Food+City Magazine, Issue II

Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

When the last food mile is the middle of nowhere.

Really. page 20 Behind the scenes of Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. page 30 How Rio fed its residents, visitors and Olympians during the 2016 Games. page 40 ISSUE II

IS S UE II

$18.00

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

LABELOLOGY Your fruit and vegetables come with a surprising amount of information about their history and origins. Each sticker has a code printed on it along with the grower’s name and logo.

These codes are called PLUs, or Price Lookup Numbers (why isn’t the acronym PLN, then?) so the store can find out the unit cost for each item. If a number consists of four digits, the item is conventionally grown; if the number consists of five digits and begins with an 8, the item is genetically modified. And if the five digits begin with a 9, you’re buying organic produce.

Some producers are going the extra step and adding QR codes that take you to a producer’s website where you can find all kinds of information, including the names of the producer’s pet sheep. In the future, be prepared for even more transparency—labels may disappear as scanners and digital “ink” become cost effective. Perhaps the store shelf will notice which fruit you put in your basket and send accompanying data to your cell phone.

These paper stickers will be the old papyrus scroll for food storytelling.

(Did you know you can eat the labels? All the materials in the paper, ink and glue are food grade. C’mon, we dare you...) ILLUSTRATION BY ROBYN METCALFE

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Food+City publisher Robyn Metcalfe has been an editor and writer at Sunset Magazine, a heritage pig farmer and a food historian. You can find her @foodmiracle on Twitter because she thinks food is a miracle.

A NEW CONVERSATION

P U B L I S H E R, EXECUTIVE E D I TO R

Robyn Metcalfe

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Cory Leahy

DESIGN

Julie Savasky, Pentagram, Austin

While not using camels or donkeys, the Brazilians managed to feed the Olympic Village and their own sprawling city at the 2016 Olympic Games. Many thought the logistics would fail, but surprisingly, everyone got fed—some even by world-famous chefs.

And new in this issue is a look at who’s working on the problems inside the food supply chain.

Sorin Grama’s story shows us how his startup learned to operate in remote villages in India.

His team eventually succeeded in solving what may seem to be an unsexy problem with some sexy technology.

Most food-related magazines include recipes—and ours does too. Just not in the way you expect. We seek out recipes that can reveal how food supply chains operate in different eras, in random, far-away places. Like England, during the Middle Ages. Ken Albala’s insights into the “first cookbook,” from the court of Richard II, will fascinate you.

We love to share what we’ve found interesting since our last issue, but we also want to know what you think about our magazine. Do you have a favorite story? Do you want to know more about a story in this issue? What would you like to read about in the future? So that we can deliver the best possible issues to you, we need your feedback. Share your thoughts on Twitter @foodcityorg or show us your #lastfoodmile on Instagram @foodcityorg. Or email me at robyn@ foodandcity.org. And, you can subscribe at​ foodandcity.org/printedition.

G E T I N TO U CH

To inquire about writing for or advertising with Food+City, send an email to info@foodand city.org.

On Twitter and Instagram, we are @foodcityorg.

Food+City magazine is published by Foodmakers, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.

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Food+City magazine publishes stories, blog posts, photo galleries and videos at foodandcity.org.

Follow us at @foodcityorg on Twitter and Instagram and at facebook.com/ foodcityorg for the latest news about how the food system works, from farms of all sizes to tables of all sizes.

Thanks to Jennifer Heitler, Cath Polito, Joan Phaup and Richard Alleger.

Printed in the USA

by CPY, Houston.

METCALFE PHOTO BY DENNIS BURNETT; GETZ ICE SHELF IMAGE NASA / DICK EWERS

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ou’re holding our second issue, and we hope you’ll join our conversation that shines a light on the food supply chain and accompanying logistics. Our first issue included stories about the new lock in the Panama Canal, the erratic path that gelato ingredients take in Rome and the global, humble story of how bananas arrive in New York bodegas.

Our stories followed the footprints of food all over the map and will continue to do so as we find the connections between how our food is produced and how it arrives on our plates. As we have said in the past, we are interested in the “to” in farm to table.

When new conversations begin, they rely on a common vocabulary, one that is durable and easily digested. Talking about c​ u​stody and i​ ntermodal transport won’t help us get to the heart of the matter: how, exactly, food gets to us. Since this is just the beginning of our tour-de-food logistics, we’ll make no assumptions and share our curiosity and discovery as we unveil the invisible food supply chain. We’ll continue to offer insights, reveal paradoxes and examine how the machinery of distribution works. And together we’ll see where and how the food supply chain and logistics can be improved.

In this issue, we’ll show you who is driving your food around in big 53-foot trailers attached to sleek trucks. Moving from 18 wheels to no wheels, we’ll show you how animals still transport food around the globe and how animal logistics may not ever go away entirely. Ari LeVaux will tell you how food gets to the most remote plates, those whose logistics are unimaginably complex, like in Antarctica, on space ships and on aircraft carriers.

MANAGING E D I TO R

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I S S U E I I D E PA R TM E N T S

2 FROM THE PUBLISHER Robyn Metcalfe starts a fresh food chain conversation, inviting readers to look underneath the often-invisible food system.

10 H I S TO R Y L E S S O N As we’ve moved farther from the farm, transparency about the food system becomes more important. To better understand a largely invisible system, we need an introduction to food logistics—starting with Alexander the Great.

12 BEASTS OF BURDEN While they may seem like historical relics, draft animals are still used worldwide to move agricultural products from fields to markets. Check out our gallery.

14 BEHIND THE WHEEL The image of a truck driver probably evokes a burly guy in a gimme cap. But a small number of women share the driving load: Meet Annette Womack.

54 RECIPE TRACKER Cookbooks are products of their time, reflecting flavor trends and the availability of ingredients. In “The Forme of Cury,” we get a taste of medieval England.

58 S TA R T U P S P OT L IG H T We catch up with three of the 2016 Food+City Challenge Prize Silver winners to hear about their progress.

60 ON OUR LOA D I N G D O C K Brain Food: What we’re reading, watching and listening to right now.

PHOTO BY SCOTT WIENER

63 SMART CITY I N N O VAT I O N Take a peek into the future through the eyes of food futurists and illustrator Josh Cochran.

Drones, rooftop gardens and smart kitchens abound.

16 THE SECRET EVOLUTION OF THE PIZZA BOX More than just a simple package for a steaming hot meal, the pizza box is to some a blank canvas—for food artistry and technological innovation. Join world-record-holder Scott Wiener on a journey into the history of the pizza box.

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COVER: A wholesaler carries frozen tuna at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo in 2008. The market faced a possible move to a new site in 2016, but it has been delayed indefinitely due to environmental concerns. (PHOTO BY KOICHI KAMOSHIDA/ GETTY IMAGES)

THIS PAG E : From simple sketches of the pie inside to painterly depictions of idyllic Italy, art on pizza boxes is as varied as pizza itself. This box is from Kazakhstan.

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CONTRIBUTORS

JOSH COCHRAN @joshcochran

SORIN GRAMA @sorino99

JOHN JUDGE @John_Judge

SONIA MASSARI @soniamassari77

JULIE SAVASKY @juliehsavasky

SCOTT WIENER @ScottsPizzaTour

Josh Cochran​grew up in Taiwan and California. He works as an illustrator based in Brooklyn specializing in bright, dense and conceptual drawings. In 2013, his work on Ben Kweller’s “Go Fly A Kite” received a Grammy nomination for Best Limited Edition Packaging.

He has a number of side projects including murals and installations.

Josh currently has a children’s picture book published by Candlewick, “Inside Out: New York.”

Sorin Grama​is an entrepreneur-inresidence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship.

He co-founded and served as CEO/ CTO of Promethean Power Systems, a manufacturer of thermal energy storage systems for refrigeration and cold-storage applications. Sorin was the principal inventor of Promethean’s thermal battery, an energy storage device that provides effective backup in areas with unpredictable grid power.

He is originally from Romania.

John Judge is president and chief executive officer of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), America’s oldest outdoor recreation and conservation organization. He formerly served as executive director of Habitat for Humanity Greater Boston and chief economic development and planning officer for the City of Springfield.

Sonia Massari holds a Ph.D. in Food Systems and Interaction Design.

She is the Academic Director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Food Studies programs and Director at Gustolab International Institute for Food Systems and Sustainability Studies in Rome.

Senior Scientific Consultant at Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation, she teaches at Scuola Politecnica di Design Milan and ISIA Design School Rome.

An associate partner in Pentagram’s Austin office, Julie has spent the last 21 years there figuring out her favorite types of design projects. Topping the list are books, magazines and identity, especially for anything food related. When she’s not working you’ll find her with family and probably eating chocolate.

Scott Wiener​is the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours, a food education company based in New York City, and Slice Out Hunger, a nonprofit focused on funding hunger relief programs through pizza-themed events.

“Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box” (Melville House) documents Wiener’s Guinness World Record collection of pizza boxes, an assemblage of more than 1,300 pieces from 70 different countries.

XAQ FROHLICH @ComedoErgoSum Xaq Frohlich​is a 2016–2017 Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is writing his book, “Accounting for Taste,” on the history of food labels. He holds a Ph.D. in Science Technology and Society from MIT, and his research focuses on risk communication, food as a liminal object that bridges environment and human health, and socially responsible consumption.

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CORY LEAHY @cocalea Cory Leahy—editor, writer, runner, enthusiastic cook and veggie-leaning omnivore—has spent 20 years as an editor of books, magazines and websites. She recently stepped out of familiar labels and into unknown territory to reimagine a next chapter that’s all about food.

Food + City Magazine

Magalí Zaslabsky​ is a photographer and student of journalism who has worked on projects in Europe, East Asia and North America.

She currently lives in Texas and maintains a portfolio at MZV Photography on Facebook.

JEANNETTE VAUGHT @jeannettevaught

ARI LEVAUX @arilevaux Ari LeVaux​writes Flash in the Pan, a weekly syndicated food column that appears nationally in newspapers. His work has appeared in Outside Magazine, Slate and elsewhere.

He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

MAGALÍ ZASLABSKY facebook.com/ mzvph

FABIANA PIRES @fabianapires Fabiana Pires​is a journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil.

For the past few years she has written about business and economics for national newspapers and magazines. Right now, she is focused on entrepreneurship and the startup scene in the country for Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios Magazine.

She wasn’t in Brazil during the Olympic Games but followed the Brazilian teams closely and was very happy to see the soccer team earn the gold medal for the first time.

Jeannette Vaught​ is an Austin-based American Studies Ph.D. with a veterinary background who writes about animals, agriculture and science. She is currently teaching American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and working on ​Locust for Reaktion Books’ Animal Series, when not lavishing carrots upon her aged horse or being summarily disapproved of by her fabulous diva of a greyhound.

LAURIE ZAPALAC @lauriezapalac1 Laurie Zapalac​ is the founder of Zapalac Advisors, a Boston-based urban planning firm providing research and strategic planning for urban revitalization and enhancement.

Laurie is passionate about understanding how and why digital technology is making historic urban environments newly attractive as places to live, work and play. When not traveling farther afield, you can find her trekking the New England coastline and enjoying local bakeries.

LEXICON Defining words that matter in the logistics industry.

ON THE W E B Teases to additional content at foodandcity.org and elsewhere.

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I S S U E I I F E AT U R E S

20 Feeding Remote Places

From the bottom of the earth to outer space, some destinations test the food supply chain more than others. Food writer Ari LeVaux explores the complexities of provisioning far-flung human habitats and finds that in some cases waste is a key ingredient rather than a useless byproduct.

30 Tsukiji on the Verge of Change

The venerable fish market known for its chaotic auctions and flapping-fresh products is facing a move to a controversial new location. Xaq Frohlich examines Tsukiji’s back story and looks into its future as it prepares for some needed upgrades and braces for the inevitable fallout of change.

40 Rio’s Recipe for the Olympic Games

While many agree that the Rio Olympics fared better than the dire predictions, the reality for restaurateurs, farmers and concession managers was rough. Brazilian journalist Fabiana Pires takes us to Rio before and after the 2016 Summer Olympics to get the real story of the “Taste of the Games.”

48 How a Little Startup Fixes a Big Food Chain Gap

In rural India, where dairies may have only one or two cows and the power grid is spotty at best, improving the supply chain from producers to distributors requires fresh thinking and a surprisingly simple solution. Entrepreneur Sorin Grama shares his story.

NASA/DICK EWERS

The Getz Ice Shelf extends several miles into the ocean from the Getz glacier as it empties into the ocean along the Antarctic coast. The vertical face of the ice shelf is almost 200 feet high and is estimated to extend another 1,000 feet below the ocean surface. This photo was taken during a flight on Nov. 5, 2010.

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HISTORY LESSON

THE EARLY YEARS OF LOGISTICS We increasingly want more information about our food. We want to see, at least once, the faces of those who bring food from fields to plates. The farther we’ve gotten from the farm, the more important transparency has become. To better understand a system that is largely invisible, we need an introduction to food logistics. History is a good place to begin.

Ever find yourself behind a double-parked truck?

Most likely, it’s delivering food. Trucks covered with images of pizza or a cornucopia of vegetables make their way into the hearts of cities around the world daily, and we hardly take note —except when they block our way to work. But truckers aren’t the only ones who dispatch our daily food supply. Container ships, cargo planes, bicyclists, camels and trains all conjoin in one complex global supply chain.

Although the tracks of our food as it travels today are well hidden, the flow of the food supply chain has existed for millennia. Pack animals and olive-oil-bearing clay amphorae​delivered food from source to consumption before the birth of Jesus. But ​logistics​, the complex systems that optimize the flow of food, originated with Alexander the Great.

“The Elements of the Science of War” appeared in 1811, written by an engineer named Wilhelm Muller. He wrote about military campaigns going back to 1667, citing the importance of balancing troop movements with the need for “victuals” and forage.

While today we move food to cities on various forms of wheeled and non-wheeled transport networks, our networks run on fossil fuel, not forage. Early logisticians were faced with the vagaries of growing seasons, changeable weather and the limited availability of enough forage to keep their equine and elephantine transport on their feet and moving. While we struggle to keep food cold and extend shelf life, those early logisticians had much more to contend with.

Like no roads.

EARLY HIGHWAYS

FORAGE AS FUEL

On this amphora, you see Dionysus, the Greek god of the grape harvest and winemaking, drinking wine while satyrs make wine, illustrating the journey from vine to cup.

VICTUALS Food or provisions, typically as prepared for consumption

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The concept of logistics appeared far earlier than the word. The word first appeared in the late 19th century to mean the art of moving and maneuvering armies, including their supplies and food. The first logisticians—working long before the 1800s—had to consider the seasonality of fodder, food for transport animals, the lack of roads for wheeled transport and the scarcity of ports, storage facilities, depots and communication networks.

During the fourth century BC, the Greek king Alexander the Great assembled an empire that stretched from Asia to Africa. His success was largely due to his understanding of logistics, the strategic movement of men and weapons that factored in harvest calendars, geography and the need for single points of control.

Other military commanders improved on Alexander’s strategies for moving food and​ materiel​. For them, having seamless logistics was a combat strategy. When Hannibal Barca, a Punic commander from Carthage, crossed the Alps in 218 BC, more than 30 elephants joined his army. The imminent snowfall would slow their progress and make it impossible to reach their enemies in Italy. The logistics of moving his army and the food to feed his troops was complicated enough. But the challenge of feeding the animals that transported the food proved impossible.

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Roman roads are mentioned in nearly every tourist guidebook. The Romans developed complex procurement and distribution of food supplies, mostly because the republic and then the empire did not produce enough food locally to feed its growing urban populations. While the Assyrians and Greeks knew how to feed their soldiers, it wasn’t until the Romans developed a complex system of roads, taxation and administration that the idea of optimizing the movement of food took shape. Roman roads and bridges show us how they distributed food across the empire.

Centuries later, when Napoleon led his Grand Armée to conquer Russia in 1812, he drew upon Greek and Roman logistics to enable his troops to stay in the field longer, sustained by a ready supply of food while destroying the supplies of their enemies. But his march on Stalingrad wasn’t so successful. The Cossacks in his path resorted to destroying food supplies along the way. Napoleon’s rations and forage for his animals were soon depleted as the Russian winter closed in. In the end, Napoleon lost almost 400,000 troops. His defeat precipitated his fall from power and the unraveling of the Napoleonic Empire.

Logistics proved to be his nemesis.

THE SCIENCE OF LOGISTICS

As the Industrial Revolution mechanized much of civilian society, Frederick Winslow Taylor

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WIKICOMMONS

Read notes from Robyn’s book research on medium.com/food-city.

introduced the concept of the scientific management of ​process manufacturing​. He promoted practices that optimized the workflow while eliminating waste. These included standardizing parts and practices as well as carefully measuring and maximizing the use of time and labor. Taylorism, as his theory was called, led to further developments that looked at how to produce and move products from factory to consumer.

Food production was one of many processes that became Taylorized.

The food supply chain differs from other supply chains in its requirement for careful temperature control. The development of ice manufacturing and refrigeration led to the development of what is now called the cold chain. Entrepreneurs such as Augustus Swift revolutionized the meat supply chain, utilizing refrigerated rail cars and vertically integrating​ all aspects of meat production.

Railroads began to move food across long distances beginning in the mid-19th century.

Shipping containers, developed by Malcom

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McLean during the 1950s and 1960s, transformed how food moved on ships, trucks and railroads. The integration of these transport networks eventually became our international, intermodal food distribution network.

When computers arrived during the early 1950s and 1960s, the idea of logical workflows got an extra push through the acceleration of data processing. The development of computerbased forecasting systems and materials requirements planning came next. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that s​ upply chain management​ became a thing, leading to the emergence of supply chain departments and centers in academic institutions. And now, food logistics has its own professional organizations, conferences and publications.

Look for this historical narrative to go into hyperdrive as railroads, computers, tracking devices, drones and robots bring new speed, safety and personalization to our daily meal.

ROBYN METCALFE

Henri-Paul Motte painted Hannibal’s epic crossing of the Alps in “Passage du Rhône par l’armée d’Annibal” (1878). No one knows how the elephants crossed the river, but they played a key role in Hannibal’s logistics.

PROCESS MANUFACTURING The production of goods typically produced in bulk quantities—as opposed to discrete and countable units—including chemicals, food and beverages, gasoline, paint and pharmaceuticals.

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#1: In the lowest point in Africa—the Danakil Depression, which covers parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti—salt extractors travel in camel caravans for days over perilous territory where temperatures are fierce and water is scarce. (PHOTO

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SIEGFRIED MODOLA / REUTERS)

#2: Camels at the Birqash Camel Market outside Cairo, Egypt. Camels arrive on foot from the Sudan, live meat on the hoof. Thousands of camels head to market to be auctioned. Colorful markings indicate important market information—a kind of bar code for dromedaries. #3: In China’s Gobi desert, carts pulled by donkeys carry every sort of food imaginable, from fresh meat to wheat and other grasses. Crops are harvested by hand reaping; this woman is hustling off the morning’s wheat in the cool shadows of an olive grove. #4, #5: The livestock market outside Kashgar, China, sits on the ancient Silk Road. Donkeys and mules are bought and sold to transport other animals purchased for meat. The sure-footed animals can deliver food where no trucks or cars can pass. Gradually, gas-powered vehicles are replacing the donkeys, able to take dozens of animals at one time from the market to local slaughterhouses. (PHOTOS #2, 3, 4, 5 ROBYN METCALFE)

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3 FOOD MOVERS

BEASTS OF BURDEN In the United States, we are accustomed to thinking of draft animals as relics of the pre-combustion engine past or, at historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg, as nostalgic attractions. But draft animals remain ubiquitous in other parts of the world as central participants in food economies, both as food products themselves and as power to move agricultural products from fields to markets.

In areas of the world where roads accommodate hooves better than wheels and the expertise to maintain and repair motorized vehicles is scarce, pack animals are the most economically efficient tool to move food products to the market to maximize profits for producers. Some draft animals are likely to be used as food once their ability to provide labor diminishes, thus filling in multiple links in the chain of food production, distribution and consumption.

This trend is relatively recent in some parts of the world. Animal power was introduced into subsistence agricultural systems across sub-Saharan Africa in just the last 100 years and facilitated a transition to commercial agriculture. In West Africa, for example, a 2005 regional report by agricultural scientists encouraged farm owners to incorporate more livestock power, or “animal traction,� into their farming practices to offset growing wage costs for human farm labor.

Some parts of the world that primarily use draft animals for food transport are the same places that record the oldest evidence of livestock domestication. The American Museum of Natural History reports that cattle and equids were domesticated for draft use between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago in what is now Central Asia, Pakistan and the Middle East. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, traditional draft livestock systems in these regions now exist in parallel with a growing turn to industrial farming in today’s globalized economy.

The transition to industrial farming in the early 20th century in the U.S. and Europe replaced animal traction with tractors. But today, in regions that continue to use animal labor, the same transition may merit further consideration due to the role fossil fuels play in climate change. While this shift in attitude may stall transition from animal to engine in some parts of the world, the transition from animal to machine labor could still happen, but the machines may run on different fuels.

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Read more about Annette and her “sister” drivers at WomeninTrucking.org/MOM-Annette-Womack.

FOOD MOVER

PHOTO BY MARY C. GARDELLA

BEHIND THE WHEEL Annette Womack gets to work at 7 a.m. and clocks in at the Giant Food distribution center in Jessup, Maryland. Thanks to her seniority with the company—she’s worked for Giant Food for 21 years—she’s got first pick of the daily delivery routes. She chooses a long round trip to Virginia, her home state, and heads out to check her rig.

Womack is one of the people behind the scenes of the nation’s food supply chain. Without her and all the folks driving those ubiquitous 18-wheelers moving food from farm to distribution center to store, grocery shelves would be depleted within a couple of days.

Womack is a petite blonde, with a snappy southern twang and a sweet-as-pie disposition. When she first started driving 30 years ago, her tractor (the cab part of a tractortrailer truck) had to be specially fitted with blocks velcroed to the pedals to ensure her feet could reach them.

While the cabs are more accommodating now than when she first hit the road—thanks to reachable pedals, air conditioning and computers that track routes, drive times and inventory—some things have gotten worse: namely, traffic.

“There is no sweet spot anymore,” Womack says. “I get it in the morning, and then I get it in the afternoon. I do a whole lot of sitting. Patience is a virtue.” With all the traffic comes a lot of other frustrated drivers. But Womack looks for the good in those sharing her roads. “When one person out of 20 waves when you let them over, then that makes up for all the ones who just took the space”—i.e., cut her off—“without waiting to be invited.”

Womack is one of the top drivers in an industry where just 6 percent of drivers are women. She’s been driving for 30 years and was named Maryland Truck Driver of the Year in 2015, the first time a woman took home that award in the 80-year history of the Maryland Motor Truck Association.

Her unflinching commitment to safety is one of the things Womack is known for. At Giant Food, where the company makes about 1,100 deliveries per week and drivers cover more than 11 million miles per year, she trains new drivers in the art of navigating narrow urban streets in and around Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

“It’s really overwhelming,” she admits. Low-hanging branches on tree-lined D.C. streets may offer shade to pedestrians, but they’re perilous for truckers. “We have to worry about what I call ‘can-opening’ the top of a trailer because the limbs are too low,” she says. “Sometimes people give standing ovations in cities because they’ll stand there and watch you maneuver your trailer into a hole with about two inches on each side. You just want to give yourself a pat on the back because you can’t believe you did it.” To help

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new drivers, Womack took it upon herself to write a route book for all 169 Giant Food stores, complete with diagrams, maps and information about the most efficient ways to reach the stores and how to get into tight loading zones. “It took hundreds and hundreds of hours, pasting and cutting the old-school way, with toothpicks and glue and little bitty arrows,” she says. “But it’s just about published, and I’m so excited for the new folks to use it.”

As a transporter of food products, Womack is also vigilant about her cargo. When she’s driving a refrigerated trailer—aka, a “reefer”—she checks and double-checks the temperature settings, ensuring she has a well-functioning refrigerator and enough fuel to keep it cold for the duration of the trip.

“You need that temperature to be at 35 degrees, and you need that refrigerator to work properly,” she says. “If it doesn’t, you can lose $40,000 worth of merchandise,” a catastrophe Womack has never experienced in her 1.7-million-mile career.

The importance she places on safety extends to those with whom she shares the road. When driving in the rain and snow, she takes it extra slow. “If you take it for granted,” she says, “things happen.” More than once she has stopped to lend a hand. One time, a young couple driving a big U-Haul truck had pulled to the side of the road, the husband signaling for help because his brakes were on fire, a result of so much stopping in heavy traffic.

“I pulled up behind them and grabbed the fire extinguisher and put out the fire,” she recalls. “And then I got back in my truck and went on my way.” Giant Food recognized Womack for that act of service, just one in a long career with many such stories. “We can help people,” she says. “As drivers, we can do more.”

She knows the important role truckers play in ensuring that fresh foods and other goods are available to American shoppers when and where they want them. Womack and other drivers doing daily deliveries for Giant Food are “local” drivers, beginning and ending their shifts each day at their home domicile (the place where the trailers sleep at night).

Other truckers are out on the road for days and weeks at a time, bringing things like produce from California to Giant’s Maryland distribution centers.

“They’re the meat and bones of getting whatever you want to your house,” she says. “If one day the big trucks stop rolling for two days, we’ll all be hurting.”

Eleven hours after it began, with a trip to Virginia and back completed, Womack heads home for the evening. Then it’s back tomorrow to hit the road again.

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For more images from Scott Wiener’s collection of more than 1,300 pizza boxes, get his book, “Viva La Pizza.”

FOOD MOVER

THE SECRET EVOLUTION OF THE PIZZA BOX

ORDERING OUT IS IN

THE GREENBOX

It might look like a standard corrugated pizza box, but the GreenBox​ is designed to break down for two secondary uses. The lid has a pair of crossed perforations that allow it to transform into four plates. When you’ve had your fill, the base folds over itself to create a low-profile take-out container for your leftovers.

THE TABLE BOX

Leaving a pizza box on the kitchen table means losing valuable surface area—​until now. The lid of the Table Box flips beneath the container and transforms the box base into a pedestal.

With your pizza elevated six inches above the table, you have plenty of room for cups of pepper flakes, oregano and grated cheese.

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Although pizza boxes didn’t become mainstream until a decade after World War II, early reports of the use of pizza boxes go back to the 1930s.

Prior to that, flat paper bags served as the first transportation vessels for American pizzas, like the paper that wrapped around their Italian counterparts. Back in Italy, a pizza was much smaller than it is in most of the world today— about the size of a tortilla—because it was intended for consumption by a single person.

It was a street food consumed by peasants and never needed much in the way of packaging.

Pizza’s move to America in the early 20th century, brought by a huge influx in Italian immigrants, greatly expanded the food’s market and led to a need for larger packaging.

The postwar boom of the 1950s convinced many Americans to move from urban areas to the suburbs, where they learned to appreciate the growing convenience-food industry. Frozen TV dinners and Chinese takeout began as a novelty but soon became part of families’ weekly dinner routine. The shape and customizability of pizza made it a perfect addition to the mobilefood trend. As pizzeria orders increased, so did the need to stack multiple pies. The solution required ditching the flat paper bag in favor of a more rigid container. Early examples began as modified bakery boxes but came into their own as paperboard pizza boxes. This material, still in use today, is made from compressed paper about as thick as cardstock.

