Issue Zero took place May 7-9, 2010, around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones’ offices. The theme was Hustle. 1,502 submissions rushed in within 28 hours, sent by writers and artists both well-known and never published. Some of the best editors and designers in the business then took these ingredients and produced a 60-page, full-color print magazine. Issue Zero won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism.

Issue One—the Comeback issue—was produced August 27-29, 2010, at the offices of GOOD Magazine in Los Angeles. An iPad version was produced during the same 48-hour period. Issue Two—the Debt issue—was produced from July 29-31, 2011, at the offices of Gawker Media in New York City.

“Thematic harmony makes reading all of 48HR’s “Hustle” issue easy. There are only three ad pages, plus the back. More words than The New Yorker? On: running, swindles, whores. Rick Ross. The words are good, but photos better; design is crisp. The cover doesn’t do it justice. Buy!
— The Village Voice

“Amongst the staff cutbacks and closures a new appetite for experimentation has emerged. One of the most ambitious is the newly created 48hr Magazine”
— The BBC

“A successful time-trial for magazines.”
— The New York Observer

Originally posted at Smithsonian’s Design Decoded blog, this is the second installment in the series about how the seedless mandarin has been designed to dominate the citrus market. Read the introduction here

When a new variety of fruit graduates from the breeding orchard to the consumer world, it needs a name. But not just any name will do. Agricultural scientists have found that the public prefers two-syllable words—something familiar, positive, and indicative of the fruit’s best traits. When the tiny mandarin Citrus Reticulata Blanco VI 765 was ready for its public debut, its creators dubbed it “Tango.”

Tango is the result of more than two decades of research at the University of California Riverside. As with any design process, the goal of developing the Tango was to solve a problem: “Its predecessor had too many seeds,” says Mikeal Roose, the plant geneticist who, along with fruit breeder Tim Williams, is responsible for inventing the Tango. “It was very difficult for growers to grow in many situations. So we initiated back in the 1990s a research program to develop seedless forms of some of these varieties, because that’s really what the market demanded.”

Roose has spent most of his career crafting citrus that sells. The inherent characteristics of the mandarin—small size, sweet taste, easily removable peel—make it a great candidate for refinement. Adding seedlessness to the list of traits makes all the difference in the marketplace. A 2005 UC Riverside study estimated that mandarins without seeds garnered three to four times more revenue than seeded varieties.

The Tango was Roose and Williams’s answer to this promising stat. Seedlessness turns the raw fruit into a convenience food the likes of which are usually only found in shelf-stable (and blood sugar destabilizing) processed products like Fruit Roll-Ups or NutriGrain bars. Working from the genetic template of the W. Murcott Afourer mandarin—a variety grown widely in California but plagued with excessive seed content, the scientists undertook an experiment. “For a fruit variety, we don’t actually need seeds to propagate,” Roose explains, “We take sticks—pencil-size pieces of tissue from the plant—that have dormant buds on them, and we expose them to radiation like a dental X-ray.”

The irradiation process induces random mutations—a phenomenon, Roose points out, which also occurs in nature as a result of ambient or solar radiation. “Farmers have long selected citrus varieties that are low-seed, that have the same kinds of chromosomal rearrangements stimulated by the same thing—there’s natural radiation around all the time and it can affect the trees at any time.” Of course, the natural radiation present in our environment exposes us to around 310 millirem per year, while the budwood in a UC Riverside citrus breeding program receives 30-50 Gy of exposure, or 3,000,000-5,000,000 millirem—at least 10,000 times more than what’s found in average surroundings.

The advantage of inducing mutations, Roose explains, rather than waiting for the sun to trigger genetic variation, is that it can be targeted toward manipulating one particular feature—a kind of rapid prototyping for agriculture. The radiation accelerates the output of new genetic compositions. Each is then cultivated, screened and tested with the hope that at least one will be reliably superior to its antecedent. “We’re greatly building upon the work of the breeders that have gone before us,” says Roose, “We look for the characteristics we want, then in some cases we can improve upon it.”

The Tango’s triumph is not only the fact that the fruit is seedless, but that the tree on which it grows will not begin producing seeded fruit in the presence of bees. While bees are imperative to farming products like almonds, apples and stone fruit, contributing billions of dollars in economic value through pollination services, they have the reverse impact on seedless citrus—they can quash the saleability of whole orchards. Cross-pollination has been a problem for California mandarins in particular, and small farms especially, where the density of acreage makes it difficult to grow the fruit in isolation from hives and other crops.

The battle between beekeepers, bee-dependent farmers and growers of seedless fruit has been such an issue, in fact, that in 2007 the California Secretary of Agriculture authorized the formation of the Seedless Mandarin and Honey Bee Coexistence Working Group, which was tasked with developing mutually agreeable best practices that would keep all parties in business and relatively happy. But they couldn’t agree. (More on trespassing bees and land use in a future post.)

The Tango’s lack of viable pollen presented a potential workaround for mandarin growers, eliminating the need for isolation or protective (and expensive) netting during bloom. Of course, sterility could also eliminate the longstanding reciprocity between bees and flowering trees, which is not good for honey producers. Without pollen, bees lack their primary nutrient supply. And unlike the whimsically named mandarins, “Orange Blossom Honey” is a product named for its source.

But while new seedless mandarin varieties may put bees out of a job, they could create more work for people. Beyond the pursuit of seed reduction, scientists are also working to develop fruit that will mature during natural gaps in seasonality. Such a product would both smooth out the year-round consistency of store-bought mandarins, and provide steadier work for seasonal laborers. “To keep people employed, it’s desireable to have fruit that mature year-round,” says Roose. “There’s a sort of social benefit.”

