Coal Comforts.

A “Coal Comforts” cupcake by Spencer Merolla (courtesy the artist).

Spencer Merolla is doing some great work, this time around, having a pop up bakery which has decidedly non-edible goodies, as they are made from ash. Just a bit here, the article is in-depth, with many links well worth following.

As the banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal continue to be developed, the legacy of pollution in its waters can be an uncomfortable narrative alongside gentrification. In conjunction with Gowanus Open Studios on October 21 and 22, artist Spencer Merolla is creating a pop-up bakery offering cupcakes, cookies, and other treats, all molded from coal ash. The inedible delicacies served from a mobile cart are meant to encourage conversation about the environment and climate change, especially on a weekend when many non-locals will be roaming the neighborhood.

“Gowanus is kind of a cautionary tale in terms of environmental degradation,” Merolla told Hyperallergic. “I love the work that is being done to clean up the canal and green the watershed, and it’s very exciting to think we can repair some of the damage we’ve inherited and be better stewards of this place in the future. But there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, here or anywhere. We have to do a better job of preventing these kinds of catastrophes in the first place. Because they are happening right now, all over.”

…Merolla’s work with molding ash emerged around that time, with a piece called “Ashes in Our Mouth (Baloney Sandwich Series)” that suggested the bad taste many were left with after Trump’s election, as well as his support for the coal industry over cleaner energy.

“I’d wanted to work with ash for some time, given its association with grief, but it was the presidential election of last year that turned me toward coal ash specifically,” she stated. “Trump’s campaign relied so heavily on nostalgia in general and for the coal industry in particular, and it got me thinking about the many ways in which that nostalgia is toxic. It persuades people that because something is old-fashioned and familiar, it’s also benign.”

[…]

It’s worth noting that among the developers of Gowanus is the Jared Kushner-led Kushner Companies. The Gowanus Canal was designated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Site in 2010, thanks to its toxic cocktail of arsenic, radioactive material, and other pollutants. Lining the canal’s bottom is “black mayonnaise,” a concoction of coal tar, heavy metals, and other sludge from decades of industrial run-off. With rising tides of climate change, it remains vulnerable to flooding, even now pouring raw sewage into the streets in heavy rains.

During Gowanus Open Studios, Merolla plans to set up the “Coal Comforts” bakery cart outside the Gowanus Souvenir Shop at 567 Union Street. The tagline of the bakery is: “Can’t have your cake and eat it too.” By shaping the coal ash into food-like forms, Merolla references how much of the world’s population consumes poisonous air due to coal pollution, and the impossible balance between continuing the industry as it is and improving human life.

As she said, “The connection between food justice and environmental justice is only going to become clearer in the future — you can’t have one without the other.”

You can see and read much more at Hyperallergic, and you can watch a video by Ms. Merolla at the Kickstarter page for this show.

Frank Buttolph’s Menu Obsession.

Photo of Frank E. Buttolph, c. 1917–21 New York Public Library.

Frank Buttolph collected menus. A lot of menus.

…Buttolph’s commitment to collecting menus came, she said, from her desire to preserve early 1900s culinary history for future scholars. Confirming this, The New York Times once wrote that “she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything.”

She was a meticulous collector—not only in transcribing, dating, and organizing her menus with a detailed card catalog, but also about how they should be stored. When the director of the Astor Library tried to rubber-band menus together, she pushed back out of worry that it would leave marks.

Click for full size.

Oh gods. Now I want proper mac ‘n’ cheese, and peach fritters.

Atlas Obscura has a delightful article about Ms. Buttolph and her quest to preserve dining habits, and you can see pages and pages and pages and of her collection here. Gad, what a time sink! There’s an Astor menu printed on linen! The menus are not limited to the U.S. The artwork on many of them is fascinating, especially those for dinners being held by individuals. The Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen-Amerika has a menu with gorgeous artwork, and the menu itself is handwritten.

It’s All About The Pizza, Ayyyy!

Palermo’s Pizza.

“What part of Donald Trump is not elite? The business side, the politics side, the inheritance side?” BBC reporter Emily Maitlis asked.

“Oh my god, there’s so many things about the president. How about the cheeseburgers, how about the pizzas that we eat?” Scaramucci replied.

“Everyone eats cheeseburgers, pizzas, what are you talking about?” the reporter fired back.

I’m with the reporter. A love of certain foods does not make an everyman.

Scaramucci then accused Maitlis of “coming across a little elitist” and said he grew up in a middle-class family with a “tight budget” and “little to no money.”

He said Trump understands the “common struggle” even better than he does.

“He knows how to operate in the elitist world and has unbelievable empathy for the common struggle that’s going on with the middle-class people and the lower middle-class people,” he said.

Oh sure, he understands the “common people”. Having daddy hand you a million bucks in seed money, that’s a very typical thing, happens to most commoners, right? Oh, and the language! “Common struggle”, pretty sure that’s shortspeak for commoners, because Tiny Tyrant fancies himself royalty. As for empathy? Oh, please. Pull the other one, it has bells on. It is totally unbelievable that Trump has any empathy at all. I would love to see someone point Trump at a typical lower middle class house, and tell him he had to take all his vacations in it, rather than his mansion in Florida, for a month. He wouldn’t be able to do it. Although you probably could park him in a Pizza Hut for a day, if the pizza was free.

Via The Hill. (Video at the link.)

Still Diets.

Photographer Dan Bannino is doing very interesting still lifes, all based on the known diets of famous peoples, past and present. They are all gorgeous, and well worth looking at, and in some cases pondering. At my age, I could do worse than paying more attention to Alvise Cornaro.

Usain Bolt’s ‘Chicken McNuggets Diet’, Dan Bannino.

You can see and read more at The Creators Project, or just head over to Dan Bannino’s website, where you can see all of Still Diets, and Still Diets II.

The Birth of Milk Bones.

Spratt’s ad, c. 1876 Public Domain.

The first dog biscuits did not resemble the bone-shaped delights of today. Developed by James Spratt in 1860, these so-called Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes were woefully square.

Spratt, an American electrician, came up with the idea for a dog biscuit after he witnessed sailors dropping hardtack—an unleavened bread—for the local dogs. He decided he could do the same—and monetize it. His flagship company, Spratt’s, was founded soon after. Their lead product, the Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes, were developed from a combination of wheat, beetroot, vegetables, and prairie meat. (The particular kind of meat in Spratt’s formula was apparently highly confidential; until his death, Spratt “kept in his hands the contract for his meat supplier.”)

At the time, the concept of a food specifically for dogs was alien. According to Katherine C. Grier, author of Pets in America, “until well into the 20th century, most household dogs lived off scraps from the kitchen, often cooked with a starch into something that people called ‘dog stew.’” But by the late 1800s, Spratt’s had shuttled dog biscuits into the mainstream—especially for dog show contestants. In 1895, the New York Times labeled Spratt’s a “principal food” of dog shows.

Spratt’s success soon spawned competition.

Over a decade later, in 1907, organic chemist Carleton Ellis received an urgent request. The owner of a local slaughterhouse was having problems with all of his excess “waste milk,” and he wanted Ellis to help him find a use for it. Ellis would eventually accrue over 753 inventions to his name and would serve as the force behind the creation of margarine, polyester, paint and varnish remover, and anti-knock gasoline. If he found the milk request odd, he did not show it. He agreed to help.

Likely inspired by Spratt’s, Ellis decided to turn the waste into food for his dog. After some experimentation, Ellis mixed the excess milk with malt, grain, and other products to form a dog biscuit—baked into what he assumed would be an appealing, rounded shape.

But when he tested the biscuits, his dog refused to eat them.

Ellis was frustrated. Clearly, the biscuit should have tasted great to a dog. He was a MIT graduate; he knew perhaps more than anyone at the time about the compounds in petroleums, oils, and varnishes. He had authored such dense, technical manuals as Hydrogenation of Oils Catalyze and The Chemical Action of Ultraviolet Rays for biscuit’s sake! Developing a treat that a dog would eat should not have provided this much of a challenge.

So he decided to do something strange: he changed the design of the biscuit rather than the ingredients. “I had some more biscuits baked from the same stock, but in the shape of a bone,” he told Popular Science in 1937, “and I found that my dog manifested a tremendous interest in the bone-shaped biscuit.”

You can read more about the origin of milk bones here. Oddly enough, I’ve always ended up with dogs who have never been terribly interested in Milk Bones.

Delicious Nudes.

Rather than fixating on the clothing or obsessing over the figure, the French fashion photographer Marwane Pallas places a special emphasis on the external objects within the frame. Props within the scene that would normally serve a supporting role are given equivalent degrees of attention to the standard “centerpieces” of the fashion photos.

You can see much more of Marwane Pallas’s work, and read more at The Creators Project, Marwane Pallas’s website, or instagram.

Religious Shroomin’ and Snorting Chocolate.

Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy.

Researchers are once again feeding shrooms of the magic kind to religious leaders, well, some of them anyway. I noticed a glaring absence of a representative of the Religious Reich. I have no idea why this is being done, it’s already been done, back in the psychedelic ’60s. Pretty much the same response of anyone who has their first experience with shrooms: “Cool, man, cool.” Of course, it if persuades any of the religious to mellow the fuck out, it’s all good. Shrooms have always had a mild effect on me, but it’s one of the sweetest rushes on the planet. We’d all probably be happier naked apes more likely to put energies into play rather than war, if we were all allowed a pocketful of shrooms. I wouldn’t mind a pocketful of shrooms.

The Guardian has the full story.

On the naked apes behaving stupidly department, we have a new thing, snorting cacao.

Now meet Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz. The product, created by Orlando-based company Legal Lean, includes cacao powder, as well as gingko biloba, taurine and guarana, which are commonly found in energy drinks.

Nick Anderson, the 29-year-old founder of Legal Lean, says he heard about a “chocolate-snorting trend” in Europe a few months ago. He ordered a sample and gave it a try.

“At first, I was like, ‘Is this a hoax?,’” he recalled. “And then I tried it and it was like, okay, this is the future right here.”

Yeah, okay, whatever. All I thought when I first saw this was “fuck, that sounds messy.” Might give brown nose a whole new meaning. My second thought was “I wonder how many people are gonna die.” True chocolate allergies are rare, and most all of them involve raw cacao. Those allergies are most often anaphylactic in nature, also. I think everyone would be better off with a light menu of shrooms.

The Washington Post has the story.