To some, this Brazilian neighborhood was a tropical Venice. To others, it was a slum on the water.

For more than 40 years, Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, had a neighborhood that floated on the river. Located near the Meeting of the Waters, the Floating City was a labyrinthine maze of houses, churches, shops, bars, and restaurants, connected through precarious streets made of wood planks. At its peak, it had around 2,000 bobbing houses built on top of trunks, and a population of more than 11,000 people.

If it hadn’t been destroyed, the Floating City could have become one of the modern icons of the Amazon. Tourists and visitors loved it. It was the subject of features in national and international magazines, where it was often compared to Venice. National Geographic ran a story about it in 1962. And some of the scenes of the Oscar-nominated movie That Man From Rio were shot there. “It was the most vital neighborhood of Manaus,” says Milton Hatoum, a writer from the city, in Portuguese.

However, underneath this layer of fascination was a certain romanticizing of poverty. Most of the residents of the Floating City were low-income families. Sex work and heavy alcohol consumption abounded. And as in most poor districts of Brazil today, there was a lack of basic amenities, such as sanitation and running water.

The story of the Floating City, like the story of the city of Manaus, is closely related to the Rubber Boom. Rubber is made from latex, which is extracted from an Amazonian tree called Hevea brasiliensis. Unlike cotton or sugarcane, rubber trees could not be grown in large plantations at the time, so native trees were the only source of latex. From the end of the 19th century until the first decade of the 20th, virtually all the rubber in the world came from the Amazon forest.

The Rubber Boom made Manaus one of the wealthiest cities in Brazil. Despite its remote location, surrounded by thousands of miles of dense rainforest, Manaus was one of the first cities in the country to have street lighting. Luxurious local buildings, including the Teatro Amazonas, were built around this time.

But it all ended in the 1910s, after the English were able to smuggle seeds and successfully breed a rubber tree that could be grown in plantations. This allowed them to create their own rubber farms in their Asian colonies, causing the collapse of the Brazilian rubber industry.

When the industry collapsed, many of the poor people that worked in the forest collecting rubber moved to Manaus. Some of them decided to build floating houses on the river using the same materials and techniques that they used in the forest.

“The poor people who wanted to remain close to downtown began to realize that living in a floating city was much more interesting for them than living in more distant areas,” says Leno Barata, a historian who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Floating City, in Portuguese. “And living on the river also had other advantages, such as not paying rent or city taxes.”

Initially there were only a handful of disconnected floating houses. But the number rapidly increased after World War II, following a temporary return of the Rubber Boom. With the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, the United States and the Allied Forces were cut off from their rubber supply and turned to Brazil for help. As a result, tens of thousands of Brazilians, mostly from the poor Northeast region, were sent to the Amazon region to relaunch the rubber industry. When the war ended, many of these “rubber soldiers,” as they became known, ended up in Manaus.

“After World War II, in the 1950s, the number of floating houses begins to increase substantially and ends up becoming what became known as the Floating City,” explains Barata.

Many residents had jobs connected to the river. Barata says that living in the Floating City was extremely convenient for fishermen, but also for merchants who bought and sold forest goods, such as nuts, fruits, medicinal plants, and even crocodile skins. Sellers coming from forest communities could bring all these goods and unload them directly onto the floating platforms. This made their job easier, as it saved them from having to carry their haul all the way to the shops. Consequently, merchants in the Floating City received a better price on those products than inland retailers, a fact that generated some resentment among the latter.

As is the case with many long-gone communities, the collective memory of the Floating City is difficult to untangle. Some people remember the neighborhood fondly, while others only recall the more unsavory elements of life on the river. Both positive and negative recollections can suffer from common tropes and stigmas about poverty, but it’s important to remember that the lived realities of the residents of the Floating City were far more complex.

“It was a slum!” says Renato Chamma, a local retailer whose family has owned several shops in the area since the 1920s, in Portuguese. Chamma, who is nearly 90 years old, recalls the floating neighborhood as dangerous and unhealthy, a place full of bars and brothels.

Renato’s nephew Bosco Chamma, who was a child in the late 1950s, says his mother didn’t allow him and his siblings to go to the Floating City, but he sometimes disobeyed her in order to fish. He remembers that on one of those occasions he fell into the water and almost drowned. Drownings of children were relatively common there, as the newspapers of the time attest. For residents from more affluent neighborhoods, stories like Bosco’s only added to the perception of the Floating City as a place of peril.

But not everyone remembers the Floating City in such a negative light. Hatoum, the writer, used to go there as a child with his grandfather. According to him, the people were poor, but they had dignity. He describes the place as vibrant, cheerful, and boisterous, with men and women dressed in colorful clothes singing and playing guitar.

“Sometimes, when it rained or the wind blew, the walkways and the houses built on trunks oscillated, giving one the impression of being traveling down the river,” Hatoum says.

The demolition of the Floating City took place in the second half of the 1960s. The state governor argued that the houses were unsafe and the area was rife with urban and health problems. But there were other interests at play. In 1964, Brazil had suffered a military coup and the new government, aiming to strengthen the northern borders of the country, had a strong interest in economically developing the Amazon region. To do this, they boosted what was then a budding plan to create a Free Economic Zone in Manaus. Through a tax exemption program, the goal was to persuade companies to build their factories there.

The river played an important role in this plan. Because Manaus has almost no road connections with the rest of the country, manufactured goods were shipped along the Amazon River toward the Atlantic Ocean. And the Floating City, with its hundreds of houses by the harbor, was an unpleasant inconvenience. So around that time, some of the lucky residents were relocated to nearby neighborhoods where they were offered houses, and others just left. Then, the floating houses were torn down.

In a way, the Free Economic Zone plan, which is still in force, was a success. It created thousands of jobs and brought money and prosperity back to the city. The city’s population boomed, from around 200,000 people in the 1960s to more than two million today. But along with these gains, there were also losses. Manaus turned into an industrial city. The river, creeks, and water streams became polluted. Illegal settlements mushroomed in the fringes of the city, driving an uncontrolled urban expansion that destroys large patches of rainforest and persists to this day.

Hatoum notes that the end of the Floating City coincided with this radical change in the essence of Manaus. “The Floating City was part of a Manaus that lived in harmony with the river and the environment,” he says. “Its destruction was symbolic because it also broke the link between the urban and natural worlds.”

In the place where the Floating City used to be, there is now a large city market and a harbor, with small passenger and freight boats coming and going. There are no signs left of the “floating slum” that the Chamma family recalls, or the vibrant atmosphere described in Hatoum’s novels. The Floating City only lives now in their memories, small pieces of a larger and more complicated puzzle.

Even a short local walk can hold countless stories.

During the past few months of lockdown, I’ve been taking daily walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I’ve strolled the same streets week after week, I've started paying attention to buildings in a way I never had before. My roommate and I turned this into a sort of historical scavenger hunt. Each of us takes photos or writes down addresses during our separate constitutionals, and back at home we look up the history of the buildings. We’ve learned that a luxury condo building was previously a 19th-century home for “respectable aged and indigent females,” that a stately brick house was the mansion of a wealthy piano manufacturer, and that, between the 1880s and World War II, our neighborhood was a thriving shoe manufacturing district.

Wherever you live, the built environment tells stories. During this period of limited movement, uncovering those stories can help you feel a sense of discovery, even in your immediate surroundings, even among the very familiar. “Every community has value, and one of the ways you can realize it is to start looking, and analyzing, and thinking about it,” says Gabrielle Esperdy, a professor of architecture and design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the editor of SAH Archipedia, a digital encyclopedia of more than 20,000 American buildings.

You don’t have to live in a city or a historic district to uncover something fascinating. Spaces that might seem mundane—even gas stations, water treatment plants, or empty lots—all “tell us something important about the choices we’ve made as a society,” Esperdy says.

Here are some expert tips for researching the history of your block, neighborhood, town, or city.

Sharpen your observation skills

To start paying closer attention to familiar scenery, you might have to “train” your senses. Historian, artist, and Black Gotham Experience founder Kamau Ware suggests a “discovery walk,” in which you focus on noticing your surroundings. “It could be something simple,” he says. “Listen to conversations in passing. Notice new cloud patterns. Try to figure out what someone is cooking.”

You might want to bring a pencil and some paper. Kurt Kohlstedt, digital director at the podcast 99% Invisible and coauthor of the forthcoming The 99% Invisible City, recommends drawing as a way to train yourself to really see what’s in front of you. “Once you start paying attention to shapes and contrast, you begin to train your brain to see things as they are, not how you imagine them to be,” he says. Taking photos or videos works, too. “Anything that forces you to think about framing and details can help you see in new ways,” Kohlstedt says. “Those details come with stories—histories of nature, infrastructure, and people that can be truly fascinating.”

Question every detail

“Start by asking the most obvious things,” says Ware, like finding the origins of your street and neighborhood names using a simple Google search. Kohlstedt suggests breaking down each thing you see into its constituent parts. “Instead of seeing just 'pavement' or 'wall,' force your eyes and mind to dig deeper, look for things you don't even know the names for—what are the building blocks that make up that bigger, more obvious stuff?” For example, “where does the consistency of a surface break down, punctuated by an exception, like a manhole cover on a street or a Knox Box on a building?”

Find and read patterns

Once you’ve trained yourself to notice details, you can begin piecing them together into patterns. “No matter where you live,” Esperdy says, “if you simply start looking at patterns of what we see on any given block, we realize that there are encyclopedias worth of information.”

For instance, reading the “rhythm of the streetscape,” as the late architectural historian Virginia Savage McAlester wrote in A Field Guide to American Houses, can reveal insights about an area’s growth rate and economic origins. A neighborhood with many houses of the same age and type likely developed rapidly (like a streetcar or postwar suburb, or a railroad boomtown), while a town that developed more slowly will have a mix of house sizes and styles. A new apartment building much taller than the surrounding structures could signal changes in zoning or expired deed restrictions, while empty lots in a historic area might indicate a declining population.

On a smaller scale, even the presence (or lack) of the humble front porch can date a building or neighborhood. As Esperdy explains, from the 19th century to World War II, front porches were widespread in American homes. Before air conditioning, they offered a place to cool off, and socialize with neighbors (just like stoops in denser areas). In the postwar housing boom, front porches largely disappeared, thanks to indoor climate control, new ideas around socialization, the rise of the backyard, and the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed the front of the house should be private. (In the late 1980s, the front porch was reintroduced in traditional neighborhood developments, or planned communities inspired by historic neighborhoods.) The front porch alone, Esperdy says, “tells us about changing technology, about community interaction, and also shifting notions of recreation.”

Dive into maps, building surveys, and even postcards

Once you’ve trained yourself to recognize the smaller details and larger patterns in the built world around you, next comes sorting out what those mean for its history. The digital resources of your public library or local historical society are a great place to start. Both Esperdy and Betsy J. Green, journalist and author of Discovering the History of Your House and Your Neighborhood, also recommend Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, available via the Library of Congress. “The maps give you an idea what the original footprint of a house was, and when it appeared on a particular piece of property,” Green says. Initially created to help agents assess fire risk during the post–Civil War urban development boom, the maps provide highly detailed information about land use and buildings—from door and window location to construction materials—for more than 12,000 towns and cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, from 1867 to 1970. Maps were periodically updated to reflect new construction (sometimes as often as every six months), and can show how a place changed over time.

Through the Library of Congress, you can also find photos and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey, the country’s first historic preservation program, created to employ architects, draftsmen, and photographers who were out of work after the Great Depression. Esperdy also recommends searching for your town’s name in eBay’s vintage postcard section. “Even if you live in Nowheresville, chances are there are postcards of it,” she says.

For city-dwellers, she also suggests Mapping Inequality, a site that combines 150 redlining maps from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation—which outlined minority neighborhoods in red, to signal a “high risk” for mortgage lenders—into one interactive map showing how racism and discrimination shaped housing policy after the Great Depression. “It pulls us out from our individual block to the scale of the neighborhood and city as a whole,” she says, “and tells important stories about how we got to where we are.”

Find former residents

Learning about individual residents of your neighborhood—or even your home—can give more color to its history. Esperdy suggests searching an address in a periodical database such as Newspapers.com (your public library or historical society may also have a digitized database), which offers a week-long free trial, to find stories related to your house. If you own the house in which you live, Green says you should check your closing documents for an abstract of title, which lists all of the past property owners. She also suggests checking Ancestry.com (available for free for some public library card holders), for city directories, the late-19th- and early-20th-century version of phonebooks, but that also include details such as occupations and the names of adult children.

And, as Ware points out, “any citizen of the United States lives somewhere that was once the land of Native Americans or First Nations. See if you know the name of the people who were there.” (Native-Land maps are a great place to start.)

Indulge children’s curiosity

Get kids engaged in this research by encouraging them to do something that’s already second nature: Ask lots and lots of questions. “If you don’t know the answer,” Kohlstedt says, “don’t give a generic one. Be specific, or do the research and figure it out.” As Esperdy points out, Archipedia also offers lesson plans for grades K–12 on everything from basic architectural vocabulary to the history of the suburbs. (And for adults and older kids who want lots of detail, McAlester’s A Field Guide to North American Houses is a rich sourcebook.) Researching your neighborhood in this way, Kohlstedt points out, “keeps kids interested and entertained, but it also lets adults see through their eyes and notice the things that they've grown to take for granted.”

The LGBTA+ Community Campus Rajpipla occupies 15 acres of farmland where a palace once stood.

One of the world’s most unusual LGBTQ support centers sits on 15 acres of farmland in Gujarat, India, by the side of the Narmada River. Rustic farmhouses are clustered near millet fields, mango trees, and a white bull with spectacularly large horns. Riya Patel, who was born in the U.S. and now works as a manager and farmer at the center, advises against taking a dip in the river: A swimmer once became crocodile lunch here, Patel says. “We get a lot of snakes too,” she adds, sitting on a creaky outdoor swing in a green-and-red dress. “We had a snake funeral the other day, after we ran one over.”

Welcome to the LGBTA+ Community Campus Rajpipla. Around 500 people have come through the campus since it began receiving visitors in 2017, Patel says. Many come seeking a rare safe space to talk about LGBTQ issues, away from rural communities where homophobia is often the norm.

Inside the buildings, the taxidermy heads of leopard and deer overlook beds, next to old photos of the royal family of the Rajpipla region. There used to be a palace on these grounds, but it was dismantled in 1960 because its infrastructure wasn’t strong enough to withstand flooding. Like India’s other royal dynasties, the family lost its power and state funding in 1971, but kept its high social status and ceremonial titles. The photos reveal the man behind the campus: 54 year-old Manvendra Singh Gohil, who is often described as the world’s only “out” gay prince. He has big plans for the future of this place.

Manvendra is the son of the Maharana of Rajpipla—his full name is Maharana Shri Raghubir Singhji Rajendrasinghji—and his wife, Princess Rukmini Devi of Rajasthan. “I was raised by a nanny, so for me family didn’t exist,” Manvendra says. When not at boarding school in Mumbai, Manvendra was brought up in the main family residence, Vijay Palace in the city of Rajpipla.

The prince tells his story in a Mumbai apartment that he rents to a friend, wearing a red-and-yellow tunic and shirt combo that faintly recalls Winnie The Pooh. He is as warm and friendly as the classic character, with a wide grin beneath his thick black mustache. “I was the most eligible bachelor in India before I got married!” he says.

In 1991, at 25 years old, Manvendra was placed in an arranged marriage with Princess Chandrika Kumari of Jhabua. He had been attracted to men since his childhood, but didn’t really understand homosexuality. “Sex education in school was about lions, zebras and giraffes,” he says. “I wondered: ‘I’m not going to have sex with a zebra—why are they teaching us this?’ They weren’t teaching about humans.”

The couple were granted a swift, amicable divorce in 1992, because the marriage was never consummated. Manvendra’s parents asked doctors to try and find out what was “wrong” with him, and he read library books that framed homosexuality as a kind of “sexual deviation.” But in the mid-’90s, things finally clicked: He read Bombay Dost, India’s first LGBTQ magazine, founded by journalist and activist Ashok Row Kavi. After Manvendra contacted Row Kavi, “things became clear,” the prince says. “He mentored me, exposed me to other parts of the community, did counseling with me. Based on that, I accepted myself as a self-identified gay man.” In 2000, he quietly formed the Lakshya Trust, an organisation focused on LGBTQ counselling and medical services in Gujarat.

His parents were not so accepting. In 2002, while Manvendra was hospitalized for mental health issues, the prince permitted his psychiatrist to tell them about his sexuality. They tried to send him to various religious leaders, as though to shake his gayness out of him. “I thought, ‘Let them try,’” says Manvendra. “They also made me vegetarian, saying it would cure me. I became even more gay.”

In March 2006, Manvendra came out publicly, and his mother publicly disowned him in a newspaper advertisement. Members of the public burned effigies of him, but this only galvanized Manvendra’s resolve as an activist. “I made a statement to the media: ‘I don’t blame my parents,’” he says. “I blamed ignorance. It was my duty, to everyone who has been homophobic, to educate them.”

Later in 2006, a lawyer challenged Manvendra’s mother’s statement. After a legal battle, the family’s effort to disown and disinherit the prince was halted, and Manvendra was given the family’s country estate. It had no running water or electricity, but it had potential.

In 2011, Manvendra met Deandre Richardson, an American man, on a dating app in India. Two years later, the couple married in Seattle. Gay marriage is not legally recognized in India, but Richardson has informally adopted the title “Duke.”

Manvendra was happy in his union, and his life was becoming more settled. As part of his role heading up the Lakshya Trust, he’d sometimes speak to parents about trying to accept their children, but more often he gave blunt advice to gay Indian men who heard about him in the media. “They’re thrown out of their homes and have no support,” he says. “I said to be prepared to detach from family and be independent.”

Until September 2018, it was illegal to have consensual gay sex in India, under Section 377 of the country’s Penal Code. Many young Indians face pressure to have children, especially in the countryside, and that often amplifies intolerance towards homosexuality. Big Indian cities often have gay scenes to tap into, both overt and underground, but not so much in rural Gujarat. “I came up with the idea of a fully-fledged campus,” says Manvendra.

By 2017, the prince and his husband had fitted two main buildings with amenities, including four bedrooms between them. The word “campus” was a bit misleading, as the site was still more like a farm. But the concept was becoming a reality: Here’s an isolated place where gay people can turn up, talk things through, have a hot meal, and escape external pressures.

Some people visited with different expectations. “They were sex-seekers,” says Manvendra, while snacking on a banana in the Mumbai apartment. “People came, partied, drank then went.” After that, the prince ramped up the vetting process, restricting it to those truly in need, or who could contribute to the campus.

Patel, a trans woman, arrived in February 2017 and quickly made herself essential. She helps manage the site and recently organized a trans conference. Shailesh Raval, a 40-year-old gay man from a nearby village, also lives on the campus. He describes himself as a “bottom seeking a nice top,” but hasn’t come out to his family. When he first contacted Manvendra, he was caring for his frail grandmother and working a snack stall.

The prince paid for Raval to travel to the campus with his grandmother, put a shawl around him, and heard his story. “Living outside was stressful, I’d always fear someone would find out,” Raval says. “I had anxiety just existing. Here, I can just focus on being myself.” His grandmother has since passed away, and he now helps out with everything from campus management to cooking.

One morning, Raval serves chai to a man in his 30s, who has walked over from a nearby village. The new arrival read about the campus online, and wants to talk about his secret love of cross-dressing. He unloads to Patel on the outdoor swing. Raval fetches snacks and the prince’s dogs snuffle in the dry dirt nearby.

There is still plenty of work to do on the LGBTA+ Community Campus Rajpipla. (A stands for Allies.) There’s a “meditation room,” but it’s unfurnished and stuffed with cardboard boxes; Manvendra has plans for music rooms, libraries, and eco-friendly houses built from recycled plastic bottles. In mid-February, weeks before a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, life there felt calm and simple.

In the years since Manvendra’s parents learned that he’s gay, his father’s attitude has softened. The pair now have a good relationship. But according to Manvendra, his mother’s attitude remains as difficult as ever: When they cross paths on the palace grounds in Rajpipla, they ignore each other.

These experiences only deepen Manvendra’s convictions about the importance of the campus. “If someone like me could be put into that trouble, it could happen to anyone,” he says. He could move to the U.S. with his husband, where he’d be far from the snakes, bugs, and homophobia of Gujarat. But he adds, “I don’t believe in escapism. Even if I’m in a homophobic culture, I’ll live in it and educate people.”

He smiles and takes a dainty sip of chai. “I belong to a warrior clan,” he says. “So I’m going to fight my whole life.”

When the going got tough, the tough left recipes.

The first impoverished German immigrant to fold oats into leftover ground meat didn’t do so out of culinary whimsy; nor did they expect their descendants to attend Cincinnati’s Goetta Festival centuries later. Enslaved West Africans in colonial Peru who reconfigured their captors’ leftovers couldn’t have known their hardscrabble bread pudding would be forever embedded in Peruvian cuisine. Most shockingly, food-stretched American mothers defied every presumptive rule of baking and respectability by making cakes from tomato soup during World War I; nonetheless, the recipe was celebrated by a struggling nation and is still endorsed by Campbell’s itself to this day.

The periods of adversity that bred these scrappy dishes came and went, but the foods are here to stay. They’re ingrained in family recipes, local food lore, and regional menus, but not as relics of anguish or curios of hardship. They live on as beloved weapons, instrumental in the fight against despair, distress, and hunger. Born of discomfort they become, against all odds, our comfort foods—so ubiquitous and widely loved today that we lose sight of the fact that they were born out of destitution.

With a lingering pandemic and cities around the world roiled in protests over race-based police brutality, times have only gotten tougher since Gastro Obscura published its second installment in our series about historic dishes born of bygone crises; the foods within our third iteration of this resilient roundup are now more crucial than ever.

As with most contributions of the impoverished and the disenfranchised, credit for these timeless staples is lost to the margins of history books. We may never know the names of their inventors, but each one of these dishes remains an echo of the powerless, reverberating through the halls of time, fueling the fight for tomorrow.

So read on, stretch the ingredients in your pantry, and eat up. No progress is made on an empty stomach.

Goetta

When it came to stretching small sums of meat products, German immigrants in the United States proved masterful. In 17th-century Pennsylvania, they married unwanted pork parts with wheat flour and called it “scrapple”; farther south, in the Carolinas, they used cornmeal instead and called it “livermush.” In Cincinnati, Ohio, refuse beef and pork met oats in the birth of goetta.

This meat hybrid was created in the 19th century, formed into loaves and sliced like bread. Frying individual slices made for a crispy exterior and a spongy interior, flavorful with the addition of onions and spices. The production of goetta was common in German-American homes of the Midwest until companies began mass-producing tubes to be sold across the region. One company’s annual summertime Goettafest is now in its 20th year.

This recipe from Food.com uses ground beef and pork. It doesn’t call for offal, but it doesn’t necessarily forbid it, either.

Ranfañote

The origins of this nutty, fruity, Peruvian bread-pudding are shrouded in mystery, but its application of star anise, cloves, and an unrefined cane sugar called chancaca—common ingredients in many other Afro-Peruvian dishes—point to the enslaved Africans who worked for the imperial Spanish viceroyalty.

Of course, once ranfañote became a common dessert, many sought to bestow credit to the more "respected" classes of the day. Some claim it was Peruvian soldiers who were experimenting with their rations during the War of the Pacific against Chile. Others name colonial Mestizo bakers as ranfañote’s true makers.

While the dish spent decades in obscurity, it’s seen a recent revival among modern Peruvian chefs drawn to traditional sweets, if this recipe from Food52 is any indication.

Tomato Soup Cake

Few could blame you for bristling at the idea of putting a can of tomato soup into cake batter; just know that “The Greatest Generation” did not.

Early advocates knew tomato’s presence in a sweet setting would raise eyebrows even during the Great Depression, thus community cookbook recipes from the 1920s for “Mystery Cake” buried the secret ingredient in the fine print. Fooled and endeared, a generation of children often enjoyed birthday cake laced with condensed tomato soup. “It tastes nothing like tomato soup, I assure you,” writes food writer Marian Bull, “but rather like a nice spice cake.” Wartime tomato cakes made do with little fat or dairy; come postwar boom-time, however, they received a much-needed buttery remix.

Given the widespread accessibility of Campbell’s tomato soup, the cake took the country by storm, popping up in local papers and eventually being co-opted by Campbell’s itself in 1947. They stand by their original recipe, to which they suggest adding your favorite cream cheese frosting.

Doodle Soup

Bradford, Tennessee, is Doodle Soup country, and no one quite knows why. Some date the soup back to the 1860s, when it could have served either Confederate or Union soldiers in a state divided by the Civil War. Otherwise it was named after the “doodle wagons” that sold odds and ends from horse-drawn carriages around the state in a time before automobiles. The only certainty is its recipe.

Roasted chicken drippings are simply mixed with vinegar and cayenne pepper before being thickened with flour. According to the Tennessean, rural folks eat it with flaky biscuits, while town-dwellers prefer the metropolitan cracker—an ongoing debate in Bradford, which declared itself the Doodle Soup Capital of the World in 1957. Their annual Doodle Soup Days Festival is in its 40th year.

Hoover Stew

President Herbert Hoover was an easy target for much of the ills plaguing the United States during the Great Depression. Newspapers became “Hoover blankets,” cardboard became “Hoover leather,” and empty pockets turned inside-out became “Hoover flags.” A common feast among the shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” within crowded cities, this macaroni mishmash came to be known as “Hoover Stew.”

The budget-friendly dish is a mixture of macaroni, sliced hot dogs, and corn that gets stewed with canned tomatoes. Easy on adult pockets and full of ingredients kids love, the stew floated many families through a period of historic child malnourishment. For being a simple and nutritionally balanced meal, the dish maintained staying power through the 20th century. This recipe from the grandson of Depression-era survivors calls for bare-bones ingredients, though variations are, of course, endless.

Crumble-In

The farmer families of Southern Appalachia in the 19th century didn’t have much, but if they had a cow and cornmeal, they had all the makings of crumble-in.

When hunger struck, they would simply dunk or entirely submerge a chunk of cornbread in a glass of milk. For those who could handle the bite, buttermilk proved even heartier, leveled out by the addition of maple syrup or honey. To take it the savory route, some added a sprinkle of black pepper on top of the rich, creamy snack.

The tough times snack lives on in the kitchens of these Appalachian farmers’ descendants as an ancestral cure for nagging hunger as much as heartbreak. As one Southern food blogger writes, her granny still has a glass every night before bed.

But not for much longer.

More than 1,300 veterans have been laid to rest in the Fort Douglas Post Cemetery in Salt Lake City since it was established in 1862. Each of these graves, of course, tells a story. But one of them, on its own, complicates the entire narrative.

The headstone belongs to Paul Eilert—a German prisoner of war who died in Utah in 1944. It is marked with more than the average epitaph. Eilert’s headstone, in an American military cemetery, is inscribed with a finely carved swastika. It’s small but unmistakable, and until recently, there were no plans whatsoever to address it, let alone remove it.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that on Memorial Day 2020, four members of Congress wrote to Robert Wilkie, secretary of the Veterans Administration (VA), joining the growing calls to replace Eilert’s headstone, along with two others bearing the Nazi insignia in Texas. “Allowing these gravestones with symbols and messages of hatred, racism, intolerance, and genocide,” they wrote, “is especially offensive to all the veterans who risked, and often lost, their lives defending this country and our way of life.” The letter is signed by Representatives Nita Lowey (Democrat of New York), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Democrat of Florida), and John Carter and Kay Granger, both Republicans of Texas. The other headstones they reference are in San Antonio, at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. Both include swastikas, and one elaborates further, “He died far from his home for the Führer, people and fatherland.” The swastika on Eilert’s headstone, moreover, is part of the design for the Iron Cross, which the Nazis had awarded him for distinguished service.

Some, including the University of Utah historian Robert A. Goldberg, have pointed out the parallels between these stones and Confederate monuments, some of which have been removed in the face of public pressure. Initially, however, the VA said that all three headstones would remain in place, under the guidance of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. The Military Times quoted VA spokesman Les’ Melnyk as saying that the Act “assigns stewardship responsibilities to federal agencies, including the VA and Army, to protect historic resources, including those that recognize divisive historical figures or events.” But sustained pressure led the VA to change course. The agency released a statement committing to “replace these headstones with historically accurate markers that do not include the Nazi swastika and German text.” In the statement, Secretary Wilkie said, “It is understandably upsetting for our Veterans and their families to see Nazi inscriptions near those who gave their lives for this nation. That’s why VA will initiate the process required to replace these POW headstones.”

Eric K. Ward, a Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Executive Director of the Western States Center, applauds the VA’s reversal. On behalf of SPLC, he had lobbied vociferously for the stones’ removal. “Personally,” he says, “I wish that those headstones would be buried just as the ideology should be buried into the ground. These are symbols of a government and an ideology that murdered millions of people—civilians. And I don’t think that there is any room for them in public cemeteries where U.S. veterans are buried.” He suggests that molds could be taken if a museum is to preserve them.

For Ward, keeping the stones in place serves to normalize Nazi iconography and, by extension, ideology. Replacing the stones, he says, shows no disrespect towards the POWs themselves—it simply disavows the genocidal regime that had conscripted them. It’s one thing for German POWs to be buried in American military cemeteries, with gravestones marking their identities and dates of birth and death. It’s quite another, he says, for them to be “labeled with swastikas and make reference to the Führer, which is Adolf Hitler.” Removing the stones will not get in the way of educating people about this history, he adds, just as removing Confederate monuments does not make it harder to teach about slavery. Besides, says Ward, most were installed not to educate people, but “to reinforce Jim Crow segregation and the terror of racial violence.”

The historian Kent Powell, author of the book Splinters of a Nation: German Prisoners of War in Utah, says it’s difficult to compare the matter of three headstones with the abundance of Confederate monuments spread throughout parts of the United States. Ideally, he would’ve liked these headstones to remain in place—or at least under local, rather than federal supervision—for educational purposes. (At the same time, he’s surprised they haven’t already been vandalized.)

Powell’s research details the widely unknown history of the POW experience in the United States during World War II, a history these stones represent—perhaps uncomfortably so. Nineteen other German POWs are buried at Fort Douglas, their graves not marked by swastikas. Nine of them were killed in Salina, Utah, in what is known as the 1945 Salina Massacre, when an American soldier shot up the town’s POW camp. Powell says that Eilert’s stone is the only one to include a swastika because Eilert was the first German POW to die in Utah. The Geneva Convention did not regulate burial procedures for POWs, so the other Germans were allowed to fund the monument they desired.

For Powell, drawing attention to the stones is about more than bringing this history to the fore. It’s a warning for the future. The stones could be shown to students, he says, to help “interpret and to explain and help us prevent the rise of fascism that brought us the 20 dead Germans” at Fort Douglas, and “the millions of people all over the world.” It’s a rise, he adds, “that we see every day …”

The perspective made George Steinmetz an “accidental environmentalist.”

In 1997, New Jersey–based photographer George Steinmetz decided to learn to fly, when he was assigned to shoot in the central Sahara and learned that his bush pilot had backed out. Steinmetz’s aircraft of choice was not an airplane but a motorized paraglider, which is more or less a backpack-mounted motor connected to a single-seat harness hanging under a parachute-like wing. “I originally got into paragliding because I wanted to fly in the Sahara,” he says, “and where I was in the Sahara you could take off and land almost anywhere, so it was a very safe environment for an unreliable motor.” On his website, the photographer refers to it as his “flying lawn chair,” which let him “fly low and slow over the ground with a minimum of disturbance to people and animals below.” It could also be conveniently disassembled and packed into three bags, weighing less than 50 pounds each. Steinmetz could fly commercial with his own plane in the cargo hold.

Since then, Steinmetz, now known as the "flying photographer,” has recorded stunning views around the globe which are compiled in a new book, The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, published by Abrams Books, with text by science writer Andrew Revkin. With the help of his paraglider, helicopters, and professional-quality drones, Steinmetz reveals not only extraordinary natural wonders, but also the enormous imprint of human activity, from the colorful salt pools of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt, Niger, to the replanting of a palm oil plantation in Sapi, Malaysia, to pandemic burials on New York’s Hart Island. (The latter is not included in the book, and the New York Police Department seized his drone.)

Though the photographer currently shoots almost entirely with drones now because they’re often the best, safest tools for the job, he appreciates the time he spent in the paraglider. “It’s very different, with a drone. Yes, you can get a camera up there,” he says, “but it’s kind of like a periscope in the sky, where you can only see what’s on the screen, you can’t see what’s outside of it."

Also, he says, “The glider is really quite amazing because you have an unrestricted view, in horizontal and vertical dimensions. Like a motorcycle, everything is out there … Oh! You’re there!”

Steinmetz greatly values that kind of open and direct experience. As he writes in the book, “I consider ground truth paramount, and I need to experience things for myself.” And that experience has been one of change, and how what he’s seen has made him an “accidental environmentalist.” “I’ve witnessed how quickly our population is growing and our wild places are disappearing, and the accelerating rates at which we are consuming the world’s resources … It’s become clear to me that we are entering an era of limits, because we can’t keep consuming resources at today’s pace if we wish to leave a habitable planet to the next generations," he continues. "The classic narrative of man 'versus' nature might need to be rethought, as a narrative of man 'with' nature.”

Atlas Obscura has a collection of images from The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.

During the pandemic, arugula is just as exciting as a Choco Taco.

When the coronavirus pandemic escalated in early March and Colorado’s governor ordered all restaurants to end on-site dining, Eric Skokan prepared to watch his life’s work slip away. Instead, he’s delivering carrots and arugula to his neighbors like a vegetable-slinging ice-cream-truck driver.

Skokan and his wife, Jill, own two restaurants and a farm in Boulder, Colorado. After closing their restaurants Black Cat and Bramble & Hare, the duo scrambled to come up with new ideas to keep the business afloat, including a roadside farmstand and meals for delivery or pickup.

But their biggest experiment also turned out to be the most successful. They cleaned up an old ice cream-esque box truck sitting on their property, installed some bells above the windshield, gave it a fresh coat of paint, and started selling vegetables around town. Mabel the farm truck, as she’s affectionately known around Boulder, is a runaway success.

The Skokans came up with the idea after a particularly harrowing family shopping trip to the local grocery store in March. People were coughing all around them, the shelves were bare, and the aisles were crowded. So the Skokans brainstormed better ways to get food to people.

They had a steady supply of fresh produce, meat, and flour from their 425-acre organic farm, after all. And people were questioning their usual food sources and looking for local alternatives.

“I really started to understand what our community was going through, that buying patterns were fundamentally changing,” says Eric. “There was this intense level of anxiety for everybody. ‘How am I going to get food? How am I going to supply my house?’”

In response, Jill conjured up a long-forgotten childhood memory of an arabber who went door-to-door on a pony-drawn cart selling strawberries in her Baltimore neighborhood.

“It all became clear that we’d take one of these old farm trucks we have, we’d repurpose it, and turn it into, essentially, a glorified ice-cream truck selling bags of arugula,” says Eric.

Eric assumed that this repurposed truck, which is decorated with cartoonish, multicolored fruits and sayings like “Baby carrots on board,” might run for a few weeks at most. Instead, the truck surpassed everyone’s expectations.

The Skokans launched Mabel in early April. Two months later, they’ve converted two additional trucks into Mabel II and Mabel III. Mabel is no longer just a temporary lifesaver; she’s a real business.

“I really thought I would end up with an old truck with the word Mabel painted on it, parked in a field somewhere, and that I could tell my grandkids about what we did during the great pandemic. At minimum, it would just be a great story,” he says. “Now we have a fleet of Mabels.”

For Boulder’s older residents, Mabel harkens back to when the milkman and baker made regular deliveries. Based on customer feedback, the Skokans created and distributed yard signs that people can set out in front of their home to request Mabel to stop.

To make the fleet of Mabels even more convenient, the Skokans are encouraging customers to use a free phone app that shows Mabel’s location in real-time. They can request that Mabel stop in their neighborhood through the app or on Mabel’s website. Or, of course, they can listen for the bells that the Skokans mounted so Mabel would announce its presence like an ice- cream truck. Mabel’s daily menu is online, but a staffer also writes the daily offerings in chalk on the side of the trucks.

These brightly colored trucks are delivering more than just fresh veggies to people. Mabel’s stops are as anticipated as any ice-cream truck, and foster a similar reaction.

“As I’m driving down the street, ringing the bells, I’ll see someone at their front stoop wave and then literally jump and run down their walkway to flag us down,” says Eric. “And then invariably, that person, bunch of carrots in hand, grabs their cell phone and tells all their neighbors. All of a sudden there’s this little community gathering. We get to experience these little pop-ups of joy, it’s amazing.”

Though the Skokans laid off 30 employees at the start of the pandemic, they’ve been able to bring many of them back and hire additional staffers, thanks largely to the success of Mabel. This summer, they’re also planning to reopen the restaurants at the farm, with socially distanced tables spread among the rustic scenery. Mabel might make an occasional appearance, after she makes her daily rounds.

Eric still sometimes finds himself staring in disbelief at the three repurposed trucks now parked at his farm, waiting to be loaded up with spinach, eggs, and fingerling potatoes.

“I’m a guy who makes souffles pretty well, and I can drive a tractor pretty well, but this is something I never expected to be doing,” he says.

Drones helped researchers keep up with fish that are longer than a person and as fast as a car.

The Atlantic bluefin tuna hunts like a wolf and is built like a barrel. “They’re power-packed animals,” says Mike Jech, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Often stretching more than six feet long and topping 500 pounds, hefty Thunnus thynnus travel in packs, zooming in and out of various types of formations, from long lines to dense clusters. Typically, the titanic tuna swim at the pace of a moderate walk, around three miles an hour, but when they need to really book it, they can swim 30 miles an hour or more—as fast as a car. Torpedo-shaped, with big fins, the fish are essentially all muscle, and their speed and brawn make them hard to capture and survey with nets. Even if you could keep up with them, “you can’t put your arms around them,” Jech says. So, instead, he and five collaborators tried a different approach: tracking tuna from the sky, with the help of a drone.

Scientists have several reasons to be curious about what the tuna are up to. From a population management perspective, they want to get a better handle on the number in the wild, particularly since the stocks dwindled from historic overfishing. By looking at the shapes and sizes of different fish in the population and estimating their mass, researchers can gauge population health. Surveying different formations can also yield fresh insight into tuna behavior, Jech says: For example, some researchers speculative that the fish stretch out into a straight line while hunting, to maximize the distance they cover, and then slide into other formations when they’re cruising.

Jech and his collaborators flew an APH-22 drone above schools of juvenile tuna in the Gulf of Maine, northeast of Cape Cod. They launched the drone from a small boat and guided it with input from a “spotter pilot,” who was in an airplane above, looking out for schools of tuna and weighing in on where to send the machine. Over the course of eight flights spanning two days in 2015, they collected nearly 1,100 images of Atlantic bluefin tuna. The researchers have just published their findings in the Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems.

Before setting their sights on the fish, the team calibrated the drone’s measuring tools by flying them over objects of known sizes, such as a “resolution chart” that looks a bit like a geometric poster you’d see during an eye exam. Because the scientists knew the exact altitude of the drone and the angle of the camera on board (and it stayed steady, unlike one held by even the most careful of humans), they were able to remotely measure the length and width of the fish, as well as how closely they huddled together.

Scientists are increasingly relying on drones for aerial surveys, and they can be mightily helpful. Jarrod Hodgson, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide who has used drones for population surveys, has remarked that drones allow researchers to keep an eye on animals that would otherwise be hard to access, or that might be negatively impacted by scientists getting too close. But as Jech and his coauthors describe in their new paper, the drone technology has its limitations. For one thing, the drones only had about 15 minutes of battery life. “Those 15 minutes go by really, really fast when you’re getting over these fast-moving animals,” Jech says.

What’s more, the strategy only works when the fish and the weather happen to cooperate. The images are best when the fish are fairly close to the surface (researchers haven’t yet pinned down exactly how deep the fish could go while still being measurable). And the surveys are most effective on calm days, with fairly placid water rather than whitecaps, Jech says. “Imagine taking black tape and blotting out the tail or nose or head,” he says. That’s essentially what happened when the waves were choppy. Even when conditions were just so, it proved hard to fit an entire school in a single image. A wide-angle lens would have distorted the edges and monkeyed with the measurements.

While drones won’t fully displace surveys from boats or planes, Jech’s team found that they’re another useful tool in the seafaring toolbox. When it comes to tagging along with Atlantic bluefin tuna, drones can help us keep up.

It's a movement made for the moment.

Brandon Waite was packing up after an evening playing board games with his friends when he noticed “1 to 4 players” written on the side of one of the boxes. Just like that, he stumbled onto the idea of playing games by himself.

“I had just never heard of that before, or I thought I hadn’t,” he recalls. “But of course, most of us have played [card] solitaire at some point.”

Since the release of "Settlers of Catan," in 1995, the popularity of hobby board games has soared. Last year thousands of new titles were released, and millions of people are playing them. At a time when so much of our work and entertainment takes place on a screen, old-fashioned board games offer a chance to disconnect and engage with something tangible, which many players say is the primary appeal.

And now, a small but growing fraction of these hobbyists are choosing to play by themselves.

In 2008, Z-Man Games released Matt Leacock’s "Pandemic"—a cooperative game that many are finding cathartic right now—followed by a series of spinoffs. In the years since, Leacock says, he’s noticed an increased interest in solo play.

“I follow a lot of posts online about my own games,” he says, “and I’m seeing more and more demand for solitaire versions. It’s actually something I’m planning to do more in upcoming games—try to support more solitaire versions of them.”

With people quarantining worldwide, having a reliable indoor hobby that doesn’t require others is more valuable than ever. Like Leacock, companies are taking note: In the past few months, several have released new single-player variants of existing games.

“All of a sudden that seems to be a trend among companies,” says Waite, who now co-hosts “Solosaurus,” a podcast dedicated to solitary board games, with his friend Carter McKie. “I think that communicates some care and concern for people that’s encouraging right now, at a time when encouragement is needed.”

For some players, going solo is even better than playing with people. Marit Alanen, who picked up solitary board gaming in early 2019, says she prefers it that way.

“I know that sounds weird,” she says, “but I do. I find that I can take as much time as I want, and I can constantly reference the rules if I need to, and there’s nobody counting on me to know exactly how to play. And then I can play as many times as I want, move on to something else, take a day between turns—different ways that just make it more flexible.”

For others, playing solo is a practical byproduct of a busy adult life—and, recently, of self-isolation. “I enjoy solo gaming,” Waite says, “but most games I want to play multiplayer, and I do want to socialize with my friends. But this is a compromise to changes in life.”

Regardless, many solo board gamers see the experience as a chance to recharge.

“I’m an introvert in a house with two toddlers,” says Waite, “and my job is working with people all day. There’s something relaxing for me about being able to sit down with a game in the evenings, spend some time in a quiet room, and just enjoy this experience.”

In some solo versions, players try to beat the board. Others have added an element known as an “automa”—an artificial player that mimics the effect a human opponent would have on the game by blocking moves or taking away resources. According to Morten Monrad Pedersen, the designer who coined the term, automa are usually controlled by a simple mechanism, like a dice roll or a deck of cards.

In some older games, says Waite, the goal is simply to beat your own score, “in the same way that people used to go to arcades to beat high scores.” But such games are losing their popularity, “and video games just don’t operate that way anymore. People want to compete against something, whether it be environmental or another player.”

Here are a few tips for the uninitiated:

Start with what you already have

If you have board games at home but have never tried playing solo, see if any of them have a solitary mode. “That’s how a lot of people get started, when they happen to notice that their game has a ‘1’ on the box,” Waite says.

Even games without an official solo mode can have a fan-made solo variant posted on BoardGameGeek.com, the biggest online forum for board-game hobbyists. (When in doubt, try searching using the game name + solo variant online to see what pops up.)

“Try the ones you already have, and don’t invest in something if you don’t know whether you’re going to like it or not,” recommends Albert Hernandez, who founded the popular 1 Player Guild (on BoardGameGeek.com) and hosts a podcast of the same name.

Check out cooperative games

In general, Hernandez says, cooperative games—where the players work as a team to win, rather than competing against each other—are perfect for solo play. You can simply choose two or more characters and play them both.

Look for recommendations

With so many new game releases each year, figuring out where to get started can be overwhelming. Waite and McKie recommend checking out Top 10 lists like the ones they discuss on their podcast, and paying attention to how long a game takes to play.

“For a lot of people, that’s going to be a very big deal,” Waite says. “You can find solo games that take 10 minutes, and some that take six hours.”

Pick a game that speaks to you

Choose a game that looks good, Waite recommends: “As shallow as it sounds, the quality of the artwork and the quality of the pieces [in the game] play a big role in how likely you are to pull if off your shelf when you’ve got other things competing for your attention.”

Hernandez says he also looks for a theme that speaks to him: “Don’t play a game just because you’ve heard it’s a really good solitary game, if you’re not interested in the theme. Every time I try to play a game like that it ends up falling flat for me. Mechanically it may be very sound, but I’m just bored out of my mind because I’m just not interested.”

Try printing your own game at home

If all you have at home is a deck of cards and some dice, Alanen recommends starting with thematic solitaire card-playing games: “Think of these as a step beyond solitaire, where there may be more strategy involved to win, as well as a theme to tie the game together and make it less abstract.”

Another free option Alanen enjoys is called print and play, or PnP games: “These are games developed by the gaming community that are provided for free to people to download and print at home.”

She recommends looking at this list on BoardGameGeek.com to get started.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

The online board-game community is very friendly, says Hernandez, so don’t be afraid to reach out to experienced solo players and ask questions. He recommends places like BoardGameGeek.com—where the 1 Player Guild he started now has over 13,000 members—or the Solo Board Gamers Facebook group.

“I think the main thing is, if you’re looking for a game and you’re not sure where to start, you don’t have to go it alone,” he says. “Even if you’re playing solo.”

Get New Orleans pralines, Jersey Shore sea salt, and other iconic treats delivered to your door.

Although states across the U.S. are opening back up at varying speeds, COVID-19 is still keeping most of us close to home. Thankfully, we can experience many of North America’s regional and sometimes quirky delights without having to hop in a plane.

“Whoopie pies are undoubtedly our top seller,” says Daniel Finnemore of his mail-order business Box of Maine. “You'll find them everywhere in Maine: at grocery stores, gas stations, fairs … there's even an annual Whoopie Pie Festival.” Customers can fill their gift boxes with classic Maine items, including jars of Marshmallow Fluff, chocolate-covered cranberry treats known as Moose Poops, and the state soda, which once outsold Coca-Cola and was likened to “root beer on steroids.”

Maine is not the only state (or city) whose culinary and cultural idiosyncrasies you can enjoy from home. From New Jersey to Alaska, Philadelphia to Albuquerque, local foods that capture their city or state’s identity are on offer, and you can have them delivered straight to your door while supporting local businesses.

Taste Alaska

In March, Midgi Moore's Juneau Food Tours was gearing up for what she hoped would be a record season. “Then like everything else, we just shut down,” Moore says of the impact of COVID-19. But after a bit of crying and gnashing her teeth, she says, she “got back into the game” with Taste Alaska!, a seasonal subscription (or one-time purchase) box that ships four times annually. Moore's first shipment focused on the state's southeast—a region especially known for its Inside Passage waterways—and is filled with locally sourced goods ranging from hot sauce made from kelp to images of Alaskan landscapes by Juneau photographer Mark Kelley. While autumn's box is still in the works, Moore says it will showcase the state's interior with foods like caribou jerky and reindeer sausage, as well as an art piece, preferably by an indigenous Alaska Native artist.

Taste of New Jersey

Despite New Jersey's reputation as a “keg with taps at both ends,” as Ben Franklin allegedly once referred to the state, since it connects New York City and Philadelphia, this box lives up to New Jersey’s moniker as the Garden State. The bountiful offerings include blueberry butter (central Jersey's vast Pine Barrens are home to the world's first cultivated blueberries) and ketchup made from juicy and tender Jersey tomatoes, which local residents swear by. There’s also raw wildflower honey, hand-harvested Jersey Shore sea salt, and salt water taffy—a candy invented on New Jersey’s Atlantic City Boardwalk in the late 1800s.

Albuquerque in a Box

Until recently, ABQ in a Box was a largely seasonal business focused on the Christmas holiday. “But we've definitely seen a spike in pre-scheduled orders these past few months,” says company co-owner Jesse Herron, “with customers working to help area businesses stay afloat.” Their New Mexico-centric goods include piñon coffee (a nutty-tasting statewide staple), coasters that look like tortillas, and New Mexico’s official state cookie, the cinnamon-sprinkled biscochito. According to Herron, the addition of a green-chile air freshener means that “once you open the box, your whole place immediately smells like New Mexico.”

Philadelphia Care Package

The City of Brotherly Love is synonymous with cheesesteak, but Philadelphia has other treats on offer. Tastykakes, a staple in regional Philly households for more than a century, are pre-packaged, dessert-style snack foods whose styles include cake-like Juniors and peanut butter Kandy Kakes. But the folks at Pennsylvania General Store know it’s butterscotch-topped sponge cake “Krimpets” that the homesick really want. You'll find these in their Philadelphia Care Package, along with goodies like Keystone Crunch (a local mix of toffee-coated peanuts, popcorn, and pretzels) and butter cookies from the city's own Melrose Diner & Bakery, a 24-hour South Philly haunt.

A Taste of Kentucky

Horse racing and bourbon are two of Kentucky's biggest draws, and A Taste of Kentucky has both on offer in the form of more than two-dozen gift baskets highlighting the Bluegrass State. Choosing the Filled Mint Julep Cup gets you a recipe and mix for the famed bourbon-based cocktail, as well as a copy of lyrics to the anti-slavery ballad My Old Kentucky Home. The larger Horse Head Gift Basket contains a Kern's Derby Tart (the mini version of Kern’s iconic Derby Pie), a can of Louisville's own Butchertown Soda, and even an old horseshoe from Churchill Downs, where the Kentucky Derby is held each May.

New Orleans in a Box

French Creole descendants Pierre Bagur and Diane Jacquet founded Aunt Sally's in the French Quarter of New Orleans 85 years ago, and today the iconic praline company is a Big Easy institution. Its current purveyors put together a box that encompasses much more than their own creamy pralines. Get ready to start cooking with a canister of Louisiana Brand cajun seasoning and a bottle of their hot sauce and whip up a fruity rum libation using Hurricane cocktail mix from Pat O'Briens, where the beverage was born. New Orleans in a Box also includes a lagniappe (or “bonus gift”), a small jester doll emblematic of masked Mardi Gras celebrations.

Box of Maine

Maine is known for its lobster harvest and 3,478 miles of coastline—a mileage equivalent to a cross-country road trip. It's also home to a bevy of regionally renowned foods such as Needham's chocolate-coated potato and coconut candies, red-snapper hot dogs (red-dyed hot dogs sold in natural casings that “snap” when you bite them), and Moxie, a sweet soda made with bitter-tasting gentian root. According to Finnemore, “you either love it or you hate it.”

The 19th U.S. President lends his name to a city, region, school, and annual festival.

Twenty miles north of Asunción, hugging the west bank of the Paraguay River, sits a bustling cattle-ranching hub called Villa Hayes. This dusty city serves as the capital of Paraguay’s Presidente Hayes Department, features a Hayes Primary School, and boasts a statue of its namesake: Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th President of the United States.

Hayes may be obscure in his homeland, but citizens of this South American nation absolutely revere the long-dead president. “Rutherford B. Hayes is our national hero,” says Maria Teresa Garozzo de Caravaca, director of the municipal museum in Villa Hayes. Kids from across Paraguay take school trips to the museum to view Hayes-themed artifacts, including a life-sized effigy next to an American flag. “They really admire the man a lot,” Garozzo explains. “He didn’t fight any battles here, but he’s in the hearts of all Paraguayans.”

Hayes never visited Paraguay, but he involved himself in the defining moment in Paraguayan history. From 1864 to 1870, Paraguay fought and lost the Paraguayan War against the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. It remains the deadliest international conflict in Latin American history. By some estimates, Paraguay lost 70 percent of its pre-war population and 90 percent of adult males. It also hemorrhaged huge chunks of its previously claimed territory, and didn’t want more bloodshed to try and wrangle them back.

That’s when President Hayes, a Republican who once graduated from Harvard Law School and practiced law in Ohio, tiptoed into the picture. In 1878, when there was no United Nations or World Court, the governments of both Argentina and Paraguay tapped him to arbitrate a protracted dispute over a large swath of the Gran Chaco lowlands, between the Pilcomayo and Verde Rivers. At the time, these prickly shrublands were home mostly to indigenous communities such as the Guaycurú, Lengua, Wichí, Zamuco, and Tupí-Guaraní, which were losing their ancestral lands to colonizers and had little allegiance to either government. The Gran Chaco was so hot and arid that European settlers often referred to it as “the Green Hell.” Nevertheless, when Hayes, a neutral third party, ruled in favor of Paraguayans in 1878, he essentially bequeathed them about 60 percent of their current land, much of which now bears his name.

The Paraguayan Chaco—about the size of Hayes’s native Ohio—has since prospered into a lucrative cattle-ranching zone. Each November, the people of Presidente Hayes Department throw a week-long celebration in honor of the Hayes decision with street parades, live music, and craft markets.

As a one-term President of the United States, Hayes reformed civil service, championed the poor, defended civil rights, expanded the power of the presidency, and introduced both telephones and the Easter Egg Roll to the White House. (He is also known for abstaining from alcohol—his wife, “Lemonade Lucy,” was a staunch supporter of temperance.) But he tends to fare rather poorly in rankings of favorite U.S. presidents. A 2018 survey conducted by the New York Times placed him at number 29 out of 44, sandwiched between Calvin Coolidge and George W. Bush.

Garozzo is disappointed to learn that Americans don’t share the same degree of appreciation for Hayes. “It really surprises me,” she says. “Everyone knows who Hayes is here.” His name was recently proposed for a multimillion-dollar bridge under construction over the Paraguay River. He’s appeared on stamps. There is even a soccer team in Asunción named Club Presidente Hayes, whose players are known as “Los Yankees.” On one reality-TV show, the grand prize was an all-expense-paid trip not to Disney World, but rather to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums in Fremont, Ohio. (Meanwhile, in the U.S., Americans are so disinterested in Hayes that his childhood home in Delaware, Ohio, was bulldozed and replaced with a gas station.)

