A recent study of the taco revealed something larger:
Look closely enough at anything and you can start to see the sum of its parts. Even, for instance, a single taco, which, when examined recently by a group of architecture students, became a window into the complexities of globalization.
The goal:
[T]o map the local “tacoshed,” which, much like a watershed, establishes the geographical boundaries of a taco’s origins — the source of everything from the corn in the tortilla to the tomatoes in the salsa.
The result:
By thoroughly understanding what it takes to make a taco, the class hoped to become “better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future.” The final product is a surprisingly useful microcosm of the industrial food system and its “richly complex network of systems, flows, and ecologies.
Complete findings coming up in Meatpaper.
