fishcakes,
flames
FLAMES:
Vintage Flower
Imagine being able to remotely and anonymously search through locals in your area, browse through pictures of them, and chat with those who also found you attractive.
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#Tinder As A Memories Methodological Tool The Hidden of Plants
Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone, 1936
#TINDER AS A METHODOLOGICAL TOOL
& FLAMES
BY ANYA EVANS
Imagine if you could use your smartphone to do this from the comfort of your own home. For those not familiar with Tinder, it’s a hugely popular dating app that allows users to swipe through seemingly endless potential partners and form matches with those who were attracted to you.
BY SARAH LASKOW
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FLAMES:
Tinder functions by accessing the user’s location and showing Tinder users based on age, gender, and distance preferences from 1 to 160 kilometres away. It only allows you to be approached by people who you have chosen. As a woman, you are more or less guaranteed matches, conversation, and dates. Imagine the kind of safe, manageable contact with new people you might have. Now imagine, what this might mean for an ethnographer conducting research in a militarised war zone that is both socially and religiously conservative, divided by strict borders and with little to no contact between the divided populations. My research looks at everyday life and the politics of space amongst Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Palestinians with West Bank ID cards are forbidden to exit the West Bank without permits, which are difficult to obtain from the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Meanwhile Jewish Israelis are forbidden to enter areas of the West Bank designated as Area A – the largest Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus,
Bethlehem, Jenin, and so on. The remaining 60% of the West Bank is “shared” between Palestinian towns and villages, illegal Israeli settlers, and the IOF. This setting offers me the unique experience of learning about two culturally different but geographically proximate groups who, despite regular outbreaks of hostility between them, have relatively little contact with each other. As an ethnographer, conducting research among both Palestinians and Israeli settlers is not an option in terms of building trusting relationships or managing my own emotions about the conflict. Movement after sundown in the West Bank is restricted to those who have cars, and the dangers of nighttime IOF raids, checkpoints, and the surge of attacks on settlers have to be factored in to travelling between spaces. Safely building relationships and knowledge about members of both communities without arousing suspicion or compromising my well-being is a difficult task, not to mention building personal and even romantic relations with those around me.
Anya Evans
“Luckily Tinder is not restricted by the occupation’s enforced ethnic separation, placing Palestinians, Israelis, and IOF soldiers on a relatively equal playing field of access.”
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#Tinder As A Methodological Tool
pictures of me in various neutral locations, removed any personal information (such as school or university that are automatically included from your Facebook profile). I also included a short introductory sentence on my profile in English explaining that I was new to the region and adjusted my settings to include male users aged 24-35 within 45 kilometres of me. While I did experiment with viewing both women and men, Tinder does not make it possible to converse with users unless they “match” you, which means that as a woman trying to talk to other women who identify as heterosexual is difficult.
We are no longer living in the days of fieldwork as a remote exile of Malinowskian standards. While loneliness in the field may be inevitable, smartphones and social media have also changed the way we conduct fieldwork – we have to work a lot harder to distance ourselves from our friends and family if we conduct our research abroad. Once in the field, I found myself using my phone just as much as ever to keep in touch with friends and family. Having lived in London for the past few years I was accustomed to using Tinder, where it has become fairly common among single young people. Naturally I was curious about how it was being used locally and I found plenty of nearby users. I created a new profile with
With the range of distance that Tinder allows, I discovered users over Israel’s Apartheid Wall in Jerusalem (14km), Tel Aviv (45km), Amman in Jordan (75km), and the south of Lebanon (140km). Searching closer to home, Tinder provided an unpleasant reminder that for those who stay within their West Bank cities, illegal and often hostile Israeli settlers are everywhere. I was horrified and yet fascinated as I swiped my way through hundreds of profiles to see Israeli man after Israeli man, as close as 2 kilometres away, inside Palestine. As an anthropologist looking at everyday life, daily routines, and how people use and understood the ethnically segregated space around them, I was hooked.
Associated Newspapers Ltd
In addition, since smartphones have become more ubiquitous than personal computers in Palestinian and Israeli society, their owners have been afforded independent and private Internet use. A new kind of private communication between individuals can now occur, including romantic and sexual exchanges, occurring on such popular messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Viber, which provides instant messaging features for known people. Conversely, Tinder opens up the potential of messaging between unknown individuals, with an explicitly romantic and/or sexual interest.
“While there has been considerable discussion of how we use social media within anthropological circles, in my review of the literature I found that little attention has been paid to Tinder as a tool, whether used personally or professionally.”
Tinder and similar location-based apps allow us to see how users present themselves to the world and have remote contact with otherwise inaccessible populations. Of course, such access in a romantic and/or sexual context also raises some important ethical and methodological questions. How can we harness popular social media platforms for research purposes? Can we differentiate between using them both personally and professionally? What are the ethical ramifications of using something like Tinder as a research tool?
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FLAMES:
Social mapping
If you stay inside Palestinian cities and you have no personal connections with Israelis, the spatiality of the occupation can be hard to understand. There is no longer an area called Palestine that is populated solely by Palestinians. There are very few maps illustrating the demographic breakdowns of the Occupied West Bank, not to mention up to date ones as the illegal Israeli settlements continue to expand. “Area A”[1] is limited to the biggest cities, shrinking and often violated. The spaces between and encroaching into these cities (“Area C”, about 60% of the West Bank) are now populated by approximately 600,000 Jewish settlers, including the ultra-Zionist, the ultra-orthodox, and increasingly the right-wing working classes, all attracted to the settlements’ government subsidisation of housing (for Jewish citizens only). The populations are mixed, but not mixing, and education about either side is detrimental and/or non-existent.
Some shared Facebook or other social media interests as well as some peace-building initiatives bring people into contact who might not have been otherwise, but Tinder shows you from the privacy of your home exactly which users are around you (again, filtered through personalised options of gender, age range, and distance). For those who didn’t grow up here, watching the settlements arrive and expand, it is very difficult to conceive of the space not always having been the way it is now, nor the extent of the settler presence.
“Tinder assisted in my understanding of just how invasive and close Israeli presence has come to one of the last strongholds of Palestinian space since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.” Getty Images
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#Tinder As A Methodological Tool
Nationalism
[1] This is discernable from name, language used on profile, and general physiology/use of national symbols in profiles.
[2] The Occupied West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C after the 1994 Oslo Accords. Area A contains the major Palestinian cities, Area B is designated mixed industrial space, and Area C, which over 60% of the West Bank is designated, is mixed Palestinian and settler space, where Palestinians are forbidden from building new structures.
The nationalism I discovered on Tinder was somehow both alarming and fascinating. Most Israeli men I saw had at least one picture of them posing proudly with their guns in army uniform, images from their three years of mandatory national service. Israeli users also often used nationalist memes in lieu of a personal photo or had the Israeli flag washed over their picture. I found far more Israelis than Palestinians[2], and those Palestinian male users generally preferred to use nationalist or romantic memes and quotes, or images of men with keffiiyehs over their faces throwing stones – the archetypal image of the Palestinian resistance actor. Presumably these photos also serve to provide anonymity; Tinder necessitates its users to post pictures on their profile, but it does not discriminate on the content of the picture. Stock images, jokes, and memes are also often used to maintain user privacy. In both conservative Jewish and Muslim cultures, Tinder creates a context where young men and women may be alone together, going against social convention. Therefore its users may prefer to keep themselves anonymous while browsing other users.
The theme of the male body as defender is also present among Palestinian users. Denied a national army permitted to engage in combat with its occupier, Palestinian men are often civilian soldiers, responsible for the protection of their homes and land. However, as the Israeli occupation government criminalises the right of resistance, the Palestinian soldier hides his face behind his keffiyeh or hides his identity entirely behind a selection of romantic quotes and ideas.  It must be acknowledged that because Tinder users are most likely in pursuit of romance and/or sex, the ways in which users communicate with each other may be flirtatious, sexually forward, or presenting a more attractive and accommodating version of themselves. One could say politely that it’s a ‘less than professional’ context. My matches often directed our conversations towards things we had in common or places we could go, paying me compliments, asking when we could meet, and extolling their personal virtues in an attempt to get my phone number and/or meet. The way we present ourselves on Tinder is not necessarily the way we may present ourselves in other formats and platforms – for example we may be more flirtatious, try to appear more outgoing, more funny, or otherwise more appealing to the opposite sex. But since this behavioural adjustment may also happen
Israeli Tinder users appear to concretise a Zionist ambition of recreating Jews as independent and defensive. Israeli mandatory reserve service requires male citizens to be lifelong soldiers, defenders of the Jewish State. The male Israeli body should be strong, muscular, and powerful.
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in face-to-face encounters between anthropologists and their interlocutors, does this mean we cannot use it as a form of legitimate empirical data collection? As an example, if I ever confessed my own politics or residence in Palestine to my Israeli matches, they often attempted to ‘convert’ and ‘explain’ to me their side, or quickly label me a terrorist sympathiser. The Palestinder Project[3] documents the average content of such exchanges, and while presented in a comedic fashion, the creators use screenshots of conversations between the two groups to emphasise the miseducation and mistrust among the populations.
[3] A tongue-in-cheek look at several foreigners’ Tinder and Grinder conversations with Israelis while living in the Palestinian West Bank during the 2014 Gaza War.
Tinder conversations in general are marketed as stereotypically brief and light, flirtatious. Here in the West Bank chats between Tinder users can quickly turn into a heated political argument unless directed away from the issues on the ground: the occupation, the Wall, the mobility restrictions, the IOF, my work. In this sense I too was adjusting the way I communicated with Israelis in order to get them to communicate with me.
FLAMES:
Cultural knowledge Tinder is also useful for expanding my knowledge of Israeli culture, as a kind of social gauge, a way to keep in touch with Israelis on my own terms with a relatively anonymous profile. When chatting with Israeli Tinder matches that I chose for both personal and professional reasons, I would tell them I lived in Jerusalem. And as I got to know the city better, I was able to provide more convincing details about where I might live, as well as which details to leave out. If I felt like provoking a political discussion I could even ‘come clean’ about my real work or location. I was even lucky enough to find a few who lived in the settlement I planned to conduct further research in. Whenever I did tell settlers I was researching them, they told me either that there was ‘nothing there’ or that they were ‘monkeys.’ Upon learning I was a foreigner, most men wanted to know my opinion about the regional political situation. My answer was usually that it was ‘complicated,’ and many responded with the view that ‘Arabs wanted war’ and they were proud to have served in the IOF that violently oppresses them. “Palestine”, for these men, was simply a place referred to as where the “hostile Arabs” live and where
Language practice
they went when serving in the IOF, not a place where foreigners might safely go or where Tinder might happen.
Tinder is exceptionally useful for keeping up on language skills. While I currently work in Palestine, my two years of Hebrew study have deteriorated – apart from conversational practice on Tinder. As similar Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic are two languages that are not to be confused, so this text-based method saved me the embarrassment of mixing up spoken Hebrew and Arabic with the wrong people. Using Tinder, I could have small conversations in Hebrew and keep my vocabulary alive without needing to speak out loud and avoiding confusing vocabulary. It’s not perfect, but it has certainly been useful.
I only ever met up with one match who fulfilled my research criteria, and because I was on the fence about whether it was a research or romantic interaction, I didn’t tell him about my work. It became clear to me during our date that we weren’t a romantic match, and since he still seemed interested in pursuing a romantic path I decided it was unethical to continue to meet with him as a research contact. I explained the situation to him but he expressed a desire to continue to pursue a romantic relationship despite my decision against it. Aside from the fact that he didn’t accept my rejection, I felt uncomfortable trying to build a working relationship with someone who would be waiting for me to ‘change my mind’ about him. Although the situation of unrequited attraction between researchers and interlocutors may well be common, Tinder’s remoteness allowed me to navigate this discomfort in a new and potentially safer way – I never had to use my real name, phone number, or feel rude disappearing afterwards.
Tinder as a methodological tool Accessing my research subjects in this remote and limited manner allows me to multitask, ethnographically, and ‘go over to the other side’ occasionally to check in with my informants on my own terms. If I want, I can pick an Israeli seemingly at random from Tinder, travel the short distance across the Apartheid Wall to West Jerusalem, talk to them, and then return to my own fieldsite where dating is difficult and contact with Israelis is limited, as is even leaving the West Bank for most. Despite maintaining honest relations with my Tinder matches, I feel a twinge of guilt when using data I’ve gleaned from conversations or people I’ve met from Tinder, as if this is somehow not legitimate anthropological knowledge.
Stockfresh
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#Tinder As A Methodological Tool
“Ethically, we must wonder if it is acceptable to meet potential research subjects in a dating or romantic context when you might have no intention of becoming involved with them romantically.”
So the question is, how do other people use Tinder and any similar social media/apps for their work? Where do we draw a line with what is and isn’t deemed scientific, objective, anthropological data? What are the anthropological uses for Tinder other than in the investigation of divided populations? These days ethnographic fieldwork is often accompanied by our smartphones, WIFI, Facebook, and the ability to stay in regular contact with our loved ones, colleagues, and new research contacts. Alongside this we have new ways of meeting and staying in touch with our interlocutors, new ways of meeting new people that can come with certain contexts or expectations, which requires us to investigate the ways we collect data and the ramifications behind them. Using romance as a context through which we can explore the cultures that we live in, and in my case, the ones that we don’t, can open otherwise closed doors. Meanwhile the remote quality of smartphone communication gives an added protection of distance and safety for ethnographers unable to move freely between spaces.
Or alternatively, is it ethically acceptable to meet potential research subjects in a dating or romantic context when you do have the intention of becoming involved with them romantically? I have been, for the most part, honest and open with those I have met regarding my intentions and profession, but this doesn’t necessarily stop people’s feelings from being hurt, or worse. Whatever my intention is in a new conversation with a Tinder match or Tinder interlocutor, I have always informed them that I’m a researcher of Israelis, which I can then position myself as politically neutral or otherwise – this is also a tactic I use outside the realm of Tinder, depending on who I’m talking to. If necessary I can hide the elements of my work that might trigger an argument or the portrayal of myself as a person opposed to Israel. This is achieved by highlighting the less political elements of my work and focusing on Israeli culture, which tends to flatter my (Israeli) Tinder contacts and potentially gain insight into their experiences. These are techniques that anthropologists may also employ in face-to-face interactions. And thus far it has worked, in that my interlocutors on Tinder have been accepting and interested in my work, often offering to meet and tell me about their lives. Establishing the context of research before a date or a romantic interaction where either party is free to reject the company of the other party felt like an interview situation to me, where the premise is similar.
“Tinder might not be the most perfect way of conducting ethnographic research, but it certainly opens up a new space for safe cultural exploration for ethnographers in difficult locations.”
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FRISÉE:
Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Inside a quiet revolution in the study of the world’s other great kingdom. 09
The Hidden Memories of Plants
THE HIDDEN MEMORIES OF PLANTS Robert Zhao Renhui
BY SARAH LASKOW
“Monica Gagliano began to study plant behavior because she was tired of killing animals.� Now an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, when she was a student and postdoc, she had been offing her research subjects at the end of experiments, the standard protocol for many animals studies.
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FRISÉE:
If she was to work on plants, she could just sample a leaf or a piece of root. When she switched her professional allegiance to plants, though, she brought with her some ideas from the animal world and soon began exploring questions few plant specialists probe—the possibilities of plant behavior, learning, and memory. “You start a project, and as you open up the box there are lots of other questions inside it, so then you follow the trail,” Gagliano says. “Sometimes if you track the trail, you end up in places like Pavlovian plants.” In her first experiments with plant learning, Gagliano decided to test her new subjects the same way she would animals. She started with habituation, the simplest form of learning. If the plants encountered the same innocuous stimulus over and over again, would their response to it change?
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The Hidden Memories of Plants
they were dropped, they didn’t react at all. It wasn’t that they were worn out: When she shook them, they still shut their leaves tight. It was as if they knew that being dropped was nothing to freak out about. Three days later, Gagliano came back to the lab and tested the same plants again. Down they went, and … nothing. The plants were just as stoic as before. This was a surprise. In studies of animals such as bees, a memory that sticks for 24 hours is considered long-term. Gagliano wasn’t expecting the plants to keep hold of the training days later. “Then I went back six days later, and did it again, thinking surely now they forgot,” she says. “Instead, they remembered, exactly as if they had just received the training.”
C.G.N. Turnbull
At the center of the experiment was the plant Mimosa pudica, which has a dramatic response to unfamiliar mechanical stimuli: Its leaves fold closed, perhaps to scare away eager herbivores. Using a specially designed rail, Gagliano introduced her M. pudica to a new experience. She dropped them, as if they were on a thrill ride in an amusement park for plants. The mimosa plants reacted. Their leaves shut tight. But as Gagliano repeated the stimulus—seven sets of 60 drops each, all in one day—the plants’ response changed. Soon, when
She waited a month and dropped them again. Their leaves stayed open. According to the rules that scientists apply to animals, the mimosa plants had demonstrated that they could learn. In the study of the plant kingdom, a slow revolution is underway. Scientists are beginning to understand that plants have abilities, previously unnoticed and unimagined, that we’ve only
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ever associated with animals. In their own ways, plants can see, smell, feel, hear, and know where they are in the world. One recent study found that clusters of cells in plant embryos act a lot like brain cells and help the embryo to decide when to start growing. Of the possible plant talents that have gone under-recognized, memory is one of the most intriguing. Some plants live their whole lives in one season, while others grow for hundreds of years. Either way, it has not been obvious to us that any of them hold on to past events in ways that change how they react to new challenges. But biologists have shown that certain plants in certain situations can store information about their experiences and use that information to guide how they grow, develop, or behave. Functionally, at least, they appear to be creating memories. How, when, and why they form these memories might help scientists train plants to face the challenges—poor soil, drought, extreme heat—that are happening with increasing frequency and intensity. But first they have to understand: What does a plant remember? What is better to forget?
FRISÉE:
Scientists have shied away from studying what might be called plant cognition in part because of its association with pseudoscience, like the popular 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants. Certain types of plant memories were mixed up, too, with discredited theories of evolution. One of the most wellunderstood forms of plant memory, for example, is vernalization, in which plants retain an impression of a long period of cold, which helps them determine the right time to produce flowers. These plants grow tall through the fall, brace themselves during winter, and bloom in the longer days of spring—but only if they have a memory of having gone through that winter.
This poetic idea is closely associated with Trofim Lysenko, one of the Soviet Union’s most infamous scientists. Lysenko discovered early in his career that by chilling seeds, he could turn winter varieties of grains, normally planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, into spring varieties, planted and harvested in the same growing season. He was, in essence, implanting a false memory of winter in plants that need a cold signal to grow.
Despite this insight, Lysenko was not a very good scientist. But after he published early work on vernalization in the late 1920s, the Soviet government, looking for an agricultural panacea, inundated him with money and prestige. As Lysenko gained power, he made outrageous claims about his original idea. Vernalization, he said, could transform all kinds of plants, including potatoes and cotton, and boost the bounty of Soviet lands.
Trofim Lysenko
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The Hidden Memories of Plants
Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin, 1935. Joseph Stalin stands on the right
Trofim Lysenko
The evidence for these claims was scant, but that didn’t matter. By 1936, Lysenko led a major research institute and was a member of the Central Executive Committee, the nexus of Soviet power. With the help of a government-appointed philosopher, Lysenko developed a theory of his work that mixed Marxism with the discredited ideas of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The offspring of vernalized plants, he argued, could inherit that acquired characteristic, so that by changing their environment he could create new breeds of staple crops in a fraction of the time of traditional breeding techniques—just as, by changing the environment of the working
class, communism could create a new breed of men. “All the claims were based on a principle of malleability, that genes were not all that important,” says Loren Graham, an emeritus historian at Harvard who has tracked Lysenko’s career. “Lysenko was a little unclear on the existence of genes.” In practice, Lysenko’s theory fell apart. He couldn’t breed new varieties of grains that inherited memories of winter. He had promised fields fuller than ever before, but his ideas couldn’t save the country from famine in 1946 and ’47. And when geneticists challenged his ideas, Lysenko denounced them, which
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led to imprisonment and death for hundreds of scientists. He is often said to be responsible for creating a missing generation of Russian geneticists, who either gave up their work, left the country, or were punished for going against him. Without them, Lysenko never could see where he was right (plants could form these memories of winter) and where he had gone wrong (this type of memory, at least, cannot be transmitted across generations). It took a generation of scientists, working in the West, to uncover the true secrets of the phenomenon Lysenko claimed as his own but never truly understood.
FRISÉE:
Even as Lysenko was making his grandiose claims, scientists on the other side of the Iron Curtain were trying to understand how vernalization works. Some of the most important investigations to examine this mystery took place in Tübingen, Germany, in the lab of Georg Melchers and Anton Lang. Melchers was a leading biologist of plant development, and Lang was a stateless, refugee Russian biologist. Together they studied vernalization in search of the biochemical secret of flowering, a hypothetical plant hormone scientists called “florigen.” One of their study subjects was a nightshade called henbane, Hyoscyamus niger. Some plants flower after reaching a certain point in their development, like teenagers who hit puberty and start to parade their newfound sexuality immediately, regardless of the consequences. Other plants, though, behave more like teenagers who wait for summer break to go crazy: They only flower when they receive cues from their environment that it’s the ideal time to do so. Henbane is one of the latter and requires both a period of cold and the right light to bloom. Rather than growing and dying in one season, as annual plants do, certain varieties of henbane are biennials, with a life cycle that spans two growing seasons. In their first spring and summer, these plants grow as much as they can, but hold back from flowering. Only in the following spring do they burst into bloom—creamy white flowers smudged in their centers with red-wine purple that runs through the veins on their petals. For a biennial, these dual requirements make sense: They prevent the plant
from flowering in the fall, when the light is right but the cold days of winter would doom their flowers. While trying to understand how vernalization and day length work in concert to make henbane flower, Melchers and Lang probed the limits of the plant’s memory of winter. In one experiment, they vernalized the plants by chilling them in a fridge and then tried to reverse the process by blasting them with warmth. The plants, they found, formed lasting impressions of the cold relatively quickly. After a day or two of chilling, the scientists could still “de-vernalize” the plants, but after four days, that possibility had vanished—the plants remained vernalized. In practice, this means that a warm spell in February won’t trick henbane into forgetting the cold weeks they have experienced. In another experiment, they withheld the ideal day length. The vernalized plants continued to grow but never flowered. Even after 10 months, when they were exposed to the day length that told them it was the right time, they would still bloom. They had remembered that experience of cold for close to a year. Melchers and Lang didn’t describe vernalization as a “plant memory,” but today it’s one of the most studied examples. Their experiments showed that plants could hold on to their pasts, for much longer than a person might expect, like undercover agents, fully trained but awaiting the signal to act.
Hyoscyamus niger, or henbane
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The Hidden Memories of Plants
An illustration of Hyoscyamus niger.
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FRISÉE:
When most people look at a plant, it’s hard to imagine that it’s waiting for anything. Plants don’t seem to have long-term plans. If they lack water, they droop. If it rains, they perk up. If they sense sunlight, they grow toward it. To our human way of thinking, it doesn’t seem like plants are doing very much at all. But we don’t recognize memories in people or dogs just by looking at them, but rather by their behavior. The dog comes when called by name; the person smiles in recognition. For the mimosa or henbane plants, something from the past changed how they reacted in the future—even if we don’t notice or understand why. Scientists first started talking about “plant memory” explicitly in the 1980s. A team in France, for example, happened upon a type of memory in which a plant recalled a history of damage to a leaf on one side of its stem and therefore dedicated its energy to growing in the other direction. Since then, scientists have found that certain plants can remember experiences of drought and dehydration, cold and heat, excess light, acidic soil, exposure to short-wave radiation, and a simulation of insects eating their leaves. Faced with the same stress again, the plants modify their responses. They might retain more water, become more sensitive to light, or improve their tolerance to salt or cold. In some cases, these memories are even passed down to the next generation, as Lysenko thought they could be, though in an entirely different way than he imagined. We now know that plants are capable of much
more than they’re given credit for. They can “hear” vibrations, which might help them recognize insect attacks. They share information by broadcasting chemicals through the air or from their roots. In the study of the memories they form, the next step has been to understand how they do it.
fate. There’s a whole world of epigenetic activity around DNA that impacts which stretches of code get expressed, or translated into action. Florigen turned out to be a tiny protein, too small for the techniques of Lang’s generation to identify. Even if they had found it, they would have been missing a key to the mystery of what makes biennials flower. Amasino’s generation, on the other hand, finally found the right level of activity—the epigenetic level—to see this process in action.
In Melchers and Lang’s time, hormones were the leading edge of plant science. The technique for discovering new hormones was elegantly brutish: Scientists ground up leaves before extracting and isolating the small molecules they released. They then sprayed the hormones back onto plants to see what happened. Gibberellin, for instance, stimulates growth. Today, it’s sprayed on grapes to make the fruit fatter and less tightly clumped. “A great deal of plant physiology was looking for these types of signals,” says Richard Amasino, a professor of biochemistry at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But the signals in flowering had not been found, despite a lot of grinding up plants.”
For example, the mechanism that controls vernalization and flowering in Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, a plant often used as a model in laboratories, is like a Rube Goldberg device of proteins and gene expression. The plant has a set of genes that create the proteins that cause flowers to form. Before vernalization, the cells are full of a second protein, named FLC, that represses those key, flowerpromoting genes. But when the plant is exposed to cold, its cells slow the production of FLC until it stops, and the balance of protein power then changes. The cells start producing more and more flower-promoting proteins, until the plant is ready to burst into bloom. In this case, a simple way to think about this epigenetic action is as a switch. The cold acts as a signal to the cell to switch the way its genes are expressed, from “don’t flower” to “flower, flower, flower.” And even when the cold signal is gone, the switch stays flipped. So, when days lengthen, the plants know it’s the right time to bloom.
By the 1970s and early ’80s, plant scientists still hadn’t found the biochemical secret to flowering. “When I began in science, this was a big mystery,” says Amasino. To understand it and begin to unlock plant memory, scientists needed the insights of molecular genetics and, in particular, epigenetics, the mechanisms that switch particular genes on and off. In recent years, scientists have realized that the genome alone doesn’t determine an organism’s
“Even when it’s spring and summer,” explains Amasino, “whatever the cold did remains as a memory.”
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The Hidden Memories of Plants
Left—from unvernalized seeds; Right—from vernalized seeds
Are plants secretly soaking up memories, flicking their epigenetic switches on and off in response to every significant stimulus they receive? It seems unlikely. Last year, a group of plant scientists based in Australia argued in the journal Science Advances that, for plants, forgetting (or not forming memories at all) may be a more powerful tool for survival than memory, and that “memory, in
particular epigenetic memory, is likely a relatively rare event.” Peter Crisp, the lead author of the paper, now at University of Minnesota, makes it his job to stress plants out. He and his colleagues might stop watering plants and let them dry out before hydrating the thirsty plants and watching how they recover. It’s been established that in certain plants, epigenetic
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memories of drought, along with other stressors such as low light and herbivory, can even make the leap across generations. So Crisp and his colleagues might do this for multiple generations (it gets interesting after three) before testing if the plants remember the ordeal they’ve been through and become more tolerant of drought. “We don’t really see that,” says Crisp.
FRISÉE:
from the Australian National University. “It happens to have this chemical marker, a change at a molecular level.” Identifying that change and attributing it to the experimental stress can be difficult. Even when scientists know a memory can form in one plant, they may not necessarily recognize it in another. The memory mechanism involving FLC that Amasino worked on, for instance, only works in thale cress. Beet plants and wheat plants have their own molecular mechanisms of vernalization, which serve the same function but evolved independently. Identifying a true memory out in the field is significantly harder.
Peter Crisp and his colleagues
Plants, he points out, have incredible abilities to rebound from stressful conditions. In a paper published this summer, for instance, Crisp and his colleagues found that plants subjected to light stress rebounded rapidly— just think how, with the right care, a neglected houseplant can bounce back from a wilted, brown mess. Scientists have now reported plenty of examples of plant memory formation, but naturally they are less likely to publish results of experiments where plants could potentially form memories but don’t. One of the biggest challenges of the field of study is even identifying whether a plant has formed a memory or not. When Crisp and his colleagues design lab studies, they have to control for any number of confounding factors to determine if any memories they observe are the result of the experimental stress. “It’s not as though the plant experiences something and says, ‘Oh, I remember this,’” says Steven Eichten, Crisp’s coauthor,
In their experiments, however, Crisp and Eichten don’t observe many plant memories being formed. What if, they ask, plant memory is rare simply because it’s better for plants to forget? “Having a memory, keeping track molecularly of signals that you’ve received in the past from your environment, does have a cost,” says Eichten. “Since we don’t see memories all that often … maybe plants don’t want to remember things all the time. Maybe it’s better to put their energies elsewhere.” Even when memories do form, they can fade. Another research group has shown, for example, that a plant might form an epigenetic memory of salt stress and pass it along across generations, but that if the stress fades, so does the memory. A plant that remembers too much might sacrifice healthy growth to be constantly on guard against drought, flood, salt, insects. Better, perhaps, to let those negative experiences go, instead of always preparing for the worst.  It’s inevitable that we try to understand plant memory and cognition through our own
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experience of the world. To an extent, even using the word “memory” is an evocative anthropic shorthand for what is actually going on in these plants. “We use the term ‘plant memory,’ but you could find other ways to try to describe it,” says Eichten. But “semi-heritable chromatin factors” doesn’t quite have the same legibility. “Sometimes I have to try to explain my work to my mom, and you say, ‘Well, maybe it’s like a memory … ’ Even if you think about human memories, it’s still kind of an abstract thing, right? You can think about neural connections, but often in common dialogue, when you think of memory, you know what a memory is. At that level, maybe you don’t care about where it’s coming from or what specific neurons are tied to it.” That’s closer to the position from which Gagliano, the ecologist, approaches plant memory. Unlike the molecular geneticists, she’s less interested in the specific mechanisms of memory formation than she is in the process of learning itself. “Of course plants can remember,” she says. “I know that behaviorally a plant will exhibit a change in behavior that is predictable—if condition A is met, then the plant should be able to do X. So by being able to do X, it means the plant has to remember what happened before, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do X.” The leaf-closing M. pudica isn’t the only plant that Gagliano can teach new tricks. In another experiment, she grew garden pea plants in a Y-shaped maze and tested whether they could learn to associate different cues, wind and light. Plants gravitate toward light, and in the experiment, Gagliano added an additional cue, airflow produced by a fan. For some of the plants, light and air flowed from the same side of the Y-shape. For others, light and air came from different directions.
The Hidden Memories of Plants
“With the peas, I turned the dial up,” she says. “Not only did the pea need to learn something, but he learned something that meant nothing, that was totally irrelevant. Mimosa had to follow just one experience, the drop, ‘What does this mean?’ While the pea had to follow two events occurring”
“In that context, memory is actually not the interesting bit—of course you have memory, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do the trick,” she says. “Memory is part of the learning process. But—who is doing the learning? What is actually happening? Who is it that is actually making the association between fan and light?”
—the fan and the light.
After training the plants, Gagliano withheld the light. When she next turned on the fans, she had switched them to the opposite branch of the Y shape. She wanted to see if the plants had learned to associate airflow with light, or its absence, strongly enough to react to the breeze, even if it was coming from a different direction, with no light as a signal. It worked. The plants that had been trained to associate the two stimuli grew toward the fan; the plants that had been taught to separate them grew away from the airflow.
It’s telling that Gagliano uses the word “who,” which many people would be unlikely to apply to plants. Even though they’re alive, we tend to think of plants as objects rather than dynamic, breathing, growing beings. We see them as mechanistic things that react to simple stimuli. But to some extent, that’s true of every type of life on Earth. Everything that lives is a bundle of chemicals and electrical signals in dialogue with the environment in which it exists. A memory, such as of the heat of summer on last year’s beach vacation, is a biochemical marker registered from a set of external inputs. A plant’s epigenetic memory, of the cold of winter months, on a fundamental level, is not so different.
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iStockphoto LP.
One 84-year-old librarian has spent more than half her life building a comprehensive database of cookbooks throughout history.
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The Archive of Eating
THE ARCHIVE OF EATING Time & Life Pictures
BY BEE WILSON
In an era when we spend less time cooking than humans ever have, we are insatiable for recipes. Every year, globally, some 24,000 new cookbooks are published, while recipes posted online have become as uncountable as grains of rice.
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Our refrigerators display wishful clippings; our kitchen shelves heave with food ‘‘bibles.’’ And still we desire more: the make-ahead recipes, the genius recipes, the 10 avocado recipes we can’t live without. What secrets do we hope they will impart? Some promise to make us better cooks; others, to save us time or improve our health. But the comfort is mostly in possessing them, like hoarded potions. ‘‘People are trying to get control of their lives,’’ the food historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton said to me recently, explaining the emotional pull of recipes. ‘‘One of the ways is through food.’’
Barbara Ketcham Wheaton
greeting each dish with appetite and her companions with warmth. She does not seem remotely obsessive. But for half a century, she has quietly pursued a project of single-minded devotion — a database called ‘‘The Cook’s Oracle,’’ in which she intends to log every recipe, ingredient and technique in the vast majority of all the cookbooks published in America and Europe.
Wheaton, who is 84, has inquiring eyes, a soft, wry voice and gray hair held back with bobby pins. She is the author of the 1983 book ‘‘Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table From 1300 to 1789,’’ a superb history of gastronomy in France spritzed with darts of wit, like lemon juice on a fillet of turbot. For 25 years, she worked as a curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in Cambridge, Mass., and I’ve known her for about half that time through our shared interest in food history. Over lunch, she exudes a humorous intelligence,
The DB — Wheaton’s fond nickname for her outlandishly ambitious undertaking — starts with medieval manuscripts like ‘‘The Forme of Cury,’’ a collection penned on vellum in the 14th century. (Typical recipe: pottage of gourds, a kind of braised pumpkin with saffron.) It provisionally ends in the early 20th century, with instructions for such dishes as ‘‘Improved Sausage,’’ by Mrs. Clara Ware (the improvement is to add a ‘‘heaping teaspoonful’’ of ground cloves to the sausage meat). In theory, more modern and non-Western books could be added as well; once complete,
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Wheaton’s database would enable scholars and cooks alike to search for every apple pie recipe ever written, every slice of toast, every technique for mashing potatoes, every subtle variation in knife work, every cinnamon stick. The point of collating so many old recipes is not to salvage actual dishes but rather to understand the aspirations that lay behind them: to see the different flavor combinations cooks craved or the things they worried about in the kitchen. The database could let us glimpse, as Wheaton puts it, the whole ‘‘complex kaleidoscope’’ of what food has meant to people.
The Archive of Eating
Here is a small fragment from just one of Wheaton’s lists of search terms, which so far cover more than 130,000 results, encompassing ingredients, techniques, food for the sick and much more:
Black beans Black cumin Black gram Black grouse Black pepper Blackberries Blackbirds Black-eyed peas Blackstrap molasses
And another: Ladyfingers Lamb Lamb’s lettuce Lamb’s-quarter Langsat Lard Lasagna Latkes
From ladyfingers to latkes is a prose poem suggestive of whole worlds. The list runs on and on, from aal (German for eel) to zucchini, seeming to contain the promise of a universal cookbook of European and American cuisine, pieced together from all the recipes ever written — a Borgesian feat of quixotic and fantastical taxonomy.
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Blancmange — ‘‘white food’’
The germ for the database first came to Wheaton in 1962. Her husband, Bob, was studying for his Ph.D. at Harvard, and her two children (the third had not yet been born) were in preschool five days a week for three hours (‘‘assuming no bugs, earaches or other interruptions’’). Wheaton had done graduate studies in art history, but she discovered that what she really wanted to do was read old cookbooks.
of confusingly similar yet distinct medieval blancmange recipes in four languages. Blancmange — which means ‘‘white food’’ — referred to a family of recipes in which pale mixtures were casseroled together into a pap, often with rice and almond milk. There were blancmanges of lobster and capon; of pike, carp and haddock. Wheaton sketched out a table representing different blancmange recipes on a piece of three-ring notebook paper and found that she could make sense of them only ‘‘as long as I kept staring at the paper.’’ She moved on to French cookbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries and tried to organize the data they contained by taking notes on each recipe one by one. But when she returned to these notes, she was frustrated. She couldn’t grasp the character of the books. In the 1970s Wheaton discovered McBee cards. They were a primitive data system, in which different pieces of information could be encoded by punching holes to designate broad categories (date, gender, country). ‘‘After the cards are properly punched, whole packs of them can be searched by running a knitting needle through the desired hole in the pack and lifting it up,’’ Wheaton
One day, she found herself trying to get her head around an excess
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explained in a talk last summer at a food symposium held at Oxford. ‘‘When, if one is lucky, gems of information will drop out.’’ McBee cards had obvious limitations, however. ‘‘My categories kept expanding, and the cards did not.’’ Wheaton tried to improve the cards by adding color-coded edges, but then she ran out of colors. In 1982, Wheaton set aside her knitting needles and switched to computers, buying the first IBM PC, which could produce accented letters. (‘‘Apple scorned such frippery,’’ Wheaton said. ‘‘I believe they thought accented letters were like ice cream cones with sprinkles.’’) After using and abandoning two database programs, she settled on Microsoft Access and has been using it ever since. ‘‘It is possible to search for fungi or for morels, and to search for courgettes and also get zucchini,’’ she said. It’s Wheaton’s hope that someday a friendly library or other research institution will take on the database and make it open for everyone to search.
The Archive of Eating
I asked her if she ever lost herself in all the data.
‘‘Oh, yes, oh, yes!’ she exclaimed, her voice almost purring. She likes to describe her database as ‘‘a cross between a Swiss Army knife and a piano.’’ It can do all sorts of handy little jobs, but it can also produce music. The music is the patterns it reveals about the vast human enterprise of cooking.
When Wheaton mailed me the database on a flash drive, I couldn’t wait to start playing with it. And sure enough, I found a storeroom brimming with secrets. You can identify long-forgotten passions, like a brief 18th-century vogue for coffee-flavored waffles, and discover the moments that many of our basic cooking methods started. You might find the first time any cookbook in the collection mentions chocolate as an ingredient rather than a drink (for the record, it’s Massialot’s ‘‘Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois,’’ 1691) or the earliest recipe for a basic roux sauce (La Varenne, 1651). But, like a long-handled skimmer reaching deep into the historic cooking pot, ‘‘The Cook’s Oracle’’ can fish out foodways so obsolete no one today even knows to mourn them. It can haul up such forgotten delicacies as artificial asses’ milk (fake donkey milk, a health food made from rose jam, candy and sea holly) or tansy, a bitter herb that was once used in desserts, like our vanilla extract. Or pulpatoon, a ragout made of an excess of ingredients including pigeons, mushrooms and pistachio nuts. Or what about asparagus chopped small, to disguise it as green peas? No one would attempt this trick now that peas come cheap from the freezer.
Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare)
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FISHCAKES:
Some of the delightful morsels prompt the thought: Why did we stop regularly cooking that? The globe artichoke, for instance. Across Europe, cooks of the 16th to the 18th centuries recognized this ornate vegetable for a great treat. The DB lists multiple iterations of artichoke pie, lavishly layered with truffles. Artichokes were boiled, braised or fried; served in a cream sauce; or simply cooked and dressed and eaten leaf by delicious leaf. Outside Italy, artichokes no longer inspire such intense worship, and our eating is the poorer for it. They belong to a more civilized, less puritanical way of life, demanding to be savored slowly, possibly with large quantities of butter.
You will look in vain here for cilantro or feta. Instead, you’ll find mutton: page after page of mutton recipes, from chops to hash to jelly to mutton broth for the sick. Croissants are present, but only in the recipes from France. There is a single American avocado recipe, from 1887 (for a salad with mayonnaise and onions), but the fruit is called ‘‘alligator pear.’’ The recipe’s author, Maria Parloa, assumes it is so rare we need to be told where to buy one (at a store on Fulton Street in New York, she suggests, where they cost 15 to 20 cents apiece, or around $4 to $5 in today’s money). You start to see that so much of what we think of as personal taste is really a question of what’s available in any given market. To be an avocado eater in 1887 was as eccentric a proclivity as being a mutton lover today. Scenes of kitchens very unlike ours materialize, full of strange utensils like salamanders (long-handled tools for broiling), croquette molds and fluted
knives for cutting root vegetables into fancy shapes. There are unusual cooking methods, like in an 18th-century recipe for beefsteak panbroiled over a fire made from two newspapers. Without kitchen timers or thermometers, the DB’s cooks were often forced to be ingenious in measuring when a dish was done: ‘‘until the bones are ready to fall out,’’ ‘‘until you can run a straw into the skin,’’ until ‘‘the milk tastes of spice,’’ ‘‘till it be soft and limber.’’ They used their senses more acutely than we do. The more fragments Wheaton collects, the more cookbooks reveal their variety, and also their mystery. There is no universal cookbook, only a tower of Babel where no cook fully speaks the language of any other. However imperfectly, the database helps decode these fragmentary snatches of dialogue: not just the ingredients of the soup, or the pot it was cooked in, but also the values of the person who prepared it.
Items from a Traditional 18th & 19th Century Kitchen
‘‘I had to learn to listen to the writer’s side of the conversation with his or her reader,’’ Wheaton says.
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The Archive of Eating
‘‘The Accomplisht Cook’’ (1660), Christmas Fish
Oracle’’ were leading bleak lives of deprivation, in which cooking was not a leisure pursuit but a way to survive.
This is sometimes hard, because the assumptions of cooks in the past were so utterly different from our own. An American cookbook from 1881 includes many recipes for marble cake, but almost no verbs, because the authors assumed that the method for marbling batter was common knowledge. Amelia Simmons, in 1796, imagines that we will have a cow on hand that we can milk straight into a dish of cider and sugar to make a syllabub, a frothy dessert: ‘‘milk your cow into your liquor’’ she calmly directs, as if it were something normal — and for her, it was. When she got started on her database, Wheaton was driven by a love of good meals. She wanted to reconstruct some of the delicious things of the past, the ‘‘overflowing generosity.’’ She collected French recipes — most of them by male chefs — for pistachio turnovers and marzipan tarts, for salmon with herbs and oranges glazed with caramel. But as time went on, she saw that many of the authors she had gathered up in ‘‘The Cook’s
Today, the vulnerability is precisely what interests Wheaton. She herself grew up in an affluent family on the outskirts of Philadelphia — there was a fine kitchen garden and a cook — but her grandfather came from a family of povertystricken farmers. Even though he went on to become a successful businessman, he kept the habits of scarcity. He saved. He mended furniture. ‘‘He understood people who didn’t have any money,’’ she told me. She began using cookbooks to reconstruct people’s lives, ‘‘even if they weren’t wonderful.’’ One of the more startling patterns is the difference between cookbooks written by men and women before the 20th century. Wheaton says she has come to see them as almost two separate cuisines. Male chefs — who had professional status — were mainly concerned with how to satisfy a master’s jaded
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palate. It was said that ancien régime French chefs aspired to give fish the flavor of meat, meat the flavor of fish and vegetables no flavor at all. Robert May in ‘‘The Accomplisht Cook’’ (1660) urges his readers to use only the best: ‘‘fine flour,’’ ‘‘good thick sweet cream,’’ ‘‘handsome’’ fishes. By contrast, the women’s books are much humbler. They include such compromises as ‘‘cheap rice pudding’’ and ‘‘cheaper fruitcake.’’ These are books about what to do when life gives you lemons — or when it gives you mediocre ingredients and limited time. The female authors assume that their readers, who are servants or wives, will be managing the cooking alongside other household tasks like the laundry and child care. Their recipes often display a brutal pragmatism. Mrs. Randolph’s ‘‘The Virginia Housewife’’ (1824) has a recipe for chicken soup — soup of ‘‘old fowl’’ — that starts with keeping the bird in a coop for two weeks before killing it and chopping it up, discarding the back because it is ‘‘too gross and strong for use.’’
FISHCAKES:
One of Wheaton’s favorite books in the DB is ‘‘The Frugal Housewife,’’ first published in 1829 (later editions added ‘‘American’’ to the title).
The Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy, 2013
The writer was Lydia Maria Child, who was also a campaigner against slavery and for women’s rights. Child’s cookbook, Wheaton said, is a ‘‘slice of life as lived by unprosperous New Englanders in the 1820s and ’30s.’’ Some of her recipes remain appealing, like her simple dish of tomatoes stewed with butter and salt. But the book as a whole is pervaded with penny-pinching. The best economy with coffee, Child advises, is to ‘‘go without.’’ Child commends cupcakes, not because she likes them — no ‘‘Sex and the City’’-style indulgence here — but because they are less expensive than poundcake. She recommends asking friends in the country to buy lard for us when it is cheapest. ‘‘Economical people,’’ writes Child, ‘‘will seldom use preserves, except for sickness.’’ The entire book contains almost no seasonings. Lydia Child was helping her readers envisage a life of financial security, in which, with a little resourcefulness, the lard would not run out. When Wheaton teaches a seminar on how to read a cookbook, she always uses ‘‘The Frugal Housewife,’’ and people ‘‘almost always dislike it.’’ We do not recognize ourselves in Child’s remedies. For many of us, stressed by work, the impossible dream is not to eat preserves but to switch off the screen long enough to make them. We clip ever more recipes: our own personal database, talismans of a more leisurely existence. As Wheaton has found, the urge to read cookbooks is not always the same as the urge to cook.
Lydia Maria Child
Food books touch more of human life than what happens at the stove. The first cookbooks were sometimes called books of secrets, in which remedies for toothache or the plague jostled with recipes for roast meats, puddings and tarts. When I typed ‘‘easy’’ into the database, it offered me not just an easy crust for family pies but also an easy way to make ink and a method for trying to encourage an easy childbirth. (For the latter, E. Smith in 1727 recommended a concoction of raisins, figs, licorice and anise seeds boiled in spring water, imbibed morning and evening six weeks before the baby is due.)
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The Archive of Eating
Cookbook readers today would be disconcerted to be offered a cure for deafness or ‘‘fumes in the head’’ alongside instructions for puff pastry. Yet recipes are all still remedies in some form or other — everyday enchantments for making life better.
Cookbooks show us at our most defenseless because they expose things we believe we lack: meringues that don’t fall; soup that will fill us up without making us fat; dinners that cook in no time at all. They allow us to imagine ourselves as bountiful hosts or artisanal pastry makers. It isn’t all fantasy, though. Cookbooks also speak to, and soothe, something real: the hunger that started when we were babies, when food and security were one and the same.
A few weeks ago, I got a new cookbook by Nigel Slater, ‘‘A Year of Good Eating.’’ I can’t pretend I needed it, though it does look lovely on the kitchen shelf in its calm blue cover. So far, I’ve cooked only one of the recipes, for hazelnut-maple cookies, though I have my eye on many more, if I can only find the time: a dish of wet polenta and winter greens, a piece of cod crusted with pumpkin seeds and dill. It makes me feel oddly reassured to have all this kitchen wisdom stored up, like jars of jelly in a pantry. Recipes can feel like charms against life’s disappointments or protection against the onward march of the years. You never know exactly when they will be called for.
The nature of Wheaton’s database is that it can never be finished, at least not by one octogenarian working alone. Even if she were to go well beyond the 3,400 books by more than 6,000 authors that she has already cataloged, the project would comprise merely the edge of a vast hinterland that we can never access: the billions of unremarked bowls of stew, the bakers who toiled alone, the long-vanished food markets. Most cooks, especially female ones, have been illiterate, unable to record their kitchen experience. Wheaton has found just nine surviving Italian cookbooks by women from before 1900. It is as if all those nonnas rolling gnocchi and cutting tagliatelle never existed. The books she is collecting in her database are all that remain of the vast human conversation about food. All we can do is gather up the fragments and try to decipher what comforts they once held.
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