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While this design does a decent job of housing the pizza as it travels from point A to point B, it has some shortcomings. First, the printing on these boxes is rather simplistic and inaccurate. Printer rollers don’t get much cushioning from thin paperboard, so ink tends to smudge.

Second, and functionally more important, the box’s walls tend to buckle and gap, even without a pizza inside. Just imagine what happens when the box is loaded with a hot, steaming pie. Add to that the lack of structural integrity inherent in thin paperboard: It doesn’t take much weight to collapse the lid, pushing it into direct contact with the pizza itself. (You’ve probably seen those tiny, white plastic “dollhouse tables” inside the box—that’s the Package Saver, invented by Long Islander Carmela Vitale in the mid-1980s. The box wasn’t good enough on its own; it needed some support to get the job done.)

CORRUGATION NATION

By the late 1960s, the American pizza industry shifted from urban Italian communities to the suburbs. That meant more pizza being made for more customers—and most of it was being delivered. But the paper industry was slow to respond to demands for a stronger container.

It took a little company from Michigan called Dominos to convince their box supplier to develop a product made of corrugated paper.

In his autobiography, “Pizza Tiger,” Domino’s founder Tom Monaghan writes about developing a corrugated pizza container with a Detroit-based company called Triad. Corrugated paper is composed of a flat liner and a fluted medium.

The latter is a wavy sheet of paper affixed to the flat liner with food-safe glue. Besides enhanced strength, corrugation also enhances insulation to keep the pizza hotter longer.

THE MODERN BOX

The result is the box you know best—it’s thicker and stronger than its paperboard predecessor and doesn’t always need the little plastic dollhouse table. As a bonus, images print more sharply on corrugated than on paperboard because the corrugation provides cushioning for the printing rolls.

Alas, the trouble with insulation is that it leads to soggy crust. The steam that keeps the

PHOTOS BY SCOTT WIENER

THE PACKAGE SAVER was invented and patented by Carmela Vitale, whose device has saved the molten toppings of countless pizzas since 1985.

No other paper product evokes such hunger.

The warm feeling of a pizza box on your lap as you copilot the family car makes anticipation peak for most 10-year-olds. The mere sight of one—or even better, a ​stack of boxes—hints at an impending celebration. It may be the only piece of cardboard that makes a mouth water.

The pizza box is one of those everyday items that seems ever unchanged, a constant in food transportation. But its technology has quietly evolved while most of us have remained distracted by the pie protected within. Upon closer inspection, the pizza box reveals an unseen story of the sometimes conflicting relationship between a package and the food it contains.

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Check out Ventit’s trade show video, demonstrating incense “steam” exiting through the box’s vents, in this story at foodandcity.org.

pizza hot leads to its downfall. The sad truth is that most consumers have grown accustomed to this tradeoff—but that doesn’t stop inventors from trying to solve the problem. One novel approach enables the offending steam to escape. A corrugated paper company in India called Shree Krishna Packaging invented Ventit, a box with indirect ports that exhaust steam without losing heat. At trade shows, the company demonstrates its ingenious design by holding a lit incense stick inside the box. Viewers can see the smoke exit the box without the implementation of direct ports.

In a 2007 study, the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai confirmed the company’s claims that their design keeps food contents hotter than standard boxes. Blind taste tests by pizzeria customers back up these laboratory claims. But despite expressed consumer preferences for a box that would deliver the best pizza—even for a few more cents per box— food distributors are wary of the extra cost.

B FLAT

Old school pizzerias, particularly those in the northeastern U.S., tend to avoid change in fear of damaging their legacy. Corrugated pizza boxes are composed of a pair of flat paper liners sandwiching a wavy paper layer. The resulting peaks and valleys—or flutes—determine a box’s thickness and strength. Flutes are labeled with letters that correspond to the order in which they were brought to market and also happens to match their thickness in descending order. ​

“B flute” boxes are the most common in New York pizzerias, but newer “E flute” boxes are thinner and cost less to ship. They even print better than thicker “B flute” boxes because their flutes are closer together, providing a more even surface. Even with all these advantages, most pizzerias in the New York area are stuck on B. Such is not the case in Italy, a place known for design that integrates art and technology.

Although they’ve had pizza much longer than their American counterparts, the Italians have only recently adopted the practice of take-out and delivery. With a younger pizza box industry, Italian pizza box makers have newer equipment that enables more detailed printing. Their pizzas are also smaller and less hefty than their American cousins, alleviating the need for thick boxes.

This combination of thinner boxes and newer equipment has led to an explosion of beautiful artwork on pizza box lids in Italy. They look more like paintings than disposable food containers.

It’s worth noting that these treasures reach the hand of the consumer after a purchase has been made, so the art comes as a surprise, rather than a tool for marketing.

Pizza boxes have long been a silent aspect of the pizza buying experience. We tend to overlook the box, relegating it to the dumpster as soon as the last slice disappears. All the while, innovators plug away at solutions to problems most of us don’t even realize exist. Only recently are consumers waking up to the fact that the vessel can be just as important at the food it holds.

SCOTT WIENER

FLUTES BY THE NUMBERS F-FLUTE 1​ / 32" 128 flutes per foot E-FLUTE ​1 / 16" 94 flutes per foot

PHOTOS BY SCOTT WIENER

B-FLUTE ​1 / 8" 50 flutes per foot

C-FLUTE ​5 / 32” 42 flutes per foot

Pizza boxes have always fought a battle between retaining heat and evicting moisture. This innovation uses indirect venting through the flutes of corrugated board to allow steam to escape while retaining more heat than the common pizza box. It’s currently available only in India and Dubai, but more smart pizza companies are bound to catch on.

THE PIZZA POD

​ ume Pizza​, a startup Z in Mountain View, Calif., has created the pizza box of the future.

Their entire concept is futuristic, starting with the use of robots to make the pizza rather than temperamental humans. It only makes sense that they invented a pizza box to match.

Dubbed the “Pizza Pod,” this odd container is made of compressed sugarcane fiber. It absorbs moisture, leaving the pizza dry and crispy.

The shells are also completely biodegradable.

A-FLUTE ​1 / 4" 36 flutes per foot

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VENTIT’S BREATHING PIZZA BOX​

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Halley VI opened in 2013 and rests on the 150-meter-thick floating Brunt Ice Shelf, which moves 400 meters toward the sea each year.

Bedrooms, laboratories, office areas and energy centers are housed in the blue modules of the British research facility, and a larger, two-story, light-filled red module is used for living, dining and recreation. The modules are supported on giant steel skis and hydraulically driven legs that allow the station to mechanically ‘climb’ up out of the snow every year. As the ice shelf moves out towards the ocean, the modules can be lowered and towed by bulldozers further inland and eventually taken apart when the time comes. ©JAMES MORRIS

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IN DEPTH

Feeding Remote Places: When the Last Food Mile is the Middle of Nowhere B Y A R I L E VA U X

Provisioning the dwellers of far-flung places puts all the elements of the food supply chain on display— from production and distribution to preparation and consumption. But how do they actually get it there?

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IN DEPTH

OPPOSITE: #1 USS Ross (DDG 71) receives pallets of supplies from USS John Lenthall (T-AO 189) during a replenishment-at-sea on April 22, 2015. #2 Sailors heave a line during an underway replenishment aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS William P. Lawrence (DDG 110). #3 USS Ross (DDG 71) receives supplies during a replenishment-at-sea with USS John Lenthall (T-AO 189) on May 1, 2015. #4 Sailors and Marines pass boxes in the hangar bay aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) during a replenishment-at-sea with the fast combat support ship USNS Arctic (T-AOE 8) and the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) on Oct. 21, 2015. #5 Sailors on the USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19) look on as a refueling boom crosses over the South China Sea. #6 U.S. Sailors prepare to transport pallets during a replenishment at sea aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75).

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When the unmanned SpaceX Falcon blew up en route to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2015, 4,000 pounds of food were lost. It was the third consecutive attempt to bring food to the orbiting astronauts that failed. The astronauts—though not in imminent danger—were left hanging.

Although there have been some preliminary, and successful, attempts to grow salad greens in the space station, the astronauts on board remain dependent on rations from earth. Luckily for them, subsequent vessels reached the space station in time to spare them a lettuce diet.

The ISS epitomizes the cliche, “So close, yet so far.” Its orbit is only 249 miles above the earth, but those are some problematic miles to cross.

One can imagine the astronauts hovering above the earth, recognizing familiar cities and gazing toward the spot where they know an In-n-Out Burger to be.

And while the ISS is remote, there are many places on earth that are even trickier to get to, with situations that require similarly complex logistics. When feeding the dwellers of far-flung places, all the elements of the food supply chain are on display, including production, distribution, preparation and consumption. How the resulting waste is managed is also a reflection of how far away from home one is. At a certain point, that waste become less of a burden and more of a necessity.

FLOATING CITY

The U.S. Navy’s 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers are the largest ships in the world. Nearly a quarter mile in length, these vessels are like floating cities, with many of the amenities of home, including a variety of foods. Unlike oil-powered ships of similar size that need to refuel every three days, the nuclear-powered Nimitz ships can cruise at 55 mph for 20 years straight— about 10 million miles—on a single “tank” of nuclear fuel.

But while the ship’s engines aren’t in danger of going hungry, the 6,000 hard-working sailors on board will eat through 25 pallets worth of food a day—roughly what an average family eats in five years. The ship’s pantries can store more than 60 days’ worth of dried food and 30 days’ worth of frozen, but only approximately two weeks’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables.

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Bringing these massive ships to port every 14 days during a seven- to nine-month deployment is neither convenient nor strategic. Instead, the carriers can remain in position thanks to a maneuver known as Replenishment at Sea. The procedure has the look of an elaborate mating ritual between two ships. They move forward on parallel courses, about 150 feet apart. Sailors on the carrier fire rifles loaded with weighted slugs at the replenishment ship.

The slugs trail thin lines to which progressively heavier cables are attached and pulled across the chasm, until cables large enough to be winched connect both forward-moving ships. Eventually, the cables are hooked up to hydraulic rigs and tensioned to several thousand pounds of pressure, and mini cable cars ferry pallets of food (and other goods) between the two ships.

To speed things up, helicopters ferry pallets directly to the carrier’s flight deck, where forklifts are waiting to bring them into the bowels of the ship’s warehouse-sized pantries. Other cables strung between the two ships function as zip lines across the chasm, on which more loads of food travel. As the supplies are loaded, fuel lines are also stretched across, because fighter jets have to eat, too.

Meanwhile, waste from the floating city is offloaded to the replenishment vessel. Waste plastic, which has been compressed into discs, will be returned to port and disposed of according to local law. Paper products are burned in filtered incinerators. Food waste goes overboard, presumably to the delight of local fish. When far from shore, human waste feeds the fish too.

The basic configuration of cables binding two moving ships was designed by Lt. Chester Nimitz himself—for whom the world’s largest aircraft carriers are named—during World War I. Stationed 300 miles south of Greenland on the replenishment vessel USS Maumee, Nimitz tweaked and refined his system while refueling and replenishing 34 destroyers in difficult conditions during the spring of 1917. Now, as then, time is of the essence in this drill, as both ships are vulnerable to attack when they are intertwined.

And accidents happen.

“Any time you put a 95,000-ton aircraft carrier next to a 50,000-ton replenishment vessel in heavy seas, tied together, sometimes King Neptune will reach up and knock things off the

IMAGE #1: U.S. NAVY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 3RD CLASS ROBERT S. PRICE; IMAGE #3: U.S. NAVY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 3RD CLASS ROBERT S. PRICE; IMAGE #4: U.S. NAVY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST SEAMAN KALEB R. STAPLES.

For an in-depth look at life on an aircraft carrier, check out the PBS series “Carrier.”

We’ll link it from this story on foodandcity.org.

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A case of bananas holds about 100 pieces of fruit and sells for about $20-25 to a bodega, but that’s after a distributor has paid $16 to $17 to a wholesaler like Top Banana. “At least six to seven make a living off it,” says Gvd. “Everybody 24 + City Magazine makes Food money.”

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The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), left, performed a replenishment at sea with the Military Sealift Command fast combat support ship USNS Arctic (T-AOE 8) and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) on Jan. 23, 2008.

PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS JAY C. PUGH COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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FURTHER AFIELD

The difficulties involved in feeding an aircraft carrier full of sailors are rooted in the sheer quantities of food and in the windows of vulnerability that open when the food is handed off. But for those who overwinter on Antarctic bases, the challenge is reversed. The number of mouths are fewer, but the intervals between replenishments are considerably longer. And getting there, especially in winter, can be more dangerous than an off-planet jaunt to the space station. In fact, winter travel is so dangerous that even medical evacuations from Antarctica

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are extremely rare. Winter residents of Antarctica are generally stuck with what ails them until winter breaks. And the same goes for what nourishes them.

On the shifting surface of the Brunt Ice Shelf, on the coast of Antarctica, the British-run Halley VI research station was built on skis to stay atop the ice—something its five predecessors failed to accomplish. And while the Nimitz carriers wait two weeks between replenishments, and the ISS is paid a visit every 40 or so​​days, Halley IV gets only two visits per year, courtesy of the British icebreakers ​Shackleton and ​Ross.

The first visit of the summer season lands just before Christmas, when a seasonal crew of about 100 people arrives. The Antarctic summer doesn’t linger long, and before you know it a ship is back in February to take the snowbirds home.

Those two visits constitute the only opportunities for replenishment that the base sees for an entire year. The crew of 11 to 16 that overwinters for nearly 10 months must make that food last until the following December atop the hungry ice.

The Christmas arrival delivers a summer stash of fresh veggies, but its main non-human cargo is a year’s supply of frozen and canned goods. The February delivery brings almost exclusively fresh

PHOTO: NICK STERN / BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY

TOP: The pantry at Halley VI is stocked with canned supplies and staples that must last through the winter for a crew of 11-16. Once the February shipment comes and goes, the pantry won’t be restocked until the following December.

ABOVE: Halley VI is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf, a mass of ice floating on the Weddell Sea in Antarctica.

line and into the water,” says retired U.S. Navy Captain Dan Grieco. In Grieco’s 30-year career he’s seen only two items lost during replenishment, including an aircraft part, which they recovered after hastily suspending the replenishment and beginning a search operation.

While the replenishment operation itself is a well-oiled machine, its success depends on finding the time to conduct it. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Grieco says, they couldn’t replenish as often as they wanted, and it wasn’t good. “We were down to drinking boxed milk at times,” he says.

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COUNTING CARGO

IN DEPTH

PHOTO: SVALBARD IMAGE DORNITH DOHERTY © 2011

R E C I P E F R O M A N TA R C T I C A

DELIVERY VARIABLES

AIRCRAFT CARRIER

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

ANTARCTICA (HALLEY VI STATION)

DISTANCE

2,175 miles from Austin, Texas

249 miles from Earth

7,931 miles from Austin, Texas

TRAVEL TIME

39.5 hours

3 days

Several weeks

FREQUENCY

Every 2 weeks

Every 40 days

Twice a year

PEOPLE TO FEED

6,000

3-10

100 in the summer 11-16 in the winter

AMOUNT OF FOOD

25 pallets

360-1200 meals

Two boatloads

veggies, explains John Eager, a former chef at the base who now does kitchen and meal planning from Halley’s administrative headquarters in the United Kingdom. The nature of the fresh vegetables tends to be along the lines of what you might find in a homesteader’s root cellar.

“We stick to hard, dense stuff that lasts a lot longer. Potatoes, carrots, onions, squash, turnips,” Eager says. “They store incredibly well, as the atmosphere is very dry. Eggs keep well, too. We can make them last six months by turning them over every week.”

Because it can take several weeks for the icebreakers to make their way to the station, anything more perishable might not even survive the journey to Antarctica, much less stick around through the winter. “Anything like salad is in a sorry state by the time it gets there,” Eager says.

Frozen foods, meanwhile, are in their element on the frozen continent. While the base itself endeavors to stay atop the ice, most of the frozen goods are buried about 10 feet down—which makes more sense than using electricity to power a freezer.

As veggies like squash approach their expiration dates, the cook will make them last longer by preparing finished dishes and freezing them.

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Many holiday meals are prepared and frozen months ahead of time.

Waste in Antarctica is carefully dealt with, in accordance to the Protocol for Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1991. Solid waste is sent home for incineration, while sewage and greywater are treated on site so that minimal trace is left behind.

Waste may be a liability in Antarctica, with massive effort and expense invested in its disposal. But when you get further away than the end of the Earth, waste suddenly becomes too valuable to part with.

BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND FETA CHEESE TARTLETS We take squash that’s just past fresh, roast and freeze it to make this fresh-tasting dish in the depths of the Antarctic winter.

The tartlets make a great starter with reduced balsamic vinegar during the 105 days of darkness at Halley.

3 tbsp. olive oil 600 grams squash, peeled and diced 375 grams puff pastry 150 grams feta cheese 1 red chili, deseeded and finely chopped 2 tsp. thyme leaves Salt and black pepper, freshly ground 2 baking trays, one lined with Teflon sheet Set the oven to 400°F. Heat a baking tray with 1 tablespoon oil on it. Add the diced squash and roast for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until softened.

Meanwhile, roll out the pastry and cut into 6 equal pieces. Put them on the Teflon-lined baking sheet. Mark a thin border around each one. Chill for 30 minutes.

Divide the cooked squash and place it on the pastry squares, inside the borders.

Crumble cheese over top, then sprinkle with chili and thyme.

Season and drizzle with the rest of the oil. Bake for 30 minutes, until golden and cooked through.

Serve hot, with reduced balsamic vinegar dressing.

WASTE AS FUEL

Any journey beyond the moon would reach the limits of the earthly supply chain. It’s not that food couldn’t be brought along; it’s just that replenishments can’t be counted on. If you don’t come back soon you will run out of food—unless you produce your own.

NASA hopes to complete a two-year mission to Mars by the 2030s. SpaceX hopes to get there a decade sooner. The present, consequently, is a fertile time for research into how to feed astronauts aboard space ships and on different planets. Because a growing portion of space

Hundreds of thousands of seed samples from around the world are saved at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in arctic Norway.

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PHOTO TOP COURTESY NASA.GOV; MARS OASIS RENDERING BY PAT RAWLINGS, COURTESY NASA SAIC

If you were embarking on a two-year trip to Mars, what foods would you be sure to take? Tweet us @foodcityorg.

exploration is being conducted by private enterprises, much of the research is closely guarded as trade secrets. But the studies being done in the public sphere are enough to shed light on how the space-age food scene could look.

For long-haul journeys through space, and for colonizing Mars, the primary means of food transport will be in the form of information, including knowledge about how to grow plants in space and in alien environments. And no information is more valuable, and less replaceable, than the DNA of seeds. These genetic blueprints are the primary way humans could transport food to places that are too far away to be replenished or to bring sufficient supplies.

In the case of the two-year journey to Mars, it may be possible to pack enough calories to keep the astronauts alive. But growing edible plants on board the spacecraft would likely be vital to survival for other reasons entirely.

As plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen. On the long flight to Mars, this action would purify the air on board. Meanwhile, the sequestration of that atmospheric carbon, in the form of plants, would take care of the astronauts’ waste.

The interconnectedness of food, oxygen and waste disposal has led to a focus on closed-loop systems in research laboratories. In one study, rats are being kept alive with oxygen produced by algae. Depending on oxygen levels in the rats’ enclosure and the rats’ metabolic requirements, scientists can shine light on the the algae to trigger photosynthesis, the process by which plants consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.

This is a simplified version of how astronauts and their food production systems could help regulate their shared atmosphere.

Any food grown in such a system could be considered a byproduct of the processes of waste management and atmospheric purification. The astronauts would have to do their part in the cycle by eating the food and excreting the waste products therefrom. As the astronauts would be eating much more than what they grow, thanks to the food they brought with them, the volume of their waste would likely exceed what they need for their little garden. But that extra poop would not be jettisoned. You don’t throw away gold.

While some researchers are studying the biospheres of space travel, others are looking

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IN DEPTH

into how food could be produced when and where the spaceship lands. Dutch scientists are attempting to grow crops like tomatoes, peas and wheat in red earth, dug from a Hawaiian volcano, thought to closely resemble Martian soil. According to Wieger Wamelink, an ecology researcher at Wageningen University, it took a little tweaking and some animal refuse, but plants eventually began growing quite well in the red dirt, which was purchased from NASA. On Mars, he explains, the plants will similarly have some extra help.

“The feces of the astronauts [produced] during the travel have to be stored and brought to Mars, where it can be used as fertilizer,” Wamelink explains.

Sowing nitrogen-binding plants like clovers, lupine, green bean and pea is another vital step in the process, according to the Dutch scientists.

“Together with nitrogen-fixing bacteria they can take nitrogen gas from the air and turn that into eventually nitrate, which the plants can use for growth,” says Wamelink.

Obviously, growing food in actual Martian soil could present a host of obstacles. The food would have to be grown in some kind of space greenhouse that would be pressurized to Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It would need to be heated, lit and protected from cosmic radiation, which damages plant DNA. Perhaps it could be partially buried, with electric lights at night, powered by solar panels. The first colonists to arrive on Mars will have no shortage of work to keep them busy, as they attempt to construct a real-life biosphere experiment—not in the red sands of Arizona, but on the red planet itself.

Despite the challenges of feeding people in remote places, humans continue to push the limits of their range. When the distance from home reaches the point where growing food is more practical than bringing it, the journey from “farm” to table resets. Space travelers millions of miles from home, counterintuitively, will be eating more locally than the person on Earth who shops at his or her local grocery store. And in the closed-loop systems where plants and humans thrive on each other’s waste, some basic facts underlying the Earth’s ecosystems become crystal clear, even as our home planet fades in the rearview mirror. Food and waste are different sides of the same coin, part of an endless cycle.

SEED DATA The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in arctic Norway has been nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault” because its location and construction were designed to withstand a variety of manmade and natural disasters. North enough to withstand rising temperatures, high enough to avoid tsunamis and rising sea levels, remote enough to survive a nuclear war and deep enough in a mountain to withstand meteorites, bombs and tornadoes, Svalbard has as good a chance as any place on earth of surviving the big one.

While Svalbard is often referred to as a seed bank, it technically isn’t, as no regeneration of seed takes place on site.

“We built a tunnel in a frozen mountain and put seeds in it,” explains Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funded Svalbard’s construction and now covers its operating costs.

Humble remarks aside, Svalbard is no joke. The vault holds copies of seed collections from seed banks around the world, including ancient strains of wheat, lentil and chickpea from Aleppo’s imperiled seed collection. Every time a depositor seed bank regenerates any of its seed, they update Svalbard’s collection, which currently contains 860,000 varieties.

TOP: After months of technical setbacks, the unmanned Falcon 9 Space X Rocket, with its Dragon Cargo Ship, delivered 2.5 tons of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2014. It was the first time a private company used its own rocket on a resupply mission.

BOTTOM: Future astronauts may grow some of their meals inside greenhouses, such as this Martian growth chamber, where fruits and vegetables could be grown hydroponically, without soil.

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Tsukiji Fish Market, How Local Is a Global Institution?

BY CRAIG CANNON

A century after the Panama Canal opened, Panama is opening a second set of locks this year that will welcome some of the world’s largest ships. This globe-changing expansion has U.S. farmers celebrating and port officials scrambling, but what does it mean for your plate?

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Tsukiji on the Verge of Change

BY XAQ FROHLICH | PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAGALÍ ZASLABSKY

During the chaotic early-morning auctions, some of the best seafood in the world passes through the crowded stalls, bound for restaurants in Tokyo and around the world.

How will this beloved institution handle a controversial move to a new location?

Tokyo’s Tsukiji ​(​soo-KEE-jee) Market is the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. Nearly 2,000 t​ons of fish pass through the market daily​. Everything from flounder, red snapper, mackerel and bonito to uni (sea urchin), conger eel and blue crab—more than 400 different varieties of fish and seafood—is found there. It’s a veritable edible fish aquarium, where one can see thousands of sea animals, living and dead, fresh and frozen, whole and sliced, stored in tanks, Styrofoam boxes and containers of all shapes and sizes. The whine of circular saws cutting through chunks of frozen tuna mutes the sound of machetes as they hit cutting boards, swung by apprentice wholesalers like samurai swords. Seafood and fish sit in boxes just above the ground, the floor wet from melting ice. This market has rows and rows of narrow aisles, a line of stalls that seems to never end.

Despite being regarded as an eternal institution, Tsukiji is on the verge of a controversial planned move. The old facilities, built in 1935 and squeezed between the Sumida River bank and Ginza shopping district, were scheduled to close in November 2016, when the market was

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to move to its new location two kilometers to the southeast in the less central area of Toyosu.

But lingering doubts about the environmental quality of the new premises and ongoing soil tests prompted Tokyo’s new governor to push the schedule out to 2017. Since the government announced the move in 2010—citing, among other reasons, the need for larger and more modern market facilities—nostalgia about the end of an era for a major institution in Toyko’s sushi culture turned the spotlight on Tsukiji Market and raised questions about what this local market means for Tokyo and the world.

ANATOMY OF A MARKET

Tsukiji was built to be Tokyo’s central terminal wholesale market after previous wholesale markets were destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Tsukiji Market, however, claims a longer heritage as successor to the former Nihonbashi Fish Market, which dates back 400 years to the start of Edo-era Japan. Indeed, Tsukiji traders refer to the paved loading slots for buyers’ truck deliveries as “chaya” (teahouses), a vestige of the old Nihonbashi Market era when

NIHONBASHI FISH MARKET Boats docked at the old fish market in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district in the 1890s. The predecessor to today’s Tsukiji Market, Nihonbashi was located right next to the famous Nihonbashi Bridge, the point from which even today all distances to the capital are measured. For hundreds of years the smell of fish and the shouts of fishermen, brokers and peddlers penetrated the air. But the market was destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.

Tsukiji was completed in 1935 in nearby Ginza.

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For a more detailed look at Tsukiji, read “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World” by Theodore Bestor.

1,677 STALLS

600

INTERMEDIATE WHOLESALERS

250

LOADING SLOTS

500

ADDITIONAL BUSINESSES

60,000 WORKERS

TSUKIJI BY THE NUMBERS Tsukiji Market is bustling with businesses and workers each day. While it was built to receive shipments from the port, the reality today is that most products arrive by truck.

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buyers waited in teahouses alongside the Edo Embankment for the proper tides to carry their boats out.

The physical market at Tsukiji is divided into the inner ( jonai-shijo) market—mostly fish and produce wholesalers—and an outer market (jogai-shijo) of mostly retail shops running along the streets just outside the inner market facilities. The inner market—the part slated to move to Toyosu—is a gigantic structure with 20 major auction pits for the seven largely family-owned auction firms, 1,677 stalls for some 600 intermediate wholesalers and 250 loading slots for buyers’ delivery trucks. The outer market shops comprise some 500 additional businesses consisting of fresh and processed fish, seafood and produce stands, sushi restaurants, and Japanese kitchenware and cutlery shops; these enterprises will remain in a new building in the Tsukiji area following the inner market’s migration. Roughly 60,000 people work at the market, the vast majority of whom are planning to move when the time comes.

Few Tsukiji Market outsiders understand its inner workings better than Harvard anthropologist Theodore Bestor, whose book, “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World” (2004), remains one of the best windows into the market’s cultural and economic structures. Bestor describes the Tsukiji buildings as being laid out to follow a market logic of “bulking and breaking: to bring in products from all over and aggregate them (bulking) and then sell them [to multiple buyers] in usable portions (breaking).” Sea animals that converge at the market from all over the world are reassembled by auctioneers by type and quality and then distributed out again to restaurants, shops and supermarkets, freshly refashioned as commodities.

Market regulars, according to Bestor, refer to Tsukiji as “Tōkyō no daidokoro” or “Tokyo’s pantry.” As the principal supplier of fresh fish and seafood for Tokyo’s restaurateurs and supermarkets, Tsukiji follows a different rhythm from the rest of the city. Its workday starts at 5 p.m. with fish and seafood being shipped in from around the world during the evening.

By 3 a.m. workers from auction houses have unpacked the shipments and laid out the seafood by variety, size, catch zone and quality.

The famous tuna auction starts at 5:30 a.m.,

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while hundreds of other specialty auctions run in parallel. The auctions are over by 7 a.m., and intermediate wholesalers take their orders away to sell to city buyers, restaurants and retailers throughout the morning.

By 11 a.m. most market vendors have tidied up their stalls, and by 1 p.m. Tsukiji Market pauses for a rest. Cleaning crews wash down the facilities and recycle the tons of Styrofoam used that day. Perhaps the most startling feature of Tsukiji is how little inventory remains at the end of each day. It’s a place that relies on a

“Perhaps the most startling feature of Tsukiji is how little inventory remains at the end of each day. It’s a place that relies on a ‘low-tech, high-touch trade,’ even today.” “low-tech, high-touch trade,” even today. That kind of selling efficiency relies on long-standing relationships between sellers and buyers, Bestor suggests. Vendors know how to clear their inventory and find buyers for everything, so the next day’s stock will be fresh.

QUIRKS AND WORKAROUNDS

Despite its operational competency, the physical market at Tsukiji is showing its age. As early as the 1990s, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government began discussions about renovating the market, plans that fell through because of the great expense of renovating existing facilities and because of the financial crisis at the time.

Now 80 years old, the facilities are out of date and suffer from wear and tear. But the market’s deterioration is only one factor in the decision to relocate—Tokyo’s bid for the 2020 Olympic Games is another. In 2010, Shintaro Ishihara, then Tokyo’s governor, defended his government’s decision to move the market to a new location, exclaiming, “The market is so old that ceiling sections would collapse in a minor earthquake!”

Since the market’s opening in 1935, the fish trade industry has also undergone several dramatic

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TOP IMAGE: JENS TOBISKA, WIKIMIDEA COMMONS; BOTTOM IMAGE: JAPAN TIMES/KYODO

TO P : A bird’s-eye view of Tsukiji Market.

BOTTOM : The new Toyosu wholesale food market in Tokyo’s Koto Ward, seen from above in July 2016. While the new site is more modern and offers better access to highways and airports, the market’s move from Tsukiji to Toyosu has been delayed several times due to concerns about soil contamination from former gasworks on the site.

BULKING AND BREAKING Tsukiji is laid out to accomplish a market logic of “bulking and breaking,” explains Tsukiji expert Theodore Bestor. Products are brought in from all over the world and aggregated (bulking), then sold to multiple buyers in usable portions (breaking).

INCOMING

TSUKIJI MARKET BULKING

changes that have affected how the market runs, including the rise of distant-water fishing in the 1950s, the shift from boats and railroads to trucking and airfreight, and the growth in frozen seafood trade and international fish trade since the 1970s.

As a result, workers have become accustomed to certain “hacks” required at Tsukiji. Vendors

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and auctioneers use bags of ice to keep fish and seafood cold in the non-climate controlled building, resulting in soggy, damp floors. In contrast, Toyosu will be a closed, refrigerated environment.

The old market was built for shipments to arrive from the port, but since the 1960s most fish arrives by truck. This means that stevedores must bring incoming consignments in from the

BREAKING

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worldwide hub for certain specialty products and high-end goods that will travel to the four corners of the earth. ​According to a Japan Times report​, an estimated 42,000 buyers and 19,000 trucks pass through the market daily. Auctioneers’ decisions about how to categorize and grade fish set global standards. For instance, airfreighted Atlantic bluefin tuna has become the iconic trade at Tsukiji. The tuna auction is big business and sees sales of tuna in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the New Year auction (hatsumaguro) in early 2017, restaurant owner Kiyoshi Kimura paid more than ¥74 million (about $650,000) for a 467-pound bluefin. The purchase—his sixth such auction win in six years—was largely a publicity stunt: The high price is well over actual market value. But it indicates the extravagance and visibility of the tuna auction worldwide.

Despite these showy sales, Bestor says the volume has been down for the past 15 to 20 years.

“The deflation and stagnation of the Japanese economy since the early 1990s led to a tightening of consumers’ belts,” Bestor explains. Another factor is an increase in direct sales. “More important is the expansion of supermarket chains

TOP PHOTO COURTESY KYODO NEWS; KIMURA IMAGE KEN ISHII/GETTY IMAGES.

Kiyoshi Kimura, president of Kiyomura K.K, poses for photos with a 180.4 kilograms (397 pounds) fresh tuna after the year’s first auction at Tsukiji Market on January 5, 2015 in Tokyo, Japan. A fresh whole tuna weighing 180.4 kilograms (397 pounds), sold for 4.51 million yen (approximately $37,500)

by Sushi Zanmai, a Tokyo-based sushi chain operator.

exit. Turret trucks race through narrow aisles, rushing purchased products from auction floor to vendor stall to buyers’ loading slots, creating a hair-raising flow of traffic inside the market.

These hacks and market workers’ persistent habits lend an endearing but mind-boggling charm to the old market: How can so much fish move through a market by such low-tech means?

“You will still see fax machines being used at the market. So crazy!” says Yukari Sakamoto, a chef and sommelier who runs tours through Tsukiji and authored “Food Sake Tokyo” (2010). The low-tech quaintness contributes to the market’s mystique. Tsukiji in many ways flows from Tokyo’s shitamachi culture—a traditional, mercantile culture seen to be rougher and more authentic than the upper-class, modern yamamote culture. Tuna vendors wield machetes like samurai warriors, slicing tuna with precise, careful cuts reminiscent of martial arts choreographed patterns, or “kata.” Tsukiji has what Bestor calls “a kind of nostalgic shabbiness” that has made it popular with tourists for decades.

Its quirky character belies the market’s increasingly global importance. Tsukiji is a

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Check out a gallery of the safety signs aimed at Tsukiji’s tourists in this story online at foodandcity.org.

and chains of restaurants (including the kaitenzushi, or conveyor-belt sushi chains), which bypass the market and purchase at least some of their seafood directly from suppliers in Japanese fishing ports or international importers.”

MIXED BLESSINGS

Nevertheless, Tsukiji is as popular as ever with tourists—who may or may not feel welcome during their visits. In early 2016 the Tsukiji Market shortened the public visiting hours, opening at 10 a.m. instead of 9 a.m., because the increased foot traffic of tourists there to see the original market before its planned move was blocking the flow of narrow aisles between stalls.

Warning signs at the entrance clarify that tourists could outstay their welcome if they get in the way of fast-moving workers, transport vehicles and businessmen.

In contrast, the new Toyosu site is decidedly poor for tourism. The three main buildings are divided by large streets that are hard for pedestrians to cross. Tourists may see the produce and seafood markets only by looking down from second-floor glass windows. While this

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allows more people to watch the tuna auction, the sense of being in the middle of the action has disappeared now that tourists can no longer walk right next to the fish. Toyosu is also disconnected from Tokyo’s centers of consumption and, unlike Tsukiji, has no local community history. There is also no metro station at Toyosu, only a monorail stop that is much less convenient from the city center.

For market insiders, the planned relocation of the inner market to Toyosu is a mixed blessing.

Tsukiji Market has an area of just 23 hectares, while the new facilities at Toyosu encompass 40 hectares. This added space has allowed designers to build the facility to favor big-scale business, and to bring the market up to date on global food safety regulations. Toyosu is connected to highways that run directly to Haneda and Narita airports, which will improve airfreight business. And Toyosu will have multistory buildings with elevators to move seafood—though some worry about how this new logistical feature might impede or complicate the flow of goods around the market.

Others have voiced concerns that passageways

O P P O SITE TO P: Buyers inspecting the day’s catch of fresh tuna before the auction begins.

ABOVE: Sellers prepare bins of fish for the wholesalers, chefs and retail customers that frequent the market daily.

KAITENZUSHI A fast-food sushi restaurant in which plates of sushi travel through the restaurant on a rotating conveyor belt that runs by every table and counter seat.

Customers select the sushi they want to eat as it passes by.

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For those who are unable to visit Tsukiji before it relocates, look for “Tsukiji Wonderland” (2016), a documentary that captures life at the market.

TURRET TRUCK A turret truck is a battery-operated machine designed to operate in very narrow aisles.

PR E V IOU S: Hundreds of Styrofoam boxes filled with seafood pile up on pallets in the bustling Tsukiji Market.

TO P : A vendor prepares his seafood for sale.

B OT TOM: At the end of a day of selling and auctions, piles of Styrofoam boxes that once held just-caught fish are corralled for recycling.

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in the new market might be too narrow for turret trucks to pass through.

As the move’s original timeline has come and gone, some remain on the fence about whether to relocate with the market, according to Bestor.

(Various reports have suggested that as many as one in six vendors are thinking about not relocating.) Many factors will ultimately shape their decisions, but Bestor says four stand out.

“If one’s shop was small scale, perhaps only occupying one or two stalls at Tsukiji, there’s less incentive to stay in business since Toyosu seems oriented toward larger-scale players,” Bestor explains. “Likewise, there’s less incentive to move if your shop catered to the walk-in trade of small-scale fishmongers and independent sushi chefs.” Bestor adds that the overhead required to move and set up a new shop is substantial and may be prohibitive for some vendors. And for some longtime Tsukiji denizens, “If you don’t have an heir looking to take over the business, then you may consider this to be a good time to think about retirement and cashing out your business by selling your trading license to another mid-level wholesaler.”

The move to the new Toyosu location has also been beset with scandal over whether relocation was rushed by officials too eager to repurpose Tsukiji’s central Tokyo real estate for the 2020 Olympics. The Toyosu wharf is built on landfill that was found to be contaminated by toxic effluent from former gasworks there.

Despite assurances from the former government that the soil had been remediated and would not pose a risk to food sold there, recent independent tests contradicted this position.

In July 2016 Tokyo elected a new governor, Yurio Koike, in what can only be described as a protest vote against the previous governor’s mismanaged city projects, including those involving the construction of Olympic facilities.

Her election reflects the feelings of negative public sentiment that have grown with these costly, rushed and top-down urban development policies. A few weeks after her election, Koike pushed the planned November timeline into 2017 so that doubts about soil contamination at Toyosu could be alleviated.

CAUTIONARY TALES

If Tokyo wants a lesson on how not to handle

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the move, it could look to Paris’s widely deplored relocation of the Les Halles Market in the 1970s. Once called the “Belly of Paris” by Emile Zola, Paris’s historical central wholesale market was relocated to modern facilities in Rungis, a suburb. What remained in the old market area, the Forum des Halles, is considered by many to be an urban planning blight.

The market’s elegant 19th-century pavilions, with their windows of wrought iron and glass, were torn down. In the old market’s place the city built a bland underground transport and shopping complex. It serves as a cautionary tale about re-zoning a central economic and social institution without considering locals’ nostalgia and affection for it.

Other cities have fared better. In the 1970s London decided to move the wholesale market at Covent Garden out to the northeastern corner of the city. The Greater London Council’s initial plans for the central neighborhood involved large-scale development contracts with little concern for housing that reflected the socioeconomic diversity of its inhabitants or the small merchants that thrived on the edges of the old market. Locals successfully protested, forming the Covent Garden Community Association, and the city decided to instead renovate the Covent Garden area to foster small shops and cafes. Today it is a popular commercial area.

Barcelona, in the same period, closed its central Mercat del Born, opening its present-day wholesale market, Mercabarna. Plans to restore El Born as a large shopping center languished from lack of public support and private finance, until in 2002 extensive medieval ruins were discovered on the site. In 2013 El Born reopened as an archaeological museum used for cultural events, and it has since been a source of local Catalan pride in preserving local heritage.

The core market relationships that form the social infrastructure of Tsukiji will largely continue at Toyosu, whatever the fallout from the move. Tuna auctions will continue to set the standard for the world fish trade, and this will continue to be the biggest fish market in the world. Only time will tell what residues of life at the old Tsukiji market will linger in its more modern successor.

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Rio’s Recipe for the Olympic Games

BY FA B I A N A P I R E S

Farmers, merchants, chefs and restaurateurs managed to feed millions of visitors and residents despite major logistical hurdles. But it wasn’t easy.

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The usual weather in Rio de Janeiro during winter is somewhere between 71 ​F and 86​​F. Around 9 a.m. in late July, the sun shines strong on the horizon. Rather than enjoying the warm winter weather last year, Romano Fontanive, the executive chef at Sol Ipanema Hotel, was exasperated. That’s because two weeks before the Olympic Games began last August, he was dealing with a significant schedule change: having to purchase food for the restaurant at 7 a.m. instead of at midnight. The shift had more consequences than simple inconvenience. No air conditioning system can prevent what the heat, sun and long lines of traffic in Rio can do to a lettuce leaf at that time of day.

The chef had to stop buying food during the cooler temperatures of night because the Ceasa Market, the most important food market in the city, which provides 80 percent of everything consumed there, changed its working schedule during the Olympic Games from 12 a.m.–10 a.m. to 7 a.m.–5 p.m. Rio’s city government implemented restrictions for truck circulation during the 30-day event (including the Paralympics).

With 800,000 tourists in the city, one of the government’s biggest concerns was to ensure fluid traffic for visitors. Unfortunately, the solution that eased road congestion created a nightmare for the supply chain of food and other goods. “I lose approximately 30 percent of the vegetables I buy every day,” Fontanive said last summer.