Currently, citrus companies pack different types of mandarins in their branded packages at different times of year. Satsumas come first—around September in California; Clementines pop up toward Christmas. The latest to mature include a variety developed at the University of California called Pixie. During the citrus off-season, fruit for those cheerful boxes either comes out of storage or from the southern hemisphere.

The variety Roose designed to bridge this gap is named Daisy SL. “I think Daisy can fill a marketing niche,” Roose projects, “There’s a window, an opportunity for a variety that mature between clementines and the Tango, in the middle of the season.” Placing the Daisy in that window requires not only well-timed ripening, but also a checklist of aesthetic characteristics that help it blend in with its early- and late-season cousins. “When we design a fruit, we’d like it to have a smooth rind and for the rind to be a deep reddish-orange. That would be a color that would sell well, that’s what we’d think from a design perspective.”

They don’t always get it right. The Gold Nugget, which Roose and Williams released about six years ago, hit the mark on seasonality, ripening on the tree as late as June. And the flavor is great—“Many people think it’s the best tasting mandarin that has been produced.” But it’s an ugly duckling. “Gold Nuggets has a rind that’s kind of rough,” Roose says, “And I’d call it a yellowish-orange color, not the deep reddish orange that we’d have specified. It doesn’t meet the design criteria.”

Just as with any product, though, at a certain point you have to release your new design into the market and see what happens. The Gold Nugget didn’t please Americans, but it’s taking off in Europe, where shoppers don’t seem to mind the irregular rind and light color. “Consumers have learned that if it looks that way, it’s going to taste good,” observes Roose, acknowledging that preferences are individual and unpredictable. “There’s not one kind of car that’s suitable for everybody and there’s not one kind of citrus that’s suitable for everybody,” he adds, “Things don’t always work the way you’d expect.”

The varieties that enjoy the greatest commercial success are often unknown to the average mandarin lover. If you bought a box of Cuties or Delites in the last few weeks, you may in fact have purchased some of the first Tangos to hit the supermarket. If they looked just as jewel-like and tasted just as sweet as your last box, the scientists at UC Riverside have designed a winner.

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The Foodprint Project is a contextual exploration of food. From the cartography of food supply chains to the molecular anatomy of flavor, from the migration of ethnic recipes to the future of urban agronomy, foodprints look beyond the plate to the social, political, artistic and economic forces that shape the way we eat.

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When John Hartupee found himself eating fast food in the Montreal airport on his way to a weekend dine-around in New York City’s finest restaurants, the irony was not lost on him. From his Blackberry, he tweeted: “Burger King in the airport waiting for my flight to NYC. I’ll consider this my amuse-bouche for Eleven Madison Park!”

The next day, Hartupee glided through the revolving door of Danny Meyer’s palatial restaurant with his girlfriend, leaving the memory of his traveler’s appetizer to evaporate in the Manhattan heat. The maître d’ greeted them, the host swept them off to a crisp, white-clothed table, and a quiet fleet of servers delivered house-filtered mineral water and minimalist square menus.

By the time the real amuse-bouche arrived, they’d been fully transported. They savored a soupçon of sweetbreads, and the table was cleared. Then a second set of small plates arrived, this time concealed under silver domes. The couple sat expectantly as the waiter carefully unveiled their next pristinely constructed bite. But instead of a torchon of foie gras or an heirloom tomato puree, each tiny plate held a single, silver dollar-size lamb burger on a diminutive bun. “We hope these are better than the one you had at the airport,” he said with a wink.

Hartupee was dumbfounded. Had the food police reported his culinary transgression? Were New York chefs omniscient? Reading Hartupee’s expression, the maître d’ approached the table and explained that as part of their daily preparations, the hosts scan social networks for mentions of the restaurant. Hartupee’s tweet presented an opportunity for the staff to personalize his experience, and they took it, figuring that frequent Twitter users aren’t too averse to having strangers know a thing or two about them.

And they were right. Hartupee’s dismay gave way to delight. “This is one of the most quirky yet thoughtful things I have seen a restaurant do,” he wrote afterwards in another online forum. “They took the time to prepare that special item only for us.” But the comments that follow confirm that not everyone relishes the diminished privacy of the digital age. One respondent wrote, “This is the creepiest thing ever.”

So how do modern maîtres d’ balance the potential of using the Internet to elevate diners’ experiences against the risk of unsettling them?

“First and foremost our job is about reading a guest,” says Sandra DiCapua, the 25-year-old head maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park. With guests like Hartupee—young, tech-savvy, and not too self-serious—it works to be completely direct about Googling them before their arrival. Most of the time, however, the information a maître d’ gleans about a diner merely provides her with an unseen toolkit for building rapport. And while not everyone wants to be recognized for the Double Whopper they ate in presumed anonymity at their departure gate, people almost always appreciate being greeted by name when they walk into an unfamiliar place.

At the Four Seasons, putting a name to a face is the real advantage of Google. “We don’t look people up to know what they do or don’t do,” says Julian Niccolini, the restaurant’s legendary maître d’, “We use Google Images to find out what they look like. That way we can identify them when they walk in and impress them even more.” It’s that very first encounter—the immediate, familiar greeting—that sparks the entire experience Niccolini works so hard to craft for his guests.

The Internet didn’t make this possible, but it certainly made it easier. “In the late 70s and 80s, we were constantly reading all the newspapers so we could see exactly who was coming and going, who was who,” he recalls, invoking a romantic see-and-be-seen New York when paper was the dominant medium. “Now newspapers are becoming a bit more…,” he searches for the right word, “difficult.”

In some ways, the longer a maître d’ has been at it, the less he needs a digital cheat sheet. Niccolini’s mind contains a decades-deep catalog of names, