the effort involved, as well as the complexity of each craft piece’s history. Embedded in each tatreez cloth are narratives of displacement and belonging, with embroiderers adding their own personal litany of sorrows and joys.
“Someone is really shedding skin when they’re producing the art,” says Ghnaim, who plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in Art History to trace the evolution of tatreez as it moves between generations in the diaspora. This year marks the re-release of an expanded print edition of her book: Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora. It also commemorates 70 long years of Palestinian exile.
Dr. Vikash Tatayah, the conservation director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, has a decidedly morbid picture hanging on his office wall. It’s a copy of a wood cutting from 1604, etched just a few years after Dutch explorers first arrived on this secluded, unpopulated island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In the foreground, sailors lure Mauritian grey parrots from the treetops, then grab them by the wings. Further down the beach is pile of dodo corpses, with more birds being clubbed to death beside them. Ships wait on the horizon, harbingers of the destruction to come. Less than a century later, the dodo would be extinct.
Tatayah’s office décor is appropriate for someone devoting their career to saving the island’s remaining native species. But it stands in stark contrast to the near-ubiquitous image of the dodo, displayed across Mauritius, as a kind of jolly national mascot. Its roly-poly, beaked visage is given place of pride on the country’s currency and customs stamps and national seal. The dodo lends its name to pizza parlors and coffee shops, its likeness to beach towels and backpacks. There are giant dodo statues in public parks and mall food courts. Countless tourist shops hawk tiny carved dodos for a few dollars. If you’d like a more rarefied version, you can pick up a pair of figurines from Patrick Marvos, an upscale jewelry shop near the botanical gardens, in sterling silver, price upon request.
Despite the polar images of the dodos dying on a beach and the dodos grinning in a shopping mall, it would be reductive to plot Mauritius’s relationship to the creature along a binary axis of shame and pride. The dodo has become a symbol of national identity in Mauritius, a kind of synecdoche for the island and its relationship to its colonial past.
Some Mauritians traveling abroad find the extinct giant pigeon is the only thing people know about their homeland. In 2015, Mauritian Rick Bonnier came to the United Status as part of a State Department exchange program for young African leaders. On his travels through North America, he often encountered people who couldn’t find Mauritius on a map.
“I told them ‘the dodo birds,’” he says. “And then it kind of comes back.”
Though the dodo may be now synonymous with a kind of cursed stupidity (“going the way of the dodo” is a cliché on Mauritius as much as it is elsewhere) it did not waddle dumbly into extinction. They were naïve, but not without reason; after all, they had never met a predator. There were, aside from fruit bats, no native mammals on Mauritius. The Dutch did become dodo predators, but contrary to the popular perception, did not hunt the bird into extinction. When they did eat them, it was not very happily; the meat was, according to contemporaneous reports, tough and unappetizing. The Dutch called it “walghvoghel,” which translates roughly as “tasteless” or “sickly” bird, because the flesh was so unctuous that it made the sailors ill.
The real problem was less the humans than what they brought with them. Cats, rats, monkeys, pigs, and other animals the colonists imported by accident or design were likely the ones who killed the bird off by feasting on its eggs and competing with it for food and resources. At a time when species around the world are facing similar threats, the dodo remains a bracing metaphor for ecological degradation—just not the way that we think. As is often the case, the dodo died not primarily from overt human villainy—blood-thirsty sailors thwacking birds on the beach—but rather by the all too human failure to consider the secondary effects of our actions—stowaway cats and rats—until it is too late to reverse them.
Dr. Tatayah and his organization have taken the lesson of the dodo to heart. Overshadowing the cautionary woodcut in Dr. Tatayah’s office are images of the other species Mauritians have brought back from the brink, with their growing numbers written beneath their pictures. But humans are still driving creatures to extinction on Mauritius, or at least coming close. Martine Goder, who works with Dr. Tatayah on the Island Restoration program, explains that even today, with biosecurity checks and public education, human settlement still poses dire, if accidental, threats to native ecosystems. Within the past decade, for example, shrews snuck in with construction materials onto Flat Island off the north coast of Mauritius, home to the last remaining population of orange tail skinks. The reptiles are tiny, skinny as an adult’s thumb with a long, snaking body that fades from brown to bright orange along their eponymous tail.
“Within 15 months,” Goder says, “all the reptiles had disappeared.” Conservationists managed to save some remnant of the population that used to number in the tens of thousands and move them to a nearby predator-free island. “But if this hadn’t been done,” Goder says, “we would have lost a species in 2011 in Mauritius.”
The loss of the skink would have carried a different emotional valence than the disappearance of the dodo. Like the dodo, it would have died not so much through direct human villainy as a kind of carelessness or neglect. But it would have been the “fault,” so to say, of the Mauritians themselves, rather than distant colonists. Perhaps this is why Goder and others, even those in the conservation world, don’t have that same ferocity when discussing the dodo as they do other Mauritian species.
Sidharta Runganaikaloo co-founded SYAH (Mauritius), an environmental NGO, on the island and acknowledges the dodo bird as a symbol of her country. She says when she first saw a link to The Dodo, the American site providing, in its words, “visually compelling, entertaining, highly shareable animal videos and stories,” she at first assumed it had to be a new Mauritian news site, based purely on the name.
But even with the close association between her country and this creature, she still feels a kind of distance.
“I’ve learned about the dodo in history class,” Runganaikaloo says. “You know that it’s the national animal of the country and… it’s just that. At the end of the day, I don’t feel any emotional belonging.”
Mauritians are all the descendants of immigrants. There were no ancestral myths about the dodo, no home remedies made from their flesh, no superstitions around their sightings, no one passing down any stories at all, other than European colonists arguing over whether or not it existed.
This dearth of a mythological record is because, when the Dutch touched down in 1598, they found an uninhabited island, unusual in the dark history of colonialism. Mauritius wasn’t fully settled until 1638, when it became an outpost of the Dutch East India Company. Their plan was to harvest the ebony forests by the sweat of imported slave labor, mainly from Madagascar, since there were no native Mauritians, aside from the forests and the animals, available for exploitation.
The last dodo sightings were reported in the 1680s. Less than 30 years later, the Dutch abandoned the island. By the time the French claimed Mauritius in 1715, the dodo was gone. Even the descriptions that survived were not granted much respect: The bird’s location was so remote and its physical appearance so unusual, that people dismissed sightings of it as mere fantasy, on par with “the Griffin or the Phoenix,” as the British naturalist H.E. Strickland notes in his 1848 book The Dodo and its Kindred. It was only in his account, written well after the British had seized Mauritius, that the dodo’s disappearance was truly recognized.
“These singular birds,” he writes, “[…] furnish the first clearly attested instances of the extinction of organic species through human agency.”
Though Strickland ultimately couched his description in the language of religion, it was still a significant admission of human guilt. While the dodo was not the first species we had eradicated, it was the first one to enter, albeit belatedly, the popular consciousness as a source of human shame.
“This is the bird of conservation,” says Dr. Tatayah, the Mauritian ecologist who keeps the aforementioned 17th-century woodcut pinned up by his desk. “Previous to that it was ‘nature is abundant, nature provides for man, nature is bountiful.’ But this was the first time that man realized well, actually you can drive things to extinction.”
Perhaps it is the distancing effect of Mauritius’s colonial history—the idea that “they” killed the dodo and not “us”—that makes the popular image of the bird so mordantly jolly. Perhaps any animal that is dead for that long inevitably feels too distant to elicit much feeling. But there was one dodo reference, out of the dozens one sees across the island, that may best encapsulate the island’s relationship with its original resident.
At the end of the tour through the L’Aventure du Sucre, the museum in Mauritius dedicated to the long history of sugar cultivation on the island, there is a cartoon. In it, a tourist couple stares, panel by panel, at meeting places for Hindus, Muslims, Creoles, Chinese, whites, the full melting pot of Mauritian heritage. In the final panel, seemingly exasperated, they ask a man where they can find “the real Mauritians.” He tells them, in so many words, that they’re looking at them. There are no “real Mauritians.” That’s just a sales pitch for tourists.
But behind him, a little gray dog pipes up: “Les vraies Mauriciens ont été mangés par les Hollandais il y a longtemps.”
The real Mauritians were eaten by the Dutch a long time ago.
Every year, these fish block traffic in Washington State.
Most of the time, Skokomish Valley Road in Washington is a quiet, two-lane street with the occasional car passing by. But every year around November, the road finds itself heavy with traffic as a motorcade of shimmering chum salmon exit the nearby Skokomish River and cross the road in a frenzy.
Their destination is anticlimactic. Most of the thousands of salmon who cross the road end up flopping to their deaths in a field and are picked up by a passing raccoon or hawk.
