The Economist – The most visually striking things on display at “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table”, an exhibition at the Africa Centre in Harlem, are a quilt and a kitchen. The quilt (pictured) is made up of 406 squares, each depicting an African-American contribution or contributor to American cuisine. It invites study: working out who is who, and what each cookie or tankard represents. The test kitchen for Ebony magazine, rescued from demolition in Chicago, is a paragon of psychedelic chic, with multicoloured whorls covering the walls, cabinets and even the dishwasher, along with pea-green countertops and a dark orange refrigerator.
But the most revealing artefacts may be the most prosaic: an ice-cream scoop and a photograph of a man standing in front of a truck. Alfred Cralle invented the scoop with a built-in scraper, turning what had been a laborious task usually requiring two hands and at least two implements (frozen ice-cream is hard and slippery) into a simple one. And Frederick McKinley Jones invented the first portable refrigerated unit, allowing perishable food to be shipped more widely. These two objects, now so commonplace as to be unremarkable, changed how and what the world eats. Read more at The Economist.