“Life won’t be easy during the Games.”

PHOTO BY JENNIFER DAVICK

Ceasa is controlled by the state of Rio de Janeiro and works like a giant farmers’ market: food producers rent stalls to show and sell their products in a 20,000-square-foot hangar. There are 800 companies and 2,000 producers registered.

Every day, 3,200 trucks pass through Ceasa’s gates.​But between July 19 and Sept. 9 (the lead-up to the Olympic Games through the opening of the Paralympics), moving around the city was harder than ever. The plan to reduce traffic for the Olympics forbade trucks from crossing specific areas at different times of day. In Ipanema, for instance, the prohibition was from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays. Many of the vehicles had to wait at the market’s parking lot until the nightly driving window opened when they could drive back to their farms or transport

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PHOTO COURTESY PAOLO MUMIA

HAULING IN THE DARK

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Chef Romano Fontanive, executive chef at the Sol Ipanema Hotel in Río, had to make major changes to his food delivery schedule due to transportation rules changes during the Games. Nevertheless, he was optimistic about the Olympics’ success.

“We need good news in this country right now,” he said in July 2016.

JEITINHO BRAZILEIRO A typically Brazilian method of social navigation where a person may use emotional appeals, family ties, promises, rewards or money to obtain favors or to get an advantage. This expression also comes from the necessity associated with a lack of resources and help.

“Jeitinho” comes from the expression dar um jeito, literally, “to find a way.” It implies the use of resources at hand, as well as personal connections and creativity.

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products ordered by customers in the downtown areas. The regulations affected not only Ceasa, but all food providers. Trucks were only able to move freely from midnight to 6 a.m., which means establishments had to keep their employees waiting during non-commercial hours to receive deliveries.

The Supermarket Association of Rio said before the Games that the rules wouldn’t affect product offerings in terms of quantity, but it might affect their prices, since the companies could decide to pass the extra costs along to the customer. The Cargo Transport Federation of Rio estimated that 3,000 companies would be strongly impacted, with losses of around 20 percent.

To prepare for the disruptions, the Sol Ipanema Hotel—located at Ipanema Beach, one of Rio’s postcard views—began organizing for the Olympics in the spring of 2016. “Our occupancy rate is high all year, so it’s not hard to adjust our supply,” said Fontanive at the time. But what did change was the amount of perishable food they bought each day. “We are buying more seafood, fish and vegetables to replace what is spoiled during transport”—20 percent more, Fontanive said. Despite the turbulence with the food supply chain, the chef hoped for the best.

Farther away from Ipanema, going up to Babilônia Hill, one of Rio’s slums, David Bispo seemed less concerned. Bispo is well known in the city after winning several food contests with recipes inspired by the favela’s cuisine, like a mix of seafood with beans. Since the favela was pacified

by Rio’s police force in 2010, the Bar do David has become an exotic destination for tourists.

Like the Sol Ipanema, Bar do David relies on Ceasa Market as its main food provider. But unlike Chef Fontanive, Bispo wasn’t worried about the food supply during the Olympics, explaining that one has to dance according to the music to make it work. “It’s the jeitinho brasileiro​[the Brazilian way of life]: we make it last minute, but we make it work,” Bispo said in July, referring to both his bar and the city’s planning for the Olympics. He decided to wait and see how the first days of the games went before changing his menu or buying more supplies.

FEEDING CHAMPIONS

Tourists weren’t the only visitors in Rio last summer. Some 11,000 competitors chasing medals descended on the city, and all of them had to be

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fed, too. Despite early concerns that the Olympic Village wouldn’t be ready for the thousands of athletes, coaches and trainers when the delegations arrived, the restaurants opened for business. In the Olympic Village, Sapore—a São Paulo-based catering firm that managed food in 12 stadiums during the 2014 Rio World Cup— ran five restaurants with a total combined area equivalent to three soccer fields. They served European, American, Asian and Brazilian specialties 24 hours a day, including pizza, salads, hamburgers, several kinds of pasta, Japanese food, cold sandwiches and some typical Brazilian food, like feijoada (a stew of beans with beef and pork) and coxinha (chopped chicken meat, covered in dough, molded into a shape resembling a chicken leg), with meals also prepared according to Jewish and Islamic specifications. More than 250 tons of food was served per day. That included 100,000 loaves of bread and 3,000 pizzas.

One of the requirements of the Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB, in the Portuguese initials) during the bidding for caterers was to use as much local food as possible, starting with food produced in Rio, followed by products from the rest of Brazil, then South America and finally internationally. Sapore didn’t have to go that far.

All the ingredients in the Olympic Village were procured from Brazilian farms, except for a species of foliage typical of Korean cuisine that is not produced in large quantities in the country.

Ingredients arrived at Sapore’s kitchen all day. Twenty-five heavy-load sealed vehicles transporting food for the Olympic Village received permission to circulate on a different schedule than the one followed by other trucks in the city. “The truckers working with us have authorization to make the deliveries on time,” said Veridiana Corrêa, Sapore’s executive director for the Olympics, last summer. Before disembarking to the kitchen, however, products were taken to Sapore’s Food Quality Center in Duque de Caxias, a nearby city. A team of specialists checked the products according to rules set by Anvisa (Brazil’s authority on health surveillance) and the International Olympic Committee. The suppliers were instructed to send fruits, meat and vegetables already peeled, chopped and ready to cook as a way to reduce waste and facilitate work in the Olympic Village. There, another team was responsible for a final inspection of the ingredients.

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PHOTO BY LUIZ BARROS

Technology helped Sapore’s 2,000 employees working in the operation. Computers monitored the temperature of 345 ovens, refrigerators and freezers 24 hours a day. A cloudbased system used cameras in the dining halls to count how many people were in the restaurant and send the kitchen an estimate of the amount of food needed. A digital spreadsheet with previously collected data also helped the chefs calculate how much food should be bought and prepared, according to the number of athletes in the Olympic Village.

All food served was free to the athletes, who could choose from healthy meals, like light sandwiches and salads, or fast food items—a choice that proved vexing for delegations’ nutritionists during past games. (Some teams, like the Australians, brought suitcases with supplements to ensure their competitors keep their diets on track.) In fact, Corrêa said, during the first days of competition, athletes ate a lot more fast food than the company thought they would. But as more events got underway, “the demand for salads and vegetables began to increase as more and more of them started to compete,” Corrêa said. And once those competitions were over, many athletes tossed their strict training regi-

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mens. “We don’t have a number of how much fast food was consumed, but I can tell you this: The swimming teams, specially the American team, can eat burgers as I have never seen someone eat before,” Corrêa said.

“A TASTE OF THE GAMES”

The plan for feeding the athletes was published in a 37-page document called “A Taste of the Games.” When it was created in 2012, one of the COB’s biggest commitments was using organic ingredients in the Olympic Village and the rest of the buildings. The plan was to encourage the catering companies to participate in an organic food supply program, called Rio Sustainable Food, by making that a distinctive factor during the bidding. With enormous quantities of food served in the Olympic buildings, it made sense to use this as an opportunity to help organic farmers, who usually lack a formal education and money to invest in their business, and often suffer from the competition of bigger and non-organic farms. But in the end, only one of four caterers hired by the COB signed up to participate in the program. The impact was negligible: R$4,000 (about $1,200) during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

One of the largest food markets in all of Latin America, Ceasa covers 7.5 million square feet.

Famous for its flower and plant markets, Ceasa serves citizens as well as restaurants and other businesses in Rio.

80%

of the food in the city is provided by Ceasa, a state-owned market in Irajá neighborhood.

32,000

trucks drive to Ceasa each day

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BOTTOM PHOTO BY ANGELO DAL BO

Another vow was to minimize food waste.

Approximately six tons of produce and other ingredients went uneaten every day in the Olympic Village. But their destination was not the trash. Each day during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the excess was transported to Refettorio Gastromotiva, a soup kitchen created by the Italian chef Massimo Bottura (the best chef in the world, according to the 2016 World’s 50 Best Restaurants ranking) and social initiatives in Brazil. The items were ingredients that would have been wasted, such as vegetables considered out of the norm for sale in supermarkets: “We are talking about an ugly tomato, an imperfect zucchini, already mature mangos or flour to make bread,” Bottura explained to the BBC. Bottura and his army of volunteer chefs from all over the world served the extra food from the Olympic Village to the poor people of Rio (2.8 percent of the city’s population live on less than one dollar a day, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). “This is not just a charity; it’s not just about feeding people,” Bottura said in a New York Times article last August. “This is about social inclusion, teaching people about food waste and giving hope to people who have lost all hope.”

As for Chef Fontanive and David Bispo, they managed to withstand the major logistical hurdles. Bar do David was operating on full capacity during the Olympic Games and the Paralympics.

“We had long lines of people at our door on the weekends,” Bispo says. He estimates that the number of clients was up 30 percent during the games. To manage the traffic snarls, he hired two helpers and avoided Ceasa Market altogether. “We decided to buy food in another farmer’s market, farther away,” Bispo says. “It was faster to cross town than to go to Ceasa.”

Fontanive took a different approach. After the first truck regulations were published in mid-July, Fontanive predicted chaos with deliveries. As part of his early planning, he decided to stock all non-perishable items used by the hotel’s restaurant, especially grains and beverages. “I had to reduce my dependence on the delivery trucks,” Fontanive explains. “We had to adapt. It was a very busy time for business, but the city didn’t plan well enough for the business owners.”

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LIVING WITH THE LEGACY

“The Olympic Games bring more than the Olympic Games.” The quote, printed on a giant billboard in the middle of Rio de Janeiro in the lead-up to the Games, tried to remind cariocas (the term for Rio natives) why hosting the event would be good for the city. It will leave legacies, it claimed.

According to Datafolha Institute, 60 percent of the population was against the Olympics in Rio, because they believed the resources of a country in crisis should be destined to deficient areas like the public health system and schools. During the opening ceremony, though, this pessimism was momentarily forgotten, as the country put on a simple but energetic performance to receive the 207 participating delegations.

But almost six months after the games ended, many of the touted “legacies” are not part of the population’s reality. Many construction projects weren’t finished, and certain plans, like Rio Sustainable Food, weren’t fulfilled. The houses and apartments in the Olympic Village still aren’t being used for social housing programs, as the government planned. Nobody, not even the leaders of those programs, is sure why. The promise of visibility for the city, in the expectation of attracting tourists and investments, also might be compromised with news reports of political corruption, financial crises and violence spreading all over Brazil. Police, firemen and many public employees have not been paid since June 2016, and the unemployment is 11 percent and rising. Even Rio’s other well-known splashy events are being scaled back: the 2016 New Year’s Eve party was the smallest in 10 years because of a budget shortfall.

As of December 2016, food-related expenses of the Olympics were still not quantified by Brazilian Olympic Committee, which is keeping a low profile as the city faces a major economic crisis. Overall, the games are projected to cost $12 billion, with 57 percent paid for by Brazil’s government and 43 percent by sponsors. There were some good outcomes: the 1.6 million tourists that came to the games spent R$424 (USD$125) a day, and international media coverage was largely positive.

“I was so proud of my city and my country,” says Fontanive. “We were facing a huge financial crisis, we still are, but we were able to create a beautiful event for everyone. ​But it is over and, now we have to deal with tough reality.”

TO P : Sapore’s Food Quality Center in Duque de Caxias. Before being delivered in the Olympic Village, the food is inspected here.

BOTTOM : Italian Chef Massimo Bottura created the Refettorio Gastromotiva, a large pop-up soup kitchen that repurposed unused food from the Olympic Village into meals for Río’s poor during the Games.

A DAY IN THE OLYMPI C KITCHEN

250 tons of food 65,000 meals 120 tons of fruits 100,000 loaves of bread 3,000 pizzas 11.5 million napkins 8 million compostable plates Sources: Sapore / Rio 2016

INTERNATIONAL MEAT STANDARDS For the athletes’ sake, failure was unacceptable in any of the 1.8 million meals provided in the Olympic Village, especially when it came to cooking meat. The main concern was the presence of substances like clenbuterol, used as treatment for breathingrelated diseases in cattle. The drug has anabolic effects that can be identified by doping tests—and no athlete wants that. Brazil is one of the few countries that still authorize clenbuterol use in food-producing animals (the Food and Drug Administration banned it in the U.S. in 1991). But Sapore, the catering company chosen to provision the Olympic Village, ensured them the village would be free of the supplement.

“All suppliers have certificates attesting a clenbuterol-free diet for the cattle,” said Veridiana Corrêa, Sapore’s executive director for the Olympics.

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TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD

TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD

How a Little Startup Fixes a Big Food Chain Gap SORIN GRAMA

In rural India, dairies may have only one or two cows and the power grid is spotty at best. The chance to improve the supply chain link from producers to distributors in these conditions offered some surprising lessons to an American startup anxious to solve the “milk challenge.”

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTO BY LANCE CASEY; OPPOSITE: PHOTO COURTESY PROMETHEAN POWER SYSTEMS

The verdict was devastating: “This will never work for us,” our customer said. It had taken three years to develop a solar refrigerator to solve rural India’s milk spoilage problem. But our prototype, which we unveiled in early 2011, was “too big, too expensive and difficult to install.” We were back to square one. I’m not from India, and no one on our early team had a connection to the country. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—we were captivated by the milk challenge in the world’s largest democracy.

And the engineer in me thought I could fix it with the right technology. Turns out, I had a lot to learn.

We first heard about the milk problem in 2007. That summer, my business partner and I were in India conducting a market survey for a solar turbine we developed that was designed to generate hot water and electricity for off-grid schools and clinics in rural India. We found ourselves in Bangalore on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. My partner picked up the phone and cold-called the managing director of Bangalore Dairy, one of India’s largest milk producers.

A few hours later we had a meeting scheduled.

We walked into his office to find him and his team of 14 engineers seated around a large conference table. They politely listened to our solar pitch, but their reaction was similar to what we had seen before: “It sounds interesting, but how does this solve our problem?”

In the case of Bangalore Dairy, their problem was milk spoilage, and our solar technology had nothing to do with milk. The meeting quickly

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turned into a reverse pitch where the dairy engineers were asking us for help. This is how I learned about India’s dairy supply chain and the milk challenge.

A RIVER OF MILK

India is a hot, largely vegetarian country that depends on milk for its calories and protein.

Milk is used in curries and chai tea and is the product of the (literally) sacred cow. India is the largest producer and consumer of milk in the world. But production in this nation of 1.3 billion people is nothing like the factory farms of the United States.

In India milk is collected from small, individual farmers scattered across the countryside.

Each one produces 5 to 10 liters per day—compared to an average output of 6,000 liters in a typical U.S. dairy farm operation. The small amounts of milk produced by individual farmers

Sorin Grama, now an entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT, found an unexpected solution for a simple problem in India: how to keep milk from small dairies from spoiling before it gets to distributors. But the path to the solution was far from simple.

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Indian dairies often have only one or two milk cows—tiny operations compared with U.S. dairies that have thousands of animals.

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can be reached within a five- or six-hour ride can deliver milk to central processing facilities.

SOLAR SOLUTION

Enter our solar-powered solution. To address the underlying problem of energy access in villages, I designed a milk chiller powered by solar photovoltaic panels. In the mid-2000s solar technology was sexy—it was coming down in cost and gaining more acceptance. I was passionate about using a renewable, clean form of energy and was determined to make it work. When we mentioned solar to customers and investors, everyone got excited.

After all, India is a very sunny place.

After some trial and error, we unveiled our prototype, ready to test it. Unfortunately, on that sunny day in South India in February 2011, my dream of using solar power crashed and burned.

The prototype failed to impress our first customer, who had been so interested in our solar solution.

He told us that our system was impractical and too expensive for Indian conditions. With that rejection ringing in our ears, we laid off our staff and paused to think about the next steps, if any.

After more than three years of work, we were back to square one.

But the problem was too big to ignore. What’s more, the customer who rejected the solar system encouraged us continue the effort. Like us, he finally understood that solar was a pipe dream and was willing to continue working with us to find a better solution. The simultaneous rejection and encouragement was effective. With some retrospection, I realized that my passion and bias for solar technology took my focus away from the real problem that needed to be solved.

Most villages in India are already connected to the grid, but the grid is not available around the clock and not always when it’s most needed. This insight led me to a better solution: a battery.

If I could store energy from the grid, I could use it during the times when the grid is off.

BOTTOM TWO PHOTOS LANCE CASEY; ALL PHOTOS COURTESY PROMETHEAN POWER SYSTEMS.

SACRED COWS In India, cows are much more than milk producers. Bovines are held in high esteem in Hinduism, the dominant religion in India.

They represent food, fertilizer and economic value. Wandering through traffic, into homes—practically anywhere—the cows are privileged members of society.

No wonder Sorin’s company got the attention of Indian dairy businesses. Keeping precious cow milk fresh could actually be sacred business.

in remote villages create a massive supply chain challenge for dairy processors who collect the milk, pasteurize it and turn it into finished dairy products sold in major urban areas like Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. In a country like India, where nearly 50 percent of the employment is in agriculture, urban prosperity depends heavily on the health and vigor of the rural economy.

Milk is like a river that never stops. Raw milk must be aggregated, transported and processed quickly before it spoils. And it must be done twice a day—morning and evening to coincide with the milking schedule—365 days per year.

For farmers, milk is like liquid gold. Rural households depend on sales of milk for disposable income. Unlike other agricultural crops, milk is a daily harvest, and Indian farmers get paid a good amount for their milk. Up to 60 percent of the price of pasteurized milk sold in urban markets goes to these small dairy farmers.

Chilling milk to 4 degrees Celsius immediately after milking preserves its freshness, prevents spoilage and enables it to be transported once a day instead of twice. Refrigeration at the source could elegantly solve all the problems associated with this distributed production system in a single step. But neither industrial milk refrigeration equipment—widely used in most of the world— nor reliable electricity is generally available in rural India.

Thus, the never-ending schedule and lack of refrigeration means transportation costs are enormous, spoilage rates are high and milk quality is very low. What’s more, only those farmers who

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#1 : Grama and his business partner met frequently with dairy owners and milk distributors to better understand their needs. Like many entrepreneurs, they found that solutions that might work in the developed world didn’t fit in India. #2: Children carry milk from the dairy to the village’s collection point. #3 : Bicycles are often the best mode of transportation in rural India, which can make scaling distribution options difficult. #4: Dairy cows must be milked twice per day, but the milk often spoils before it reaches distributors because Indian roads can be hard to navigate. Grama sought to prolong the milk’s viability to improve the production process.

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#1 : Grama’s solution was a thermal-batterypowered refrigerator that chilled raw milk, preserving it, at the collection point in villages where milk is sourced.

The refrigerator’s thermal battery stored energy from the unreliable electric grid in the form of ice, which kept the milk cool until the dairy processors could come to collect it. #2: Grama, at right, spent time learning from iterations that failed before finding the right solution. He sought feedback from his customers at every step in the journey. #3 : Grama’s thermal battery also works to cool a cold storage system for preserving fruits and vegetables. #4: The chiller was a simple solution that everyone—including poor and uneducated dairy farmers—could use.

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PHOTO #2 LANCE CASEY; PHOTO #4 COURTESY NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS; ALL PHOTOS COURTESY PROMETHEAN POWER SYSTEMS.

Hear Sorin Grama talk about his milkchilling solution in a video in this story online at foodandcity.org.

As it turns out, I had designed a battery for our solar system. I didn’t think much of it because it was just a necessary component to make solar technology work. But it was not just any electrical battery; it was a thermal battery designed specifically for refrigeration. It stores energy in the form of ice and is less expensive and lasts longer than an equivalent electrical battery. With just a few hours of grid power we could run a refrigeration compressor—like the one in your home refrigerator—and make ice. When the grid power is off, the ice chills the milk.

I quickly built a new prototype and tested it—it worked! The simple and inexpensive solution won the day. To solve a big problem in an emerging economy like India’s you often don’t need fancy technologies. You need simple, practical technologies because they’re more affordable and easier to maintain.

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES

Alas, solving the technology didn’t fix everything. Scaling the technology was a whole new challenge. I moved to Mumbai in 2012 to oversee the commercialization of our milk chiller.

Progress was slow. A partnership with a manufacturer in Mumbai fell apart when we realized they were investing in another company that was working on products that would compete with ours. Good suppliers were difficult to find and product quality was inconsistent. We had to be vigilant about every single component that went into our system.

In addition to production challenges, we had trouble creating a market. Dairy processors in India, the potential buyers of our technology, are conservative and slow to change. Fortunately, our outsider status as an American company opened many doors. American-made or -designed products are generally viewed positively in India because they are considered to be higher quality.

We got meetings with general managers of all the top dairies in India. Innovation in the dairy sector is not very common, and these executives were intrigued by our technology.

But converting initial sales meetings into actual orders was far more difficult than we expected. Adopting a new refrigeration product and changing a decades-old milk collection process was too daunting for most dairies. Only a few visionary leaders who understood the value of

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higher quality raw milk would adopt the technology. With much effort in the lab and long hours in the field, we delivered and installed 50 systems by the beginning of 2014.

Suddenly, everything came to a grinding halt.

While our first customers were absorbing and evaluating the new system, other potential customers were waiting to see the outcome of these trials. Months went by without new orders. We started to wonder if we had missed the market.

MEETING MARKET DEMANDS

I spent many days in the field observing our systems, talking to our customers and trying to understand what was wrong. Sometimes customers would tell me directly what they didn’t like about our system. But most of the time, I had to observe and listen carefully to the things they didn’t say in order to understand the hidden needs and frustrations. The effort paid off. The design needed a few more tweaks to make the system easier to clean and operate and more energy efficient. After we made these changes, new orders started to come in within weeks.

Most notably, our very first customer—a charismatic and visionary industry leader who rejected our solar system and challenged me to find a better solution—began to place repeat orders. He became an valuable champion and the largest user of our technology. To date, he has installed more than 250 systems in South India. I owe him a lot of credit for our success: He was tough and friendly at the same time.

Tough because he constantly pushed me to reduce costs and friendly because he was always available to lend a hand when I got stuck. I would spend hours with him drawing concepts and calculating economics of different configurations on a whiteboard in his office. I think he saw a genuine effort on my part, and with that I gained his respect, attention and eventually his business.

It has been a long and arduous journey, but I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned the value of being immersed in the market and the environment where our customers operate. I’ve learned that assumptions need to be frequently checked and adjusted to reality. And I’ve learned that while you might start with a technology looking for a problem to solve, success comes when you actually solve a customer’s problem.

DESIGN FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD When doing business in India, Western business models do not always apply, says Prabhudev Konana, professor of supply chain management at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Most Western business models are based on massive economies of scale, but that doesn’t work in India,” Konana explains. “Production is fragmented. Distribution is extremely complicated.”

With thousands of tiny producers—e.g., dairy operations with one or two cows—and a rural road system that’s sometimes passable only by bicycle, India offers a business environment where simplicity and consistency reign supreme. Technology must work seamlessly, every single time; if it doesn’t, people won’t be willing to risk their tiny margins on it.

“How you design things for less educated, economically poor people is an art in itself,” Konana says.

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RECIPE TRACKER

Are you moving away from cookbooks to other kinds of instructional media? Which cookbook taught you the most? Tweet us @foodcityorg.

TART IN YMBRE DAYS Cookbooks are more than collections of recipes. They may have a theme (Appetizers!

Cookies! Tacos!) or showcase a particular cuisine (Thai, Italian, Parsi). Some cookbooks tell stories to contextualize their dishes or ingredients, offering the history of a meal or its place in a holiday tradition. Others provide detailed instructions about technique, inviting the reader to start with this recipe, then try other ingredients using the same method.

But cookbooks are also products of their time. Just compare the aspics, crown roasts and cheese balls found in Helen Corbitt’s 1957 classic with the sous vide chicken breasts and kale salads in a contemporary volume. Cookbooks reflect not only trends in food preparation and flavors but also the availability of ingredients in a certain era and region.

Take, for instance, “The Forme of Cury,” a collection of recipes recorded by a master cook working in the court of King Richard II. It’s one of the earliest known cookbooks and was probably made as a record of food served, rather than as a working cookbook. There are a handful of copies, all handwritten before the advent of printing centuries later.

“There’s no way really to tell if anyone ever used them, unless you look at the stains on them,” says Ken Albala, a Renaissance historian and food scholar at the University of the Pacific.

“Chances are these were not brought into the kitchen, because usually cooks were not literate.

But whoever wrote these down obviously was.”

Some of the ingredients used in 1390 will seem quite familiar: game (consumed more by nobles with estates), pork, chicken, butter, cheese, eggs, vegetables, spices. But the preparations differ from dishes we eat today.

“The way they think of food, the colors they like, the flavors, the textures, the ingredients—it’s a completely different cuisine” than contemporary European fare, Albala says.

The origins of much medieval cuisine are in the Muslim Middle East, Albala explains. Those ingredients and techniques moved to India with Mughals and then to Spain and the rest of Europe. From there they traveled to Mexico with the conquistadors in the 1500s. “The moles of Mexico are the long-lost cousins of the curries in India,” Albala says.

The generous use of spices in royal repasts was a display of wealth and status. Pepper and cinnamon traveled from India, while cloves and nutmeg originated in Indonesia and ginger came from China. Passing through the hands of Arab and Venetian merchants during their years-long

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journey, the exotic spices in use in the 14th century were exorbitantly expensive, accessible only to the wealthy.

While spices were sold in apothecaries, staples, such as milk, cheese, butter, grains and bread, were available in food markets, set-ups that resemble our modern farmer’s markets.

“Food markets go back to ancient times,” Albala says. “In England, there are markets that started in the middle ages that are still there.” As with any type of market, the laws of supply and demand came into play. In the years following the plague—the period in which the Forme of Cury was written—the population was down, so wages were higher; thus, meat consumption also increased. As the population rebounded, wages fell, and the poor ate less meat.

Diets of the 14th century were influenced by more factors than just the availability of ingredients. Religious traditions and dietary rules informed daily menu planning. “Religion determined what you could eat seasonally and during fast days,” Albala says. “Lent, vigils of saints’ days—probably a third of the whole calendar is fasting.” The Tart in Ymbre Days recipe on this page is a kind of crustless quiche that contains onions, eggs, greens, raisins and “powder douce,” a common mixture of ginger, cinnamon and sugar (the original pumpkin spice!). Ymbre Days are quarterly sets of fasting days that mark the seasons of the Christian calendar. Because they fall outside of Lent, they were considered moderate fast days: meat was prohibited, but eggs were not.

Knowledge about fast days and how to put meals together would have been passed down orally, by peasant families and royal kitchen staffs, without the use of cookbooks. For one thing, most cooks weren’t literate. “We learn by looking and hearing and smelling, and not approximating through words,” Albala says.

In fact, the whole notion of learning through cookbooks is a practice that may not last much longer, Albala believes.

“I think in the future we’ll have interactive videos, or some kind of instructional media where you can stop and ask questions, look closely and zoom in,” Albala says. “Perhaps something that will know what ingredients you have in the kitchen, know what kind of equipment you have, will adjust for your altitude or your allergies and could make working recipes for you. I think probably in our lifetime we’ll see cookbooks go extinct, or they’ll just be a rare, interesting artifact for people who like to collect them.”

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Working together.

Making a difference.

Look around and you’ll find us. We’re in the classroom supporting education.

We’re fighting hunger with donations and warm meals. We’re protecting the environment by recycling. We’re volunteering our time for a worthy cause.