“Hayes doesn’t even cause a blip on the radar of United States history,” says Eric Ebinger, author of 100 Days in the Life of Rutherford Hayes. “He was not a two-term president. There was no war during his administration. There were no big scandals. There was nothing.”

If Hayes is mentioned in the U.S. at all these days, it’s often as a comparison to Donald Trump, who similarly lost the popular vote but won the election. (Hayes earned the nicknames “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency” in the process.) But Ebinger wonders why there aren’t more Americans who champion the unsung Ohioan the way Paraguayans have. He says that for his work arbitrating the border dispute in South America, “he would have won the Nobel Prize, had that been around at that time.”

Dustin McLochlin, the Chair of Curation and Education at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums, isn’t so sure about that. He says that the decision “didn’t weigh on him much at all,” and that Hayes’s Secretary of State, William Everts, probably led the arbitration. “This is backed by the fact that there really isn't much of a record of how or why he made the decision in his diary or personal letters.”

Hayes’s intentions are beside the point for the people of Paraguay, who continue to use this historic link to the U.S. as a tool for bridge-building between nations. Paraguayan ambassadors remain frequent visitors to Ohio. The previous ambassador helped Fremont ink a sister city agreement with Villa Hayes in 2018, while the current ambassador recently launched a new Hayes Scholarship Program for Paraguayan students to attend Ohio Wesleyan University in Hayes’s birthplace of Delaware, Ohio.

Meanwhile, Garozzo says U.S. ambassadors have visited Villa Hayes for the November Laudo Hayes Firm Day celebrations, a provincial holiday. The local government also launched a new tourist circuit through Villa Hayes in 2018. Perhaps the city will offer hope to fans of other lesser-known leaders, that even figures who are neglected at home may find a place where they will endure as heroes.

The effort to document Black Lives Matter and more—in real time.

On Thursday, June 11, 2020, after rain spattered down on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., curators from the Smithsonian went to check on things. The area, which is close to the White House, has been a flashpoint in recent weeks. At the end of May, the park was full of people protesting the death of George Floyd, killed by a Minneapolis police officer, who has since been charged with murder and manslaughter. It’s the place where U.S. Park Police used chemical agents to flush out protesters for a presidential photo op. Soon, a black fence, reinforced with concrete supports, was erected around the area. The fence soon became a magnet for signs—memorials to Floyd, calls to end police brutality, references to past atrocities. Now the fence is coming down, and museum curators are setting out to collect some of the objects that will help tell the story of this turbulent time.

The rain didn’t seem to threaten the signs that still hang nearby too much, says Tsione Wolde-Michael, a civil justice curator in the division of political and military history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who is working on a coalition to document and preserve materials from Lafayette Square, along with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Anacostia Community Museum. (The former is also inviting the general public to hold onto and describe items that might be useful additions to the collection.) At Lafayette Square, “The good news is that it looks good,” Wolde-Michael says. “We'll be going again tomorrow, because it has rained again today, to check in, continue to talk to folks who are out there, and make sure that they know who we are, what our intentions are, and learn more about them and hear their stories.”

Atlas Obscura spoke with Wolde-Michael about collecting in real time, and the objects that will help future museumgoers understand the spring and summer of 2020.

When did the team start saying, “Hey, we ought to be collecting some of these items?”

The interest in rapid collecting is something that museum professionals are used to. But this particular moment is something that's very special. And we want to make sure that we are able to document this history in real-time, when it is safe to do so.

We made our first effort to go down to the White House area yesterday morning, and stayed until midday. It was a coalition of about nine of us. We started around the north fence area. It’s a powerful site, and it is a site that’s rapidly changing, too. Lafayette Square is one of the largest national protests. Thousands of people have gathered, and it has an amazingly rich history, being at the foot of the White House.

With the news that the White House perimeter fence would be coming down, you saw that people, on their own, were making an effort to preserve these objects from the protests.

The fence is largely barren now, with the exception of some areas. There’s a portion that’s marked with the number of minutes and seconds that George Floyd was suffocating for. There’s been a transition of protest signs from the fence, which almost all have been removed and placed across the street. People collected signs in wheelbarrows and posted them up on construction scaffolding and plywood outside of the Chamber of Commerce building. There’s still a first-aid station and folks who are bringing signs to protest. You still have folks singing and chanting. It’s still an active site, and there’s preservation that’s happening organically. It was this really beautiful, collaborative process of people trying to memorialize this moment together. The feel is really that of a living memorial.

Are there other areas beyond D.C. that you’re interested in?

There's an interest in also looking at protests that happened in particular neighborhoods in the district, and also broadening our scope beyond D.C. to capture the national response to this moment, as well. Of course, Minneapolis is going to be a site of interest, but we are in the process of identifying what those regional focus areas will be, and how we want to coordinate our efforts.

How do you approach people and start to collect without removing or detracting from the installations?

While we're eager to document, there's always this tension between documenting and being sure not to disrupt a political process that's in play. While rapid collecting is important, we always want to be sure to take a thoughtful approach. If someone is carrying a sign for the day and they might dispose of it at the end, that's a different scenario than if there is a sign that is being posted to a memorial wall. Navigating that is just part of our everyday work in community collecting, and that is something that I think all of our units have a strong tradition in.

With community collecting—[especially] when dealing with sensitive topics like this one, and communities that have fraught relationships with cultural institutions—you first meet community members, you establish trust, and that's part of laying the groundwork for collecting. That’s also how we get such layered stories.

In general, you would go up, introduce yourself to someone, identify yourself as a curator from the Smithsonian, and really just talk to them—learn more about why they're there, what their interests are, a little bit about why this moment is important to them. And maybe they have some unique stories attached to their sign or why they’re in D.C. As a curator, what I view as important about an object can be totally transformed by the perspective of the person whom that object belongs to. Stories can transform an object that looks rather mundane and really imbue it with a lot of power.

We use our good judgment and deep experience and training to say, “Okay, is this something that someone’s going to dispose of? Is this particular sign in danger of being destroyed?” And then you present them with the opportunity to have that object become part of the national record, which is a powerful statement. Sometimes it's appropriate to do it in that moment, and sometimes it's appropriate to just give someone a card and let them know, “Please think on it. And if you'd like to be in touch or have more of a conversation about it, you know, we're always here to talk to you.” Overwhelmingly, folks do reach out and let us know whether they’re ready to part with an object or not.

What types of objects jump out to you?

There are the really iconic pieces that are no-brainers for us, and signs that might be particularly visually compelling.

Also objects that speak to the breadth of this moment. A lot of people are asking, "Why now?” George Floyd’s death came in the middle of a pandemic, when people were cooped up in their homes, and media attention was on that and suddenly shifted to his death. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many people were calling [racism] during the time of COVID, “America’s deadly virus.” The response to Floyd’s death was not about police brutality alone. It’s about COVID, it's about the communities of color that are disproportionately impacted, it's about having some of the highest levels of unemployment in our nation's history. It's all of these things. Objects that allow us to speak to those overlapping realities are always of interest.

[We’re also interested in] things that connect the past to the present. There were signs and graffiti that reference the Tulsa race riots or that reference Emmett Till. It's those kinds of connections you see the general public making that are really powerful statements.

There are other things that aren't so tangible—for example the Movement for Black Lives’ response, or the mayor’s actions [directing city workers to paint “Black Lives Matter” on a road near the White House]. With a paint canister from the right organization, those things can become iconic. We are actively thinking about the notion of capturing sound and of collecting oral histories as a part of this, as well.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Their diverse, globetrotting work is equal parts science and spectacle.

High above the southern French village of Duilhac, Patrice Potier and his son Simon are standing in the ruins of the Peyrepertuse castle, narrating a feast for the eyes. As 2,000 spectators watch, nearly a dozen birds of prey are swooping up and down the cliffside, disappearing from view only to return and land on an outstretched arm.

This 13th-century castle, built more than 2,500 feet above the ground below, is perfectly positioned for such a spectacle. Two winds intersect here, and no matter which one is blowing on any given day, the Potiers’ birds can always soar.

"You witness flights here that you won't witness anywhere else in the world," says Patrice. "Each and every time, I get emotional seeing an eagle fly, a falcon fly, this way. And I've seen them fly a thousand times."

Patrice has been a professional falconer for 30 years. A consummate showman with a captivating voice and manner, he travels the world for his work, displaying the 60 birds he keeps at his home in Normandy to live audiences, in documentaries, stage plays, and even an opera.

Simon is an avian expert as well, but of a decidedly different feather: The younger Potier is one of the foremost scholars in Europe on birds of prey.

Together, the father-son falconry duo create shows such as this one at Peyrepertuse for festivals and fairs all over France.

Falconry is first and foremost a hunting practice that dates back over 4,000 years. Falconers train birds of prey—usually falcons, but also hawks, eagles, and owls—to seek out small game and bring it back to the falconer, who can receive a landing bird on his or her arm thanks to a leather gauntlet or glove that protects the skin. Leather hoods are used on the birds during training and transportation to prevent them from being distracted (in fact, the term "hoodwinked" may have come from 16th-century falconry terminology for this practice). Bells, meanwhile, are often attached to the bird's legs to help the falconer find a bird in the sky, and some modern falconers even use GPS tracking devices.

Today, according to Veronique Blontrock of the International Association of Falconry, tens of thousands of falconers around the world belong to clubs and associations dedicated to the sport. But she notes that there are possibly tens—or even hundreds—of thousands more who practice the sport "not secretly, but discreetly," especially in countries where falconry is not governed by laws and regulations. In Europe, she says, about 10,000 people openly practice the sport.

For Patrice, it all started with a common buzzard.

Growing up in housing projects in Verdun, he was lucky enough to live next door to a 27,000-acre wood filled with birds. When he was 12, he stumbled upon a buzzard that had fallen out of its nest.

"I picked it up and I fed it, and I raised it," he recalls. "And then … well, I made a lot of mistakes."

He managed to get the bird to follow him on walks, but about a month later, lacking the appropriate training, it flew away.

It wasn't until 10 years later that Patrice would acquire his next bird—a northern goshawk—after an encounter with Jean-Louis Liegeois, a forest ranger experienced in hunting with birds of prey. After meeting Liegeois through his wife's cousin, Patrice expressed interest in the older man's passion for falconry. The two hit it off, and soon Patrice began accompanying Liegeois on hunts. Together their birds snared small game—rabbits, hares, pheasants, wild ducks—though almost never to be the men’s supper.

"In falconry, there's an ethic," says Patrice. "The bird isn't hunting for you; he's hunting for himself. When he catches something ... the least you can do [is] let him eat."

At the time, falconry was a hobby for both men. But they would both eventually turn it into a career. Liegeois would go on to become director of the Falconry Academy of the Puy du Fou, a historical theme park (the second-largest in France after Disney). Potier, meanwhile, found work at a wildlife park, where he applied his newfound knowledge to the development of his own show—the first spectacle of falconry on horseback to grace French stages.

In a way, the show harked back to an earlier time in France, when horses and falconry were closely connected—at least among the aristocracy. In the first half of the 17th century, King Louis XIII kept 300 birds of prey, and in the ensuing decades, French aristocrats and nobles frequently hunted on horseback accompanied by peregrine falcons, known for their speed.

"They soar so high that at a certain point you can't see them at all," says Patrice. "That helps them return to earth at breakneck speeds. At the time [there was an expression] that in going so high, the falcon was becoming closer to God. And only they—the nobles—could use such a bird, who came so close to God."

But after the French Revolution, falconry fell out of fashion due to its association with the recently deposed nobility. French falconers who hunted in the following centuries often did so in secret.

But what’s old is new again, and falconry eventually came back into vogue. In 1954, it was legalized by the French government, and in 2010 formally protected by UNESCO as an intangible world heritage.

Today, Patrice regales his audiences with these rich historic tales. But unlike his peers—there are about 70 in France, by his estimate—his stories tend to focus equally on modern scientific issues like biodiversity and animal conservation.

"It's required, in France," says Liegeois. "We're required to talk about biodiversity; we're required to talk about conservation. But at the end of the day, very, very few people actually do it."

These are apt and timely topics: In France, agricultural pollution is afflicting many species, including prey animals. Falcons and other hunting birds are quickly becoming endangered. Patrice editorializes frequently, telling audiences that French farmers should stop using chemical pesticides, to protect the country’s agrarian ecosystem and reduce the impact on the environment. With his captivating voice and natural showmanship, he keeps his audiences enthralled.

Simon grew up listening as well. Now a postdoctoral fellow in zoology at the University of Lund who publishes papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, Simon was exposed to his father’s dual passions—birds of prey and ecology—at an early age. But Patrice says he never expected his son to follow in his footsteps.

“I hadn’t planned anything for my children,” says Patrice, “except that they should be happy.”

When they were young teenagers, Simon and his brother Maxime often worked with their father, helping to train Patrice’s birds at their home in northern France. But while Maxime was attracted to water rather than air—today he works in river conservation—Simon found his father's passion contagious.

When he was 16 they performed their first show together—a spectacle set to the music of Claude Nougaro, against the majestic backdrop of the Corbières mountains. Patrice says that afterward Simon was overcome with emotion, tearfully repeating, "It was beautiful, wasn't it? It was beautiful, what we did."

After one of their shows, Patrice remembers going horseback riding and encountering Simon in the mountains, alone with a bird he had trained. “I found it so moving," Patrice recalls."To see him alone in the mountains, just letting his bird fly.”

Today, Simon’s passion informs his research, which focuses on visual acuity in birds of prey. He carries out all of his experiments—such as exploring how birds stabilize their heads in flight, and delving into the mechanics of their depth perception—at his father's home, 45 minutes from where he lives with his wife.

“I’m linking [falconry], now, with issues of conservation—notably problems with collisions with windmills or electric lines,” Simon says. “Understanding how [birds of prey] perceive them and how we can make adjustments, so that the birds can see them better.”

Simon’s passion and work help inform Patrice’s show script, which includes some of the latest scientific research. Simon says that audiences today are more interested and receptive to their message than they were 15 years ago, when he first began working with his father. Simon’s access to the latest research allows them to update their script on the fly.

For instance, says Liegeois, “People used to say, ‘This eagle I’m showing you sees eight times better than you.’ And Simon actually proved, scientifically, that it’s not eight times. It’s two and a half. So [some professionals in the industry] corrected [their] scripts. [They] changed what [they] say.”

Today the father-son team work in a host of venues and formats. They’ve collaborated with robotics experts, for instance, to see if the locomotion used by birds of prey can help develop better flight patterns for drones. They’ve also provided trained birds for artistic endeavors. Patrice recalls his experience working on the documentary film Un Matin sur terre, which filmed sunrise in three different parts of the world. For the segment on the Arctic, Patrice’s snowy owl was the star (a role it got to play only after it had traveled to Norway as checked baggage).

Patrice even supplied a massive crow for an opera. “The crow was supposed to come out just as the last note rang out, in the last act,” recalls Patrice with a laugh. “So the conductor would give the sign. And the crow understood! Soon, it wasn’t about me, in the wings. I didn’t need to call him. As soon as he saw the conductor, he came out! We did 30 shows, and he never made one mistake.”

Patrice and Simon say they love their varied work, which takes them around the world and into exciting encounters and circumstances. But as time goes on, Patrice finds himself identifying more and more with conservationists who question the ethics of keeping such majestic birds in captivity. He says that when people concerned with animal welfare approach him after shows, he can't help but agree with them.

"They come up and say, 'A bird of prey doesn't belong in a medieval festival on a perch. It should be in nature.' What do you want me to say? They're right. The older I get, the more I think about conservation and reintroduction of birds into nature. And not so much about having them at home. I don't know if I'm right … but that's what feels right."

Simon says, “My father is a bird-lover before [he’s] a falconer. And he brought me up with that love. Seeing them in nature … that’s our first passion.”

Patrice agrees: "I can't take a walk without looking into the sky, to see if there's a bird of prey up there. It's not something I really think about. It's not really … calculated. It's just normal."

Their diverse, globetrotting work is equal parts science and spectacle.

High above the southern French village of Duilhac, Patrice Potier and his son Simon are standing in the ruins of the Peyrepertuse castle, narrating a feast for the eyes. As 2,000 spectators watch, nearly a dozen birds of prey are swooping up and down the cliffside, disappearing from view only to return and land on an outstretched arm.

This 13th-century castle, built more than 2,500 feet above the ground below, is perfectly positioned for such a spectacle. Two winds intersect here, and no matter which one is blowing on any given day, the Potiers’ birds can always soar.

"You witness flights here that you won't witness anywhere else in the world," says Patrice. "Each and every time, I get emotional seeing an eagle fly, a falcon fly, this way. And I've seen them fly a thousand times."

Patrice has been a professional falconer for 30 years. A consummate showman with a captivating voice and manner, he travels the world for his work, displaying the 60 birds he keeps at his home in Normandy to live audiences, in documentaries, stage plays, and even an opera.

Simon is an avian expert as well, but of a decidedly different feather: The younger Potier is one of the foremost scholars in Europe on birds of prey.

Together, the father-son falconry duo create shows such as this one at Peyrepertuse for festivals and fairs all over France.

Falconry is first and foremost a hunting practice that dates back over 4,000 years. Falconers train birds of prey—usually falcons, but also hawks, eagles, and owls—to seek out small game and bring it back to the falconer, who can receive a landing bird on his or her arm thanks to a leather gauntlet or glove that protects the skin. Leather hoods are used on the birds during training and transportation to prevent them from being distracted (in fact, the term "hoodwinked" may have come from 16th-century falconry terminology for this practice). Bells, meanwhile, are often attached to the bird's legs to help the falconer find a bird in the sky, and some modern falconers even use GPS tracking devices.

Today, according to Veronique Blontrock of the International Association of Falconry, tens of thousands of falconers around the world belong to clubs and associations dedicated to the sport. But she notes that there are possibly tens—or even hundreds—of thousands more who practice the sport "not secretly, but discreetly," especially in countries where falconry is not governed by laws and regulations. In Europe, she says, about 10,000 people openly practice the sport.

For Patrice, it all started with a common buzzard.

Growing up in housing projects in Verdun, he was lucky enough to live next door to a 27,000-acre wood filled with birds. When he was 12, he stumbled upon a buzzard that had fallen out of its nest.

"I picked it up and I fed it, and I raised it," he recalls. "And then … well, I made a lot of mistakes."

He managed to get the bird to follow him on walks, but about a month later, lacking the appropriate training, it flew away.

It wasn't until 10 years later that Patrice would acquire his next bird—a northern goshawk—after an encounter with Jean-Louis Liegeois, a forest ranger experienced in hunting with birds of prey. After meeting Liegeois through his wife's cousin, Patrice expressed interest in the older man's passion for falconry. The two hit it off, and soon Patrice began accompanying Liegeois on hunts. Together their birds snared small game—rabbits, hares, pheasants, wild ducks—though almost never to be the men’s supper.

"In falconry, there's an ethic," says Patrice. "The bird isn't hunting for you; he's hunting for himself. When he catches something ... the least you can do [is] let him eat."

At the time, falconry was a hobby for both men. But they would both eventually turn it into a career. Liegeois would go on to become director of the Falconry Academy of the Puy du Fou, a historical theme park (the second-largest in France after Disney). Potier, meanwhile, found work at a wildlife park, where he applied his newfound knowledge to the development of his own show—the first spectacle of falconry on horseback to grace French stages.

In a way, the show harked back to an earlier time in France, when horses and falconry were closely connected—at least among the aristocracy. In the first half of the 17th century, King Louis XIII kept 300 birds of prey, and in the ensuing decades, French aristocrats and nobles frequently hunted on horseback accompanied by peregrine falcons, known for their speed.

"They soar so high that at a certain point you can't see them at all," says Patrice. "That helps them return to earth at breakneck speeds. At the time [there was an expression] that in going so high, the falcon was becoming closer to God. And only they—the nobles—could use such a bird, who came so close to God."

But after the French Revolution, falconry fell out of fashion due to its association with the recently deposed nobility. French falconers who hunted in the following centuries often did so in secret.

But what’s old is new again, and falconry eventually came back into vogue. In 1954, it was legalized by the French government, and in 2010 formally protected by UNESCO as an intangible world heritage.

Today, Patrice regales his audiences with these rich historic tales. But unlike his peers—there are about 70 in France, by his estimate—his stories tend to focus equally on modern scientific issues like biodiversity and animal conservation.

"It's required, in France," says Liegeois. "We're required to talk about biodiversity; we're required to talk about conservation. But at the end of the day, very, very few people actually do it."

These are apt and timely topics: In France, agricultural pollution is afflicting many species, including prey animals. Falcons and other hunting birds are quickly becoming endangered. Patrice editorializes frequently, telling audiences that French farmers should stop using chemical pesticides, to protect the country’s agrarian ecosystem and reduce the impact on the environment. With his captivating voice and natural showmanship, he keeps his audiences enthralled.

Simon grew up listening as well. Now a postdoctoral fellow in zoology at the University of Lund who publishes papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, Simon was exposed to his father’s dual passions—birds of prey and ecology—at an early age. But Patrice says he never expected his son to follow in his footsteps.

“I hadn’t planned anything for my children,” says Patrice, “except that they should be happy.”

When they were young teenagers, Simon and his brother Maxime often worked with their father, helping to train Patrice’s birds at their home in northern France. But while Maxime was attracted to water rather than air—today he works in river conservation—Simon found his father's passion contagious.

When he was 16 they performed their first show together—a spectacle set to the music of Claude Nougaro, against the majestic backdrop of the Corbières mountains. Patrice says that afterward Simon was overcome with emotion, tearfully repeating, "It was beautiful, wasn't it? It was beautiful, what we did."

After one of their shows, Patrice remembers going horseback riding and encountering Simon in the mountains, alone with a bird he had trained. “I found it so moving," Patrice recalls."To see him alone in the mountains, just letting his bird fly.”

Today, Simon’s passion informs his research, which focuses on visual acuity in birds of prey. He carries out all of his experiments—such as exploring how birds stabilize their heads in flight, and delving into the mechanics of their depth perception—at his father's home, 45 minutes from where he lives with his wife.

“I’m linking [falconry], now, with issues of conservation—notably problems with collisions with windmills or electric lines,” Simon says. “Understanding how [birds of prey] perceive them and how we can make adjustments, so that the birds can see them better.”

Simon’s passion and work help inform Patrice’s show script, which includes some of the latest scientific research. Simon says that audiences today are more interested and receptive to their message than they were 15 years ago, when he first began working with his father. Simon’s access to the latest research allows them to update their script on the fly.

For instance, says Liegeois, “People used to say, ‘This eagle I’m showing you sees eight times better than you.’ And Simon actually proved, scientifically, that it’s not eight times. It’s two and a half. So [some professionals in the industry] corrected [their] scripts. [They] changed what [they] say.”

Today the father-son team work in a host of venues and formats. They’ve collaborated with robotics experts, for instance, to see if the locomotion used by birds of prey can help develop better flight patterns for drones. They’ve also provided trained birds for artistic endeavors. Patrice recalls his experience working on the documentary film Un Matin sur terre, which filmed sunrise in three different parts of the world. For the segment on the Arctic, Patrice’s snowy owl was the star (a role it got to play only after it had traveled to Norway as checked baggage).

Patrice even supplied a massive crow for an opera. “The crow was supposed to come out just as the last note rang out, in the last act,” recalls Patrice with a laugh. “So the conductor would give the sign. And the crow understood! Soon, it wasn’t about me, in the wings. I didn’t need to call him. As soon as he saw the conductor, he came out! We did 30 shows, and he never made one mistake.”

Patrice and Simon say they love their varied work, which takes them around the world and into exciting encounters and circumstances. But as time goes on, Patrice finds himself identifying more and more with conservationists who question the ethics of keeping such majestic birds in captivity. He says that when people concerned with animal welfare approach him after shows, he can't help but agree with them.

"They come up and say, 'A bird of prey doesn't belong in a medieval festival on a perch. It should be in nature.' What do you want me to say? They're right. The older I get, the more I think about conservation and reintroduction of birds into nature. And not so much about having them at home. I don't know if I'm right … but that's what feels right."

Simon says, “My father is a bird-lover before [he’s] a falconer. And he brought me up with that love. Seeing them in nature … that’s our first passion.”

Patrice agrees: "I can't take a walk without looking into the sky, to see if there's a bird of prey up there. It's not something I really think about. It's not really … calculated. It's just normal."

A little "library" that's literally for the birds.

At an unusually unruly library in Virginia, there’s food everywhere and droppings on the floor. Sometimes, visitors stand on the reception desk and squabble with abandon.

Welcome to Bird Library, a large bird feeder designed to resemble a public reading room, where feathered patrons from finches to sparrows (and the occasional squirrel) congregate. Perched in a backyard in the city of Charlottesville, it is the passion project of librarian Rebecca Flowers and woodworker Kevin Cwalina, who brought together their skills and interests to showcase the lives of their backyard birds.

“Both of us have a love for birds, but once we set up the library we really got into it, making up stories for them,” Flowers says. When she noticed that mourning doves look like they’re wearing blue eyeshadow, for example, she created a character named Miss Dove. “I imagine her as a children’s librarian who doesn’t actually like children. We have pictures of her being lazy or making some strange faces.”

Flowers and Cwalina created Bird Library five years ago after they discovered the Piip-Show, a now-defunct live feed of a birdhouse decorated as a coffee bar that became one of Norway’s most popular TV broadcasts. Their feeder can likewise be observed on a 24/7 livestream, and its activity followed on a website where the couple regularly posts photographs of particularly comical or rare encounters. Recent visitors have included a striking rose-breasted grosbeak, a cardinal that looks like it’s vaping, and a trio of mourning doves seemingly caught in a serious meeting. Cwalina rebuilt and expanded the library last year, but the original one featured miniature, handmade books that common grackles would steal and leave scattered around the yard.

“They all have their own personalities, and you can learn a lot about birds by watching their mannerisms,” Flowers says. “Mourning doves tend to be ground feeders, so they snack and stay a while. A nuthatch will fly in, grab a seed, and fly out. Some of the sparrows have a technique where they eat the food and fling it everywhere, like a dramatic explosion of bird seed. Cardinals can be a little aggressive to other birds—they’re often fighting with sparrows.”

As an activity that can be enjoyed in solitude, birdwatching has gained traction as a popular way to pass time during the COVID-19 crisis. Not only are more people going birding in nearby parks or woods; more people are also turning to webcams of birds, which offer individuals who do not have the luxury of accessing green space a way to connect with nature. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s live cameras, which spotlight avians from barred owls to red-tailed hawks, have received twice the amount of traffic during the months of March through May compared to that same period last year, according to the Lab’s Bird Cams Project Leader Charles Eldermire. Viewers are also spending three times the amount of time on those feeds despite a reduction in cameras this season.

That spike might be attributed to a common yearning to find comfort in the natural world during a time of overwhelming uncertainty. “Watching birds can help provide the thread that stitches the fabric of an increasingly fractured-feeling-world back into something that approximates whole,” Eldermire says. “Birds offer a continuum of learning opportunities, with more common local residents that can be easy to get to know and observe intimately, and surprising visitors that might be new or transient. To catch a glimpse [of them] or a snippet of a recognizable song can spark excitement during these pandemic days when so much can seem the same.”

Birdwatching is also a calming activity, whether done in an open park or out one’s kitchen window. “It forces you to slow down, be quiet, and tune in more to your senses and surroundings,” Cwalina, who is a member of his local Monticello Bird Club, says. “You have to physically be still, too, so in a way there’s a meditation aspect to it.”

Bird Library is mostly visited by common backyard birds, but monitoring it has been a simple way for Cwalina and Flowers to get acquainted with their local biodiversity. Collecting specific data on everyday visitors can also be a valuable citizen-science project: Project FeederWatch, launched by the Cornell Lab, invites people in North America to count their backyard birds to help track long-term population trends. “It’s fairly easy to build a bird feeder,” Flowers says. “Make it your own by having it relate to something you enjoy.”

Cwalina hopes to eventually publish an open-access plan for a similar bird library, so that other birders can build their own versions. “I would love for people on the West Coast, in other countries, to set up live cameras on them,” he says. “How cool would that be, to have a whole network of bird libraries?”

Highlights from a long history of turning crumbs into puddings, soups, and brews.

You made bread. It may have been sourdough—as dense as dark matter, and much trickier than it looked from the recipe—or oil-slick focaccia, or no-knead white, with yawning holes in the crumb. Whatever it was, you made bread, and now you have too much of it, and it feels like a waste to throw it out. (At the same time, it’s growing increasingly stale.)

Home cooks around the world have faced some version of this dilemma for pretty much as long as bread has existed. The result is a rich, global tradition of repurposing such leftovers. In some cases, they’re moistened into a thrifty mush; in others, a heel of stale bread becomes the conduit for bananas, or shrimp, or any number of more obviously delicious foodstuffs. Here are seven dishes and drinks that transform scraps into a spread. In almost every event, these recipes are far better than stale bread has any right to be—and usually incredibly filling.

Açorda

Made with coriander, garlic, olive oil, and, of course, bread, the Portuguese soup açorda tells the story of centuries of Arab-Portuguese relations. While the base ingredients remain the same, açorda is often topped with seafood, sausage, or a poached egg, depending on where it’s made. More common in the south of the country, it’s believed to be a loose interpretation of tharid, a Middle Eastern bread soup often eaten in the month of Ramadan.

Though açorda is now often eaten by adults, it was for a long time “a stand-by dish for feeding infants,” writes Edite Vieira in The Taste of Portugal. It makes sense: It’s easy to assemble, hard to dislike, and doesn’t require too much chewing. More than that, she writes, this bread porridge is “surprisingly tasty,” whatever your age. Vieira’s book contains recipes for several varieties of açorda.

Kvass

For “authentic” kvass, the Russian soft drink made by fermenting bread, yeast, malt, sugar, and water, you really need rye bread. That, at least, is the characterizing flavor of this tart, fizzy drink, popular in Eastern Europe since at least 989 AD. (At the baptism of one Prince Vladimir, the spread apparently featured “food, honey in barrels, and bread-kvass.”)

In the thousand or so years since, kvass has been drunk by monks, appeared in Tolstoy novels (he nicknames it “pig’s lemonade”), and enjoyed by generations of Russian school children, despite its 0.5 percent alcohol content. (Its Estonian cousin is known as kali.) From 1967, the drink was commonly found on street corners, sold out of iconic yellow barrels, labeled квас, and drunk from communal glass mugs of dubious hygiene. “Like beer, kvass is drunk chilled, so the appearance of carts with kvass barrels on the streets meant that summer was nigh,” remembers Sergey Grechishkin in his memoir Everything is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid. “Kvass was one of the great pleasures of a Soviet kid’s life, alongside ice cream and elusive bananas.”

The modern drinker has two options. You can buy the commercial stuff—Nikola is one popular brand—or make your own. Regardless, in the interests of public hygiene, it’s probably worthwhile to make sure everyone has their own glass.

Firfir

A good day in Ethiopia—or anywhere, really—might start with firfir. This popular breakfast combines last night’s shredded injera, a fermented sourdough pancake, with spices, onions, and clarified butter. Similar jumbles of mashed-up flatbread occur all over the world—think Mexican migas or Ashkenazi Jewish matzo brei.

Traditionally, firfir is served warm, writes Kittee Berns in Teff Love: Adventures in Vegan Ethiopian Cooking, and eaten with a spoon or fork, or even more injera, as “primo comfort food.” (Its cold counterpoint, a kind of “injera salad,” is known as fitfit.) Cooks often fold in other ingredients, including leftover wat (stew), broth, or vegetables. Though very common in Ethiopia, writes Berns, firfir is “somewhat rare in Ethiopian restaurants in North America.” To make it at home, you really need the spice mix berbere, as well as authentic injera, made with the grain teff.

Bread Pudding

A Victorian chef seeking to repurpose a loaf of bread didn’t have to look far. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the domestic bible published in 1861, boasts no less than five recipes for bread pudding: “baked,” “very plain,” “boiled,” “brown,” and “miniature.” In each, stale bread is reduced to crumbs, mixed with milk, sugar, and dried fruit, then heated into one solid mass. It’s frugal, stodgy, and an exercise in Anglo-Saxon restraint.

By this point, Brits had been eating some version of bread pudding for centuries. Compared to its medieval forebear, a piece of moistened bread known as a “sop,” the addition of sugar and fruit would have made Mrs. Beeton’s dishes wildly extravagant.

Nowadays, bread-and-butter pudding is far more common. Here, custard, leftover sliced bread, and raisins come together in a combination that the British food writer Nigel Slater likens to an edible hug. (The Guardian’s Felicity Cloake has taken a stab at perfecting the recipe.) It’s a beloved school-cafeteria stalwart, and one that far exceeds the sum of its parts. (Summer pudding is yet another British bread-based dessert.)

Biscocho de Caña

Spanish name notwithstanding, biscocho de caña is a typically Filipino cookie that can be hard to find elsewhere in the world. It’s profoundly post-colonial: The Spanish word bizcocho typically refers to a kind of sponge cake, while wheat bread seems to have first arrived in the Philippines with Portuguese explorers and settlers in the 1500s and became much more common and accessible in the Second World War with the arrival of American troops.

The word biscocho, like biscotti, comes from the Latin for “cooked twice.” The biscuit is made with twice-baked, crusty pan Americano, and coated in butter and sugar. It can also be made with condensed milk, for added sweetness, or flavored with butterscotch.

Within the Philippines, Iloilo City, on Panay Island, is biscocho’s undisputed hometown, with outlets of the popular chain Original Biscocho Haus sprinkled liberally across the city. Though biscocho can be made at home, it’s more commonly purchased commercially, particularly by visitors to the city. Either way, this sweetened cracker is eaten at almost any time of the day or night, to stave off hunger between meals, kick off the day, or as an accompaniment to tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.

Bánh Chuối

You might already be familiar with the Vietnamese word for a baked good: bánh, as in bánh mì. The dessert bánh chuối is often made by combining bread scraps with banana (chuối) to produce a sweet with the consistency of cheesecake and the general austerity of all leftover-bread-based foods, at once luxurious and economical.

Often made with stale white bread, coconut cream, and lots of sugar, this pudding is flavored with banana or coffee according to preference, baked, then chilled in the fridge. Essentially a “baked banana bread pudding,” it’s “especially easy and forgiving” to bake, writes Sue Tran in the foreword to her recipe on Vice, with plenty of flexibility according to what you have to hand: “Any bread works,” she says. “Baguette is traditional, sourdough makes it a bit tangy, but even white sliced bread works.” More than that, it’s delicious, served either warm or after a few hours of chilling in the fridge.

Popara

To the casual observer, the Balkan bread mash popara might sound a little on the bland side. That’s sort of beside the point. For centuries, this mix of torn-up stale bread and a liquid—milk, water, or tea—has been used to stave off hunger and make resources go further in times of hardship.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t gild the lily. Popara can easily become more sumptuous with the addition of fried onions, sour cream, sugar, or cheese, or by adding lard, butter, or some other fat. Beyond that, it’s down to a matter of taste—whether you’d rather start your day with smooth popara, like a kind of bread milkshake, or a chunkier texture, where pieces of chewy bread are suspended in the mush. Either way, it’s the sort of meal that sits heavily on the stomach, pushing any thoughts of lunch off into the distant future.

Turns out there’s a lot of running involved in running an empire.

Long before sports leagues around the world were abruptly put on hold, and centuries before they were founded, Mesoamerican cultures were having a ball on courts of their own. The Olmecs, Maya, and Aztecs all had variations of a ball game, but the Aztecs may have had the most well-known version of the affair, which sometimes culminated in heads rolling, along with the ball.

Though human sacrifice is thankfully off the table today, the game—or a makeshift analog thereof—is still playable, at home, with the right equipment. And in the midst of a global pandemic, it helps to have the right conditions too.

In some parts of the world, life as we knew it is beginning to resume. (This may change when a second wave of coronavirus infections occur, but for now, many countries in Asia and Europe, and some U.S. states, have begun slowly returning to business as usual.) For team sports, from Korean baseball to Spanish soccer, that means playing in stadiums and arenas without fans. And if those athletes can do it in those eerily quiet venues, so too can you in your local park.

Mesoamerican ballgames long precede the Aztecs, though they were a mainstay by the time Aztec society developed, in the early 14th century. The rules are still a matter of debate, as archaeologists have had to work backwards from the court remains to figure out how these games may have been played. But they likely featured two teams and players acrobatically moving a rubber ball up and down the court. Some ballcourts, like the large one at Chichén Itzá, had tall wall-mounted hoops—a forerunner of modern basketball, perhaps, albeit one with far less scoring.

Needless to say, reenacting the games played under those conditions is impossible at home (or without a critical mass of players). But if you’re in a part of the globe that’s been hit especially hard by the coronavirus, there’s an alternative.

“One of the ways in which modern scholars can begin to enter into the nuances of Mexica [aka Aztec] culture is through language,” writes John Schwaller, an Aztec historian at the University of Albany, on the educational company Mexicolore’s website. Schwaller enumerates the instances of Nahuatl (the Aztec language) words that refer to running—paina, tlaloa, totoca, and tlacza—in the Florentine Codex, a fairly comprehensive 16th-century study of Mesoamerica.

Not all of that running was recreational—there were messages that needed delivering, and some runs had a ritual purpose—but the distances were great enough that extensive training was required. Luckily for you, running hasn’t gone out of style, unlike the Mesoamerican ball games. Plus, with no other people and few materials required, it makes for attainable exercise.

Though not Aztec per se, the indigenous Rarámuri of Chihuahua, Mexico, make for a good modern equivalent. Famous for their distance running—the lengths of which vary, but a relatively “low-distance” jog can total 150 miles—the Rarámuri make ultramarathons look like walks in the park.

The long runs are a regular part of Rarámuri life—a far cry from the months of focused training many of us do for a single 26-mile marathon. As John Kennedy, a UCLA anthropologist, told The New York Times in 1994, if running "were removed from Tarahumara life, the effect would be greater than if some sporting activity were dropped from our own culture.

For the Aztecs, the ballgames and running were similarly essential institutions. Ballgames were played on every social level, and sometimes had ceremonial or state-related functions. And running was a key part of communicating across the vast Aztec empire.

In The Fifteenth Month: Aztec History in the Rituals of Panquetzaliztli, Schwaller describes the extensive messenger network that vined across the empire, where couriers would run messages to the next courier, in a relay to get the mail to its destination. Hernán Cortés, the conquistador, once estimated that a team of Aztec runners could cover 260 miles—10 marathons—in a single day.

Though the invading Spanish eventually killed off the Aztecs and their empire, some Aztec traditions have continued to this day. If you’re stuck at home, you can don some sneakers and run like an Aztec (or at least like a Rarámuri). And once your quarantine ends, you can find a rubber ball, grab some friends, and get to work on your own iteration of a revived Mesoamerican pastime.

Whatever you do, remember the fundamental rule of getting fit, which hasn’t changed in millennia: No pain, no gain.

If it weren't for aerial surveys and lidar imaging, Aguada Fénix might never have claimed the superlative crown.

Millennia before Maya city centers like Tikal and Chichen Itza took shape, a massive earthwork was forged on the gulf side of Mexico, in the state of Tabasco. Over 4,500 feet long and up to 50 feet tall, the raised platform sat just below the surface of what is today an inhabited part of the bucolic Mexican coast.

The site, called Aguada Fénix, is about 3,000 years old, and was one of 21 ceremonial centers discovered in 2017 using aerial surveys and lidar imaging, which mapped out the subtle topographies that lay beneath the foliage and other surface-level features in the area. Of the ceremonial centers those surveys identified, Aguada Fénix is by far the most sprawling. In fact, after three years of study, researchers have determined that it’s the largest and oldest Maya structure ever found in Mexico.

The details of the find, its dimensions, and the artifacts uncovered during its excavation were recently published in the journal Nature.

The platform at Aguada Fénix is comparable to the Olmec center of San Lorenzo. Ceremonial platforms like these are the horizontal answer to the more famous pyramids’ verticality. Since the Maya platforms were built long after the Olmec constructions, theories have drawn connections between the two cultures: Were the Maya innovators—the real Mesoamerican McCoy—or Olmec copycats?

“The find compels us to move beyond the polarized debate between Olmec influence and Maya independent development,” says Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper, via e-mail. “Some inspiration came from the Olmec center of San Lorenzo, but there were substantial innovations by other groups.”

Unlike some other lidar finds, glimpsed through dense thicket and jungle obscuring ancient ruins, Aguada Fénix was hiding in relatively plain sight—among the rural ranches of Tabasco. The lidar images also revealed nine roads leading to the central platform, which was constructed with a patchwork of soil and clay.

Among the artifacts found at the site were six greenstone axes and an unusual animal sculpture, quite unlike the typical Olmec works that feature giant heads, supernatural beings, and members of the Olmec elite. Resembling a local peccary, the sculpture was affectionately named “Choco” by the dig team, which included researchers from the U.S., Canada, and Japan.

“It is different from any known sculpture,” including “contemporaneous Olmec sculptures tied to powerful elites,” says Inomata, whose team is now trying to sort out its purpose and meaning. “It suggests the possibility that there was a unique sculptural tradition in this area.”

Now that Aguada Fénix has usurped the previous record holder for both oldest and largest Maya site in Mexico, the question is: Can it keep the superlative crown? With lidar imaging gaining momentum—from the small-scale piney forests of New Hampshire to a plan for mapping the entire world—it may be just a matter of time till Aguada Fénix is left in the dust.

The demise of Arabica's birthplace would be a catastrophe for the industry.

Walking into the montane cloud forests with a small group of coffee collectors, ducking under mossy, low-hanging branches, ropey lianas, and slender wild coffee trees broken by baboons trying to reach their sweet fruit, is like returning to a time when rivers ran unimpeded and great forests ruled the land. Hazy sunlight pierces the dense canopy. Black-and-white colobus monkeys sit quietly observing from above, heavy silvery-cheeked hornbills lift off from treetops with the deep whooshing of wingbeats, and electric-green mambas slither unseen. The steady drip of water from the morning rain plops down on coffee trees that are merely one part of the rich, biodiverse understory.

These coffee forests, in Ethiopia's Kafa region, some 300 miles southwest of Addis Ababa, are the heart of coffee’s birthplace, and one of the few places where it still exists in the wild. Growing spontaneously under the canopy of trees, forest coffee is neither cultivated nor maintained, and a complex system of ancestral entitlements regulates who can gather the coffee berries when they ripen in autumn.

While these fruits look similar to their cultivated cousins, the trees themselves appear different. Ferns, colorful epiphytic orchids, and leafy climbers wrap around the tall, slender trees that reach up towards the available light. Bearded festoons of silvery-green moss hang from their slender branches. Leaves are sparse, and coffee fruits few. With most of their energy going into simply surviving, they grow slow and produce just enough for the species to continue.

Once the collectors arrive at the part of the forest whose coffee they can gather, they reach up and double over nimble branches, spinning the berries between thumb and fingers to separate them from the short stem and dropping them into buckets that hang around their necks. They take perfect, deep-red coffee fruits, but also unripe green and yellow ones and the overripe purple ones, which might be claimed by baboons, birds, or rainstorms if left for later.

I first journeyed into these isolated forests when writing a book: Where the Wild Coffee Grows. I came to see coffee in its original home, to see wild Arabica trees which, I learned, are at risk of disappearing entirely within 60 years. That would be devastating to the communities that live in and around Ethiopia’s coffee forests. It also sends fear into the coffee-soaked hearts of aficionados, breeders, and farmers around the globe.

There are two commercial varieties of coffee, Arabica (Coffea arabica) and its more tropical cousin, Robusta (Coffea canephora). In 2019, the world produced some 22.6 billion pounds of coffee, 60 percent of that the higher-valued, more-nuanced Arabica. Most of the world has just a single way to farm it—in large, orderly fields of heavily-laden trees and often little shade.

In Ethiopia such plantations are rare. The most common method is “garden coffee” grown on small lots or family compounds. Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, and Harar—the country’s best-known producing areas—rely on this type of cultivation. In Kafa and around the southwest, people gather “forest coffee” deep in the woodlands where it grows undisturbed, or boost output from trees along the forest edges by cutting back surrounding vegetation, trimming trees, and thinning the canopy. This is known as “semi-forest coffee.” Locals make little distinction between the two types. Sellers in the sprawling Saturday market in Bonga, Kafa’s lowkey capital, say both are wof zerash, or sown by the birds.

While the wildness of these forest coffees is unique, another factor distinguishes them from much of the globe’s Arabica: the devastating fungus known as leaf rust is kept naturally in check.

Latin America produces almost 85 percent of the world’s Arabica, and its coffee is in trouble. Arabica coffee is self-pollinating, pollinating itself about 95 percent of the time, and it spread around the globe from a literal handful of seeds. As a result, cultivated Arabica is genetically weak and unable to withstand or adapt to the diseases and changing climate that are battering production. Coffee leaf rust, which has decimated coffee-growing regions before, wiping out the entire industry of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the late-19 century, has sent Latin America’s industry into a tailspin.

The greater the genetic diversity of a plant species, the greater chances it has to adapt to such threats. Or even offer attractive traits for the market. For coffee that means higher yields, interesting new flavors, or—in something of a holy grail—naturally decaffeinated beans. The diversity in Ethiopia, especially deep in the forests, is richer than anywhere else—some have estimated that Ethiopia possesses 99.8 percent of the genetic diversity of Arabica. These cloud forests hold not just the origins of Arabica coffee, but a key to the industry’s future.

Ethiopia has one of the fastest growing populations in the world. In 2000 it had 66 million people; today there are 115 million. With such growth comes the need for more farmland and the continual threat of deforestation. In the early-20th century, forests covered about 35 percent of the country. Today it is around 4 percent.

For decades, deforestation looked ready to claim the coffee forests, along with the genetic diversity they safeguarded. While scientists are preserving wild varieties of other important crops in seed banks and gene reserves, coffee seeds do not store well using such conventional methods. The best place to safeguard their genetic resources is in their original home.

But around Kafa at least, says Mesfin Tekle, the leading local expert on Kafa’s coffee forests, deforestation has been brought under control. That is in part from Participatory Forest Management, a popular program that transfers the right to manage and exploit a forest’s renewable resources—wild coffee, honey, spices such as cardamom—from the government to a local community. In return, the community is responsible for its conservation.

More protection came in 2010 when UNESCO designated 3,000 square miles the Kafa Biosphere Reserve, covering two-thirds of Kafa in a trio of zones with distinctive rules on access and activities. Home to some 650,000 people, the Reserve is 55 percent forest, including one-quarter coffee forest. That same year, UNESCO added the Yayu Coffee Forest Biosphere Reserve to its protected list, and in 2012, the nearby Sheka Forest Biosphere Reserve, where coffee also grows naturally.

Today, wild Arabica’s greatest threat is climate change. Highly sensitive, it can only survive within a narrow band of conditions. Aaron Davis, a senior research leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the world’s foremost authority of coffee and climate change, has forecasted that the places where wild coffee can grow will decrease by 65 percent by 2080. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case showed a 99.7 percent reduction, with wild Arabica tree populations dropping by 40 to 99 percent.

With the gathered coffee loaded into canvas sacks and balanced on their heads, the foragers walk back out of the forest, stepping through a bramble of twigs and under branches until they find a thin trail—marked in places by fresh buffalo tracks and baboon scat filled with pale coffee beans—that will lead them back to their hamlet.

Coffee is seemingly everywhere. Along with banana-like enset and staples such as potatoes and beans, most of the conical, wattle-and-daub huts have several coffee trees, often uprooted as saplings from the forest floor. Most homes have a rudimentary raised bamboo bed for drying their own coffee. The foragers place their newly picked fruits on these in a single layer. It takes a week or two for them to dry into leathery brown pods. (Each contains a pair of oval beans.) While some gets sold at market, much is kept to brew at home.

Coffee in Ethiopia is drunk seemingly all the time, nowhere more so than around Kafa’s coffee forests. Kids begin to sip it when they start walking and talking, and adults drink numerous cups a day. Locals also cook the fresh coffee fruits in butter, crunch on roasted beans like corn nuts, and prepare infusions with coffee leaves. Coffee-related activities are the livelihood for about one-quarter of Ethiopia’s population. In Kafa’s highland coffee forests, that number is nearly 100 percent.

Despite Ethiopia’s coffee heritage, its brews have only recently gained the recognition they deserve. Ethiopian coffees are now internationally celebrated for their bright fruity and floral flavors, from the juicy blueberries of a Guji to the lemony and jasmine flavors of a Yirgacheffe, and a handful of high-end roasters have begun to offer sublime wild-forest coffee. The German developmental agency GIZ works with nearly 60 cooperatives, including the Kafa Forest Coffee Cooperatives’ Union, while Union Hand-Roasted Coffee, in East London, partnered with Aaron Davis and Kew Gardens to offer Yayu forest coffee. These projects aim to increase Ethiopian farmers’ earnings while protecting coffee forests and giving more people a taste of these unique coffees. Brewing Union’s freshly-ground Yayu forest coffee with a Chemex or V60 filter is to sample hints of citruses, plums, and chocolates.

A cup of true wild coffee drunk on the edge of the forest, though, is different. It usually has more uneven flavors—a result of the fruits’ varying ripeness and the manner of drying.

Brewed in a bulbous, terracotta jebena coffeepot over coals and drunk from tiny, handleless cups, it combines notes of citrus and stone fruits from drying naturally in the pod, but also at times a fermented winey-ness from overripe fruits and grassy astringency from immature ones. There is something of the dusty, mossy aromas of the woodland that clings to it, too. It tastes—thrillingly—of the forest where it grows.

Kabbalah mystics lie beneath.

At a graveyard in northern Israel, pilgrims seek to spiritually ascend with the help of Jewish mystic holy men buried beneath bright blue graves.

The cemetery is in Safed, which spent 500 years as a small Galilean settlement before becoming the world capital of Kabbalah, the best-known form of Jewish mysticism, during the 16th century. Thousands of graves and burial caves are carved in the rock. Some of the graves, painted blue, belong to the holy men, tzadikim. According to Jewish faith, a tzadik has no yetzer hara—evil inclination—and he inspires this miraculous virtue in those praying at this grave.

Every year hundreds of thousands of people visit the cemetery from Israel and abroad: pilgrims, secular tourists, the Kabbalah-curious, and once, controversially, Madonna. Most of them come to pay homage to two graves: those of Rabbi Isaac Luria (HaAri, “The Lion”), one of the most revered figures in the Kabbalistic world, and Rabbi Joseph Karo (author of the Shulchan Aruch).

Now, due to the coronavirus pandemic, visitors have deserted the cemetery, leaving a lone archaeologist, Yossi Stepansky, to wander around and converse with the dead.

“I’m in the middle of a fascinating but somewhat morbid project: GPS-mapping more than 120 Hebrew epitaphs from the 15th-17th centuries,” says Stepansky. “It’s weird, spending time among the 40 thousand ancient graves, being by myself with no one around but the ‘Sleepers.’” The inhabitants of the cemetery are known as sleepers due to a Safed belief that their city will be “the first to be resurrected by the Messiah, who will first appear in the upper Galilee.” This contradicts traditional Jewish belief that resurrection will begin on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

With no money available to renovate it, the cemetery has been neglected for years. No one knew the number of the graves, and the records went missing decades ago. In the early 1990s the Safed municipality decided to renovate it by cleaning old graves and roads, building a staircase, and painting selected gravestones blue. When the excavations began, they were in for a shock: Under the paths leading to the famous graves were thousands of other graves, buried under the dirt because of the rains and the sediment flowing down the mountainside.

Aside from the visitors, two locals frequent the cemetery almost every day: Stepansky and David Appenzer, who represents the town’s religious authorities and is in charge of the cemetery’s renovation. They are acquaintances, scions of old Safed families. While Appenzer sees the cemetery as a territory beholden to Jewish law, Stepansky sees it as a world-class, rare open museum under threat of extinction from neglect. According to him, the old Safed cemetery holds “Israel’s largest collection of ancient Hebrew inscriptions, which is also one of largest worldwide.”

In an interview with Jewish TV network Hidabroot a few years ago, Appenzer described the moment of discovering an ancient gravestone as one of “almost indescribable excitement. Out of the tens of thousands of gravestones we uncovered, less than 150 can be identified,” he said. “Most of them are made of limestone and their inscriptions have eroded over the years. That’s why, when you find a gravestone with an inscription, your heart leaps when you see the first letter.”

According to Israeli law, the cemetery is considered an antiquity site, but due to its religious significance it is managed by the Safed Cemetery Foundation. Stepansky fears the repercussions: The hundreds of uncovered gravestones used to be protected in their earthly “tomb,” but are now exposed to weather damage. He wants to document all the gravestones before they crumble away.

So far, only partial archaeological surveys have been conducted in it, documenting about 30 gravestones. “All the inscriptions need to be photographed and sketched, because sketching captures more details than a camera,” says Stepansky. “Afterwards, we send the findings for a paleographic opinion.” No hand-drawn sketch of the inscriptions at the cemetery has been done so far.

In the 1990s some of the gravestones were painted azure, the signature color of Kabbalistic Safed. It looks striking, but affects the preservation process. “My problem is not with the azure, but with the paint,” Stepansky says. “Small details might be erased and become indecipherable during the painting.” Nevertheless, he believes that Appenzer is trying to be as careful as possible under the existing restrictions.

One of the fascinating graves uncovered belongs to Joshua Ibn Nun, a physician who managed to smuggle the writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria and so bring to the world the works of Kabbalah.

After Luria’s death, his most well-known disciple, Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, embarked upon a lifelong mission: Writing down the sermons he and his friends heard from Luria. In 1575, three years after Luria’s death, Vital and the other disciples signed a letter of commitment: “we will not reveal to our fellow men any of the secrets we heard from [Luria] … and we will not be able to reveal it without [Vital’s] permission.”

“According to historical sources of the early 17th century, it was Bin Nun who was first to disseminate the Kabbalistic ‘Lurianic’ writings of Rabbi Vital after bribing Vital's brother into sneaking a large part them out of Vital's house,” explains Stepansky. “He had them copied, and distributed to scholars who had been anxiously awaiting them for years.”

Until local COVID-19 restrictions are completely lifted, Stepansky strolls among the “sleepers” with his GPS and encounters a phenomenon he cannot explain. “In the Kabbalists’ plot, where Rabbi Luria’s grave is, the measurement failed completely, and I have to map it manually. The surveyor who came with me couldn’t explain it. It seems like the satellites are refusing to pinpoint the grave’s coordinates, or that the dead are the ones objecting.”