Bring on the Mold
In my architecture studio this semester, “Growing Power, Sowing Worlds” with Rania Ghosn, we started out by discussing the idea of the subnatural. This term, coined by architectural historian David Gissen, describes spaces that we are taught to avoid in design: spaces that are damp, moldy, smoky, or dusty, to name a few, that make habitation less comfortable or even unhealthy. As applied to food, we might define the subnatural as an ethereal realm of edible-ish goods that shifts in our perception of what should be seen, touched, smelled, and digested. In this realm, cheese reigns supreme: a sensory paradox in which smellier is often better, mold is cultivated, and the farther past its expiration date, the more its value grows.
In the gif below, we see cheese in a progression of decay: growing, melting, cracking, developing new colors and losing others.
(image by the author)
The cheeses featured are:
Piper’s Pyramid: a goat’s milk cheese made by Capriole Creamery aged 10 days, laced with a touch of smoked paprika giving it it’s orange hue.
Berkswell: a classic British sheep’s milk cheese, firm in texture with a distinctive natural rind that mimics the weave of the colanders in which it is aged. This particular wheel developed an unusual blue streak of mold which was not characteristic, but not bad mold. I found this particular wheel to taste more parmesan-y than was typical.
Gorgonzola Piccante: a spicy Italian blue with particularly prominent and marble-like veinage.
Fresh chevre with pink peppercorns: I can’t remember who made this cheese, but we lost it in the back of the fridge and it developed some beautiful furry mold.
Age here does not imply a downward curve; rather, the cheese architecture develops a new system of valuation. Decay is an anticipated part of the process, and it’s beautiful.
Where else might we capitalize on these subnatural moments in the food and architecture worlds? Some people might find farming itself to be subnatural, far from our Western norms of “civilization.” Farms are often full of strange smells, animals that roll in mud, and a variety of excrement. It can be a dangerous place to walk around if not wearing the right type of shoes, and you would definitely want to wash your hands before eating, even if you were not worried about covid. But maybe there are ways can we dig into this subnatural category as untapped potential.
“The Night-Soil Men”
(image source: Johnson, xviii. Courtesy of Illustrated London News)
A few weeks ago I went to a (virtual) lecture by Seth Denizen hosted by the Harvard GSD in which the speaker argued for the use of wastewater irrigation. This is not a new idea. Steven Johnson writes in his book The Ghost Map: “waste recycling is usually assumed to be an invention of the environmental movement…but it is an ancient art…a hallmark of almost all complex systems.” (Johnson, 5-6) In fact, waste recycling by “night-soil men” in 19th century London was a profitable and formidable industry, essential for London’s urban and rural operation and health.
Seth Denizen’s case study is the Mezquital Valley – almost 200,000 acres of land that are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City, and have been since 1901. There are pros and cons to this practice that Seth can explain best himself in the recorded zoom. For example, one of the benefits is that this sewage provides free fertilizer to the farmers; without it, the farmers would have to find other sources of fertilizer, driving up their costs of operation. The negative side is that, along with nutrients, we’re dumping pharmaceuticals into the earth, presenting possible health concerns for workers and for the food being grown. We also dump metals, but the cation exchange capacity of the soil traps the metals, acting as a kind of filter. Seth argues that this scenario is a new agricultural condition and, “in the context of a warming planet, the world simply cannot afford for urban wastewater reuse to fail” (Denizen).
Access to water is an increasingly pressing issue, for reasons of sustainability as well as equity. As the climate warms and drylands - areas defined by a scarcity of water, where rates of evapotranspiration exceed those of precipitation - become a more prominent feature, we’ll have to consider more sustainable methods of sourcing water (for example, fog catchers), or rather we could reevaluate the efficiency of our recycling systems. Digging into the subnatural, perhaps wastewater irrigation could be a part of the solution.
Citations
Denizen, Seth. “Thinking Through Soil.” virtual, September 21, 2020. https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/seth-denizen-thinking-through-soil-case-study-from-the-mezquital-valley/.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map. Penguin Random House, 2006.