And we’re answering the call for help in times of need.

In short, we’re committed to Helping Here for one reason.

We’re proud to call Texas home. education • volunteerism • hunger relief • environment • disaster relief ©2014 HEB, 13-3946

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Congratulations

ANNETTE WOMACK From your friends and colleagues at

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S TA R T U P S P O T L I G H T

FOOD ENTREPRENEURS FIND CONTINUED SUCCESS

Whether newly hatched companies or enterprises needing a little help getting to the next level, competitors in the 2016 Food+City Challenge Prize are still going strong. We checked in with three of the Silver Prize winners to hear about their progress.

Carolina Medina Agruppa Carolina Medina found herself in a paradoxical place after competing for th​e 2013 Hu​lt Prize, a million-dollar seed-capital competition. Her team, which came together for the contest, finished in second place—but the winner took the entire purse.

Undeterred, Carolina pressed forward with Agruppa, a company that leverages technology to empower mom-and-pop food vendors by providing produce at wholesale prices, eliminating middlemen. After a successful pilot in Kenya for the Hult Prize, Carolina and a partner brought Agruppa back to her home country of Colombia, and it continues to grow.

The basic issue was the cost—not the availability—of food in low-income neighborhoods. In other words, it wasn’t that the apples weren’t arriving, it’s that they were arriving at a very high cost after going through the hands of numerous middlemen, each of whom were taking their cut.

We knew we wanted to make a mobile-based solution where small shops could order directly and bypass the middlemen. Our system aggregates demand for fresh fruit and vegetables from small vendors, creating daily collective orders that add up to wholesale quantities. Vendors are economically empowered, and those living in low-income communities benefit from sustainable access to nutritious food at lower prices.

One of the biggest pivots we had here in Colombia came from the realization that Bogotá is a very large city, and distances are too long for mom-and-pop shops to come to our warehouse and pick up what they ordered the night before. We needed to become a heavy logistics company and incorporate daily deliveries to the shops—Monday through Saturday—into our model.

It was a great pivot because I realized we could be a lot more cost-efficient: It allowed us to increase the capacity of our warehouse rather than create multiple little warehouses all over the

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city where people would come and pick up their orders.

After bootstrapping with our current ordering channels— WhatsApp, SMS or phone calls—we’re ready to build and implement three more sophisticated channels for vendors to order their stock: a personalized app, an integrated voice recognition transactional system and a simple call center for those who are less tech-savvy and for customer service in general. This should also help cut down customer ordering time as well as optimize the logistics behind it all.

And breakeven is on the horizon! Hopefully, with 700 momand-​pop shops—which we should have by mid-​2017—we will become self-​sustainable!

Ashley Colpaart The Food Corridor Ashley Colpaart is a food system innovator whose business helps other food innovators. Inspired by other sharing e​conomy businesses—e.g., Uber, Air BNB—The Food Corridor brings together commercial kitchens with excess capacity and nascent food businesses in need of kitchen space. It’s a win-win for all players, offering restaurants and school kitchens potential new revenue sources, and giving food producers a foot in the door to develop their products and grow their businesses. In June 2016 Ashley launched The Food Corridor’s platform in Colorado, taking on the first stage of building her market of commercial kitchens.

In 2015 I was reviewing applications for ​Community Food Project Grants​to decide who would get funding. Many of the projects wanted to build infrastructure, like processing and distribution centers. But their business plans weren’t always very strong, and many lacked an asset mapping of what infrastructure already existed in their community. I was thinking,

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Learn more about the Food+City Challenge Prize online at foodandcity.org/prize. Read about the 2015, 2016 and 2017 finalists and their innovations.

“How do you know you need to build this facility?”

During that trip, I used Air BnB and Uber for the first time, and it dawned on me that the sharing economy that exists in other sectors hasn’t been applied to the food system. Sharing is something we do with food all the time. We break bread together, people have been sharing kitchens for a long time, co-ops started in agriculture—so I thought, why not apply that same model to the food sector? I chose to do it with kitchens because that’s where a meal starts.

Our platform development process has been very customercentric. We beta-tested our software with 12 shared-use kitchens nationally, watching them use the product and listening to them talk about their business models and what features were essential for them. Then we prioritized those features and built them.

Something our Food Challenge Prize mentor said really stuck with me: “When you’re building a new product, you can build something and maybe people will want it. But if you listen closely to the problem your customer has and build a solution for it, that’s when you win.”

What’s cool about my idea is that it can be applied to any commercial kitchen asset—like refrigerated trucks, or backhauling produce, or freezer or refrigerator space. If a farmer has a bumper crop of tomatoes or there’s a hail storm coming that weekend and they want to harvest before they go to market in a few days but they don’t have a refrigerator, they could hop on The Food Corridor and find some commercial refrigerator space where they could store it for a few days. I see The Food Corridor becoming a pipeline of innovation for the food industry.

Neheet Trivedi Real Food Solutions

I knew I had to partner with somebody who has the skills and background to help build this. Through a mutual friend I met D ​ r.

Rupa Mukherjee​, a practicing gastroenterologist, who was very excited by the idea. She had a lot of patients to whom she was recommending food-based solutions, but there wasn’t a specific solution or product that she really liked. Our idea was to make products for aspects of health, starting with nausea. My role is “make it happen”—bring experts together, ask the right questions, find the manufacturer, find the customers. So I rely on people like Dr. Mukherjee to provide the input to create our products.

We started doing tests with our nutrition bar on cruise ships for people who get nausea from motion sickness. Demand was so high that we focused more of our marketing and sales efforts on that space and a little less on other forms of nausea. We haven’t let pregnant women go by any means, and they’re still a focus of the business. We just found our initial market through motion sickness.

You focus on different markets based on the skills and tools you have. Business is constantly evolving.

Building a company from scratch is tough. You’re competing against incumbents and new companies, you’re competing for mind space, for Internet space. You must be thoughtful about how you’re differentiating, especially with a consumer product.

We have an advantage in that people are looking for our products: They’re looking for morning sickness relief, motion sickness relief, nausea relief, so they often find us. But you must do everything you can to make it easy for them to find you—because we have a solution that we know will help them.

The goal with Real Food Solutions was to build a successful business, and there are many ways to do that. You can raise outside funds or remain private and grow a lifestyle-type business.

We felt that the timing was right for us to partner with another company that had a great brand and a way to reach more customers than we could alone, and we’re excited to join the Pink Stork Solutions team.

Startup to acquisition is th​e ideal path for many new businesses. For Real Food Solutions, that milestone came just five months after winning a silver award at the 2016 Food+City Challenge Prize. The Boston-based company, co-founded

by Neheet Trivedi, uses existing clinical research to create foodbased remedies for everyday ailments, including nausea. In July 2016, they were acquired by Pink Stork Solutions, a company committed to delivering natural products to help alleviate some of the symptoms that come with pregnancy.

The aha moment was seeing my sister have terrible nausea from morning sickness when she was pregnant. She was reluctant to take medication and wished for a food-based solution that would help with her nausea, be easy to eat and provide nutrition.

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FOOD + CITY CHALLENGE PRIZE Innovation in food takes all forms, from making improvements to pallets to creating new avenues for delivering food or designing packaging that increases the shelf life of a food. Since 2015, we’ve hosted a challenge prize for startups in the food space that are challenging our notions of how the supply chain works.

The 2017 Challenge Prize will be awarded on Feb. 4, 2017. Be sure to visit foodandcity.org/prize to learn more about this year’s finalists and their big ideas to improve how we feed cities.

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ON OUR LOADING DOCK

BOOKS Fresh, A Perishable History

Suzanne Friedberg reveals the historical and cultural development of what “fresh” means. As early as the 1930s, consumers worried about eating too much processed food. For a fascinating look at how consumers’ thinking about fresh, frozen, canned and “shelf life” has evolved, this book lays it all out. How we feed cities will build on these histories.

Door to Door, The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

Edward Humes reveals surprising details about how stuff moves around the world. One highlight: You’ll get used an inside look at the logistics of Domino’s Pizza, which has been in the food delivery business for decades. Blue Apron and Instacart, take note.

Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable

Baylen J. Linnekin examines the unintended consequences of well-intentioned food regulations. For example, how grading standards and labeling requirements contribute to the food waste we’re trying to reduce. When was the last time you met a lawyer who argued for fewer regulations, and simpler ones at that?

Feeding Gotham, The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790 to 1860

Gergely Baics uses sophisticated maps to tell the history of New York’s food system over time, showing how market spaces took shape and how food producers such as bakers dispersed themselves over the landscape. It’s dense, but if you want to know why your grocery store is where it is today, study the maps and footnotes.

PODCASTS Heritage Radio Network

This Brooklyn radio station makes podcasts that explain, celebrate and challenge our views of the food system. “​How Great Cities Are Fed​,” moderated by Karen Karp, includes a conversation with Food+City Director Robyn Metcalfe about food logistics and the supply chain. “​What Doesn’t Kill You​” offers views of food system experts, including Baylen Linnekin, who explores all the complications that occur when trying to feed the world.

Eat This Podcast

This podcast transcends the obvious to explore how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion and more.

Gravy

Host Tina Antolini explores southern immigrant food culture, including both new and old food traditions. The podcast digs into lesser-known corners of the region, challenges stereotypes, documents new dynamics and gives voice to the unsung folk who grow, cook and serve our daily meals.

L EFT: (From Gravy Ep. 45) View of a portion of one of the wooden platforms and a building at Manilla Village, established in 1873 by Chinese and Fillipinos and located about 20 miles southeast of Lafitte in Barataria Bay.

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FILMS AND TELEVISION Tsukiji Wonderland

Soon after it was announced in 2014 that the cramped Tsukiji market would be moving to a larger site in Tokyo’s Toyosu neighborhood, filmmaker Naotaro Endo began shooting to commemorate this institution. Interviews with vendors plus commentary from food celebrities make this film a feast for sushi lovers everywhere.

Flowing Data: A Century of Ocean Shipping Animated

Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, created this seasonal, animated map of shipping paths to show how goods moved from 1750 to 1850—long before the Panama or Suez canals opened. Imagine how those two shortcuts changed the way food moved around the world.

Food Forward (PBS)

This series appeals to our enthusiasm for visionaries and innovation within the food system. One episode suggests we might consider foraging in the woods for our food. Another visits Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab to hear from a food psychologist about how we make food choices.

WEBSITES BLDGBLOG​

(​“building blog”) Geoff Manaugh is a writer and futurist who connects technology and humans in a way that will get you thinking about the world around you, including food logistics.

Grasping the urban built environment is essential to understanding how we feed cities.

MIT Media Lab’s ​ Future + Food coLab​

brings together Target, IDEO and MIT. Emphasizing how technology can solve problems in today’s food system, its projects are shaking up how we might produce, deliver and taste food.

Watch for Future + Food events and happenings, mostly in Boston.

GRAVY PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION; TSUKIJI PHOTO COURTESY OF SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack some wisdom about the global food supply chain.

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M A P A R T I S T Check out Josh Cochran’s other work including his obsession with donuts at joshcochran.com.

FOOD + CITY MAPS

REALLY, REALLY SMART CITIES

At Food+City, we think a lot about the relationship between food and our cities. Now, through the artistry of Josh Cochran, we can look at how food might fit into future urban landscapes and what urban designers now call Smart Cities. We contacted three really, really smart people for their visions of what our food-wise city might look like in the future.

JOHN JUDGE

The president of the Appalachian Mountain Club brought his view of how plants, agriculture and the natural environment could mingle in a city.

He envisioned new uses for telephone pole infrastructure as aeroponic poles, vertical gardens to be found every few feet. And he sees car-oriented technology reapplied to food, including parking lot–based planters powered by hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that plug in during working hours; and a just-in-time composting “uber” with sensors that indicate when the bin is full and trigger a self-driving composting barge to come pick it up.

SONIA MASSARI

As director of the GustoLab Food Studies Program in Rome, Massari sees an end to restaurants as we know them but no lack of socializing over food. People will prepare food and eat on the go in their driverless cars; and solar-powered food trucks will grow their own ingredients in mobile gardens. City squares and green spaces—some on rooftops—will become open-air gyms and community gardens. And neighborhoods will be equipped with digital vending machines that sell fruit, vegetables, milk and other fresh products.

In Massari’s future, every flower bed and traffic barrier will become agricultural land. Through an app, all citizens will be able to water plants and take care of these areas. Urban gardens and agricultural areas will be monitored using Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and digital devices. And perhaps most notably, food waste will disappear: All leftover food from supermarkets, kitchens, industries or urban

agriculture will be gathered by food collection apps (which will direct food to people who need it) or it will be sold in supermarkets featuring soon-to-expire foods sold at a discount.

LAURIE ZAPALAC​

An urban planner who works with cities as centers of innovation and food distribution, Zapalac sees kitchens as hubs of information that feed individual food supply chains. The details of our kitchen inventories will be available on our smart devices, so we avoid buying duplicate bottles of mustard—but also so that grocery delivery services can be truly automated. Along the way, recycling and compostable waste collection will be complementary services to grocery delivery: Containers will be reused rather than recycled (think the return of the milkman), and our food scraps will become the compost feeding the produce that will eventually become our next great meal. Thinking more broadly, in neighborhoods once recognized as food deserts, an expanding network of community foodscapes will combine concepts from the edible education movement with innovative forms of job training—building capacity by strengthening the soil and enhancing the beauty of once depleted communities. These places will also function as stages and urban “dining rooms,” providing venues where local culture and local identity can be shared and celebrated.

LO O K CLO SE LY at the illustration (following spread) to see what innovations you discover.

Then share your ideas and sketches with us on Twitter or Instagram @foodcityorg and use #SmartCities.

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Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

When the last food mile is the middle of nowhere.

Really. page 20 Behind the scenes of Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market. page 30 How Rio fed its residents, visitors and Olympians during the 2016 Games. page 40 ISSUE II

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