The annual phenomenon caught the attention of internet users last month when a Washington resident named Diana Kannenberg posted a short video of the salmon traffic jam online (seen below). While wildlife crossing is not particularly unusual in the Evergreen State, the animals blocking traffic are usually not fish.
But this spot is special. This salmon crossing happens almost every year at the same location around five miles down the Skokomish River, says Aaron Dufault, salmon policy analyst for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Dufault credits a unique combination of factors that often coincide in mid- to late-November: heavy autumn rains, peak chum salmon returns, and a stretch of river prone to flooding that happens to be right next to a road.
“The river overflows its banks, and you’ll get a whole bunch of fish that’ll just follow wherever the river is,” says Dufault, “even when following the river means crossing a road.”
Some of the salmon will backtrack and make it back into the river, but most will die in the fields where they become fertilizer or food, according to Dufault. Although it may be distressing to see so many salmon lose their way, Dufault says the location of the fish means they are probably from a nearby hatchery, where chum salmon are born in a human-managed environment and released into rivers to supplement wild populations. “They are pretty close to the end of their journey,” he says.
Dufault says the nearby salmon hatcheries usually return more fish than they need on an annual basis, so losing a couple thousand every year doesn’t make much of a difference from a population standpoint. “Sometimes we can surplus tens of thousands,” says Dufault. “We're talking like 30 or 40,000 sometimes. So the scale just isn't quite commensurate with there being either a financial or conservation issue.”
The crossing is a chance for Washingtonians to see the remarkable athleticism of salmon, Dufault adds. “Most people know they’re pretty amazing critters that can overcome quite a few obstacles to get back to spawn,” he says. “They’re able to get over the road when they’re barely half-covered in water. It’s always amazing to see how well they can migrate through such little water.”
Watching the salmon propel their muscular bodies through an inch of water, like hydroplane boats, striving towards probable death by the thousands, one can’t help but be impressed, “It’s obviously not ideal for them,” says Dufault, “but they will do their darndest to get through it.”
Invented in Troyes, these travel-sized texts started popping up everywhere.
No matter where you are in the world, during any given morning commute, you will likely see a book. Whether that book is electronic and read from a screen, or a more traditional three-dimensional version in the grasp of a hand, the fact remains: people like to read on the road. In 2018, it’s easy enough to compress a text into a never-ending scroll of a PDF and attach it to an email, which is equally digital and shockingly fast. But in the 17th century, sharing a piece of literature was exclusively tactile and decidedly more slow-going.
Troyes is a town in northeast France that sits on the Seine in the Champagne region. It is known for being a main stop on the ancient Roman travel route Via Agrippa, and the site where the standard measurement for gold evolved. It is also responsible for the mass production of literature in France.
In 1602, brothers Jean and Nicolas Oudot were printers in Troyes, and sustainably minded to boot. Using recycled paper from previously published books, the innovative printmakers created low quality, travel-sized brochures, protected with covers made from used sugarloaf packaging the color of faded denim. These updated editions of classic texts (think fun-sized SparkNotes) this small-format printing model birthed were thus named livres bleus (blue books). Blue books, and the broader Bibliothèque bleue (blue library) publishing house, were made possible through the Oudot brothers’ association with the family of Claude Garnier, who was a Renaissance-era printer of popular literature himself, primarily for the king of France.
Admittedly, these blue books were not beacons of perfection. They were littered with typos and misaligned margins, and had a reputation for being highly (read: egregiously) abridged versions of their parent text, but the possibilities they contained were remarkable nonetheless. The brothers Oudot diluted their literature for a much wider (and less literate) audience, and it wasn’t long before the simplified volumes became relatively mainstream. Because they were cheap to make they were cheap to buy, thus increasing the lower class’ access to books. In a 1979 study, American historian Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that printing was “the unacknowledged revolution” of the Renaissance, due in part to the blue library’s role in situating printed matter as a significant part of popular culture.
The tiny texts, measuring 12 by 7 centimeters (4.7 by 2.8 inches), were also easy to carry on one’s person, which gave birth to our term “pocket book.” Their miniature size made for easy transport, so blue books, small and light, became a perfect vehicle for the popularization of mass media. Book-peddling colporteurs created a network of wide distribution across France by selling the petite books at various fairs and markets. Printers used colportage, this system of literary circulation, to spread their cheap, abridged editions of popular texts to rural areas of Europe in particular, as book shops were exclusively found in major cities. In this way, blue books increased literacy in working-class populations dramatically. Though the Oudot brothers initially focused on reprinting and repurposing local literature, their blue book format took hold in other French cities and towns—proving that readers beyond Troyes, including those in urban environments with the capital to purchase classic works, were devoted to the new blue library. (Even noblewomen read them!)
As the years—and the success of blue books—marched on, the blue library became a bonafide family affair. Jean and Nicolas’ sons, four between the two of them, ran the production of blue books in the late 17th century. The family’s eventual literary imprint in Paris, cemented by its publication of satire, religious literature, cook books, and almanacs in large quantities, nearly secured them a printing monopoly over popular French works. But in 1760, the Oudots finally went out of business, as new legislation infringed upon the right to reprint literature.
Today, Troyes’ very own Greater Troyes Media Library—Médiathèque du Grand Troyes—holds over 2,000 volumes of these 17th-century blue books. Print isn’t dead after all.
From most beautiful to most explosive, here are some highlights from our growing database of the world's wondrous foods.
It's been a year since we launched Gastro Obscura, a guide to the world's most wondrous food and drink. To mark this milestone, we’ve looked back at the 1,000 foods we've added to our database, picking out some of the most amazing entries in different categories. We also reviewed data from our readers, who, for the past year, have been marking which foods they have tried or want to try. It revealed some bests of the best.
Out of the more than 1,000 entries in our foods database, readers wanted to try peanut butter fruit the most. Although it might look a bit like a grape tomato, this Andean fruit has a smooth, dense pulp with a nutty flavor that has undertones of berry and sweet potato. Native to Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, it can be eaten raw or blended into milkshakes or pastries. Some chefs even transform it into a jam, making for an all-in-one PB&J spread.
Twice a year, pilgrims in Sardinia walk 20 miles from the city of Nuoro to the village of Lula. They are celebrating the Feast of San Francesco, and when they reach their destination they will be rewarded with the rarest pasta in the world. Also known as su filindeu, Threads of God are intricate, painstakingly pulled noodles that only three women on Earth can make. So it’s not surprising that the pasta has proved the most desired, yet elusive food in Gastro Obscura’s database: It has the greatest discrepancy between readers who want to try it and those who actually have had the pleasure.
While the ingredients list is simple—semolina wheat, water, salt—making Threads of God is a delicate process of working the dough into rounded strands and doubling, doubling, doubling until reaching some 250+ strands without breaking. After drying in the sun, the noodles are commonly served with a simple mutton broth and sprinkling of pecorino cheese.
Out of all the pastries, puddings, and pies we’ve covered in the past year, this Dutch-Indonesian dessert takes the cake. Lapis legit, Gastro Obscura’s most desired sweet, consists of 18 to 30 individually baked layers of spiced butter, sugar, and egg yolk, sometimes in a variety of colors. The decadent stack combines elements of German baumkuchen, a spit-roasted cake that Dutch colonists brought to Indonesia in the 15th century, with local Indonesian spices such as cinnamon, clove, mace, and nutmeg. To achieve the layers, bakers swapped out the traditional spit for a pan and broiled each layer before adding the next. Today, you can track down the delicate delicacy in Indonesia or the Netherlands (where it’s also known as spekkoek).
Our foods database contains quite a few pyrotechnic delights, but when it comes to surprisingly explosive food, unassuming chocolate teacakes take the top prize. In 1953, members of England’s Royal Air Force made an interesting discovery about the teacakes in their ration packs: With increases in altitude, the marshmallow inside the cakes expanded and, at 15,000 feet, it cracked the chocolate shell. It wasn’t long before pilots started conducting what one veteran called “rather unscientific in-flight experiments” with their snacks.
It was all fun and games until the teacake explosion. During the summer of 1965, a captain and student pilot forgot they had placed several unwrapped treats above their instrument panels. After the captain performed an emergency depressurizing switch, the treats exploded, scattering chocolate shrapnel and marshmallow across the windshield, flight controls, and the mens’ uniforms. Afterward, the RAF banned marshmallows from flights. Although it’s never been officially confirmed, most people suspect the teacakes in question were Tunnock's.
From radish sculpture contests to parades with giant floats made entirely of citrus, food makes a fantastic medium for creative expression beyond the kitchen. Stunning, ephemeral, and sometimes painstakingly detailed, Tibetan Buddhist butter sculptures might be the finest example of food art. To make the sculptures, monks and nuns shape yak butter—which also fuels lamps in Buddhist temples—by hand and dye it with mineral pigments to form flowers, animals, and symbols. The sculptures are a crucial element of the New Year’s Butter Lamp Festival in Tibet, when the streets are filled with flickering butter lamps and beautiful butter-based art. But, like most food, this wonder doesn't last forever. At some point, the makers melt their masterpieces or feed them to animals.
When in Jakarta, you’d be hard-pressed to find a warung, a late-night, hole-in-the-wall food stall, that didn’t sell some version of Indomie noodles. But only one establishment serves up a version so spicy, it’s earned the nickname “death noodles.” The dish is covered in 100 to 150 ground-up bird’s eye chilies. On the Scoville scale, which ranks spiciness, a single bird’s eye chili is 100,000 units, which is hot, but nothing warranting a death moniker. However, when crushed and combined, the 100 to 150 peppers in death noodles can add up to a scorching Scoville rating of 20 million. Just how hot is that? One British chef claims to have temporarily lost his hearing after eating the dish.
During food shortages in the USSR, no crumb went to waste. Thrifty chefs used sgushyonka, a sweetened condensed milk, to deliciously glue bits of leftover cake, cookies, or bread together to form new desserts. Kartoshka was one such dessert. Meaning “potato” in Russian, the crumb collage gets shaped into a little tuber and coated in cocoa powder for a final flourish. Now that cafeterias tend to have more ingredients to spare, the treats sometimes get a splash of cognac or rum and a bit of frosting.
In Nepal, men scale steep cliffs on rope ladders and dodge stings from giant bees in the hopes of collecting a sweet and powerful prize: hallucinogenic honey.
It might be tempting to say mad honey’s intimidating reputation comes from its psychedelic properties (bees produce it when they feed on the nectar of rhododendrons that contain a neurotoxin), but the most dangerous aspect of this food is the act of harvesting it. As the bees nest on cliffs, honey hunters must try to extract pieces of the hive while dangling hundreds of feet in the air. The insects also happen to be the largest honeybees in the world.
The peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich started innocently enough. During the Great Depression, cheap, filling foods played an integral role in Americans’ lives. One particularly beloved combo of protein and fat was the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. Though the sandwich remained popular in the South throughout the decades following the Depression, it’s since faded into obscurity. When we published an entry on it, the sandwich had a polarizing effect on our readers. Some cried sacrilege over the unconventional combo. However, many readers remembered the sandwich with nostalgic fondness, chiming in with other toppings their families added to the PB&M, including lettuce, bacon, and bananas. One reader had thought the PB&M was something only her grandmother made: "I thought I was the only one. I have mayo mates!”
The oldest wine in the world is nearly 1,700 years old. Unearthed from a couple’s tomb in what is now Speyer, Germany, the Speyer wine bottle houses a dark, resin-like mass and cloudy liquid. And just how did this liquid keep while other ancient tipples evaporated? Historians point to a solid wax seal and significant portion of olive oil in the wine, which helped further seal the liquid off from air. You can still see the wine bottle at Speyer's Historical Museum of the Palatinate. Researchers even say that it’s probably still safe to drink, but museum curators aren’t taking any chances cracking the ancient seal.
The blocky confection took on a very different definition in England.
In 1524, Henry VIII received a box of “marmaladoo” as a gift from a Mr. Hull of Exeter. Although the name of the treat was glaringly and oddly misspelled on the box, it at least conjures the idea of marmalade—in particular the tangy, crystalline orange-and-peel jam that's long delighted Brits at breakfast time.
History suggests there was something else in that package. Well into the 16th century, "marmaladoo” signaled a misspelling not of British marmalade, but rather of Portuguese marmelada. A staple of seasonal Portuguese cuisine, it is a thick, copper-red confection that is still produced today out of quince, a fall pome fruit, in much the same way as it was in Henry VIII's day. It's nothing at all like British marmalade, and any resemblance between the two is purely etymological, and confusingly so.
The story of British marmalade—and also of Portuguese marmelada, its older and stouter cousin—begins with the quince. Related to but larger and more sour than a pear, the quince is inedible raw. Still, it emerged in ancient Mesopotamia and was quickly domesticated throughout the Mediterranean world. The Greeks, who referred to the quince as “honey apple," cultivated it in 100 BC or earlier, while cookbooks dating back to the 1st century detail Roman and Byzantine recipes for quince-based preserves.
From Portugal to Turkey and Morocco to Italy, people found different solutions to the problem of this abundant but inedible fruit. Eventually a particular recipe began to gain traction. People would boil the offensively sour quince with sugar, then pour it into a mold, and let it solidify into a thick paste that could be cut into variously sized pieces. (This was possible, though they didn’t know it at the time, because the quince is rich in pectin, a naturally occurring gelling agent.) The resulting confection went by a variety of names—marmelada in Portugal, kidonopasto in Cyprus, pâte de coing in France.
The Portuguese version stands out because its very name contains a barely abridged history lesson. Marmelada gets its name from the Portuguese word for quince, marmelo. The term is borrowed from the Latin melimelum, a derivative of the Greek word for honey apple, melimelon.
The word marmelada first appeared in writing in 1521. By then, the confection was on its way to international fame. Explorer Vasco da Gama carried boxes on boxes of marmelada aboard his ships, hoping the sweet paste would ward off scurvy (not so much). Marmelada kept well, so it became a natural export for the Portuguese, which is how it ended up in the hands of Henry VIII in 1524.
Marmelada contains a considerable amount of sugar, which was still prohibitively expensive at the time, so it was considered a luxury item. This notion of exclusivity added to its reputation, and ensured that only the wealthy had access to it. Throughout the 15th century, the elite enjoyed marmelada as a digestive following heavy meals. (Later, beliefs about the curative powers of quince-based products spawned an entire range of medicinal marmeladas, including the infamous Marmelada Cephalica, which included “the salt of a man’s skull.”)
Dedicated consumers of quince-based preserves, the English didn’t actually try their hand at making them until the 16th century,according to food historian Ivan Day. As soon as they did, however, the wheels of invention and reinvention kept turning. By the 17th century, fruit “marmalades” were all the rage in England. Quince-esque or not (common flavors included cherry, red currant, and grape), many fruits were eventually made into preserves, and they were all called “marmalades." During this period, the English began to flirt with orange marmalade, the true ancestor of the current breakfast staple. Yet early recipes, such as those published byGervase Markham in 1615 orEliza Cholmondeley in 1677, still resulted in a final product that resembled a boxed, paste-like marmelada.
Janet and James Keiller, a pair of Scots, are often credited with developing marmalade as a more spreadable preserve. The story goes that sometime the 1700s, Janet, a confectioner, found herself in possession of an entire ship’s worth of Seville oranges, which her son had bought cheaply from a storm-damaged Spanish vessel. Challenged with preserving as many oranges as she possibly could, Janet followed a quince-based recipe and hoped for the best. The experiment supposedly resulted in orange marmalade. The details may not be entirely accurate, but the business side of it certainly is: Keiller’s was the world’s first commercial brand of orange marmalade, and they were responsible for building the first marmalade plant in 1797.
Over time, the term “marmalade” drifted further and further from its origin. By the early 1800s, marmalade was considered a “half liquid preserve,” already a distant cousin of the stiff, chewy version enjoyed in the Mediterranean. It also moved to claim a seat of honor at the breakfast table and became synonymous with orange jam, complete with peel.
Today, marmalade's popularity is dwindling among British breakfasters, withstudies revealing that younger shoppers made up just one percent of marmalade buyers in 2017. Experts have long worried about the life expectancy of the tangy preserve, but efforts to rebrand it have been rejected. (Suggestions to spiff up the recipe or, worse, rebrand it as “orange jam" have been particularly jibe-worthy.)
In Portugal, quince-based marmelada continues to thrive in a somewhat parallel economy. It isn’t something one buys, but rather something one receives from family members in mismatched containers. Every year as fall rolls around, discerning households gather in the kitchen to peel, boil, and pour the ugliest quasi-pears into salad bowls and empty ice cream cartons, which they then disperse among family members. Grandmothers and aunts routinely squabble over the color and opacity of their preserves, which range anywhere from crystal-clear red to creamy orange. A particularly unique variety, a white marmelada (actually the color of a rich butter) developed by nuns in the southern city of Odivelas, benefits from a somewhat higher status, as its recipe was very nearly lost in time when the convent closed its doors in 1886. Today, the white marmelada of Odivelas is celebrated in a yearly festival, but there’s something to be said for every other form of this rustic, unpretentious confection. With bread and butter, it’s a treat. With cheese, it’s a national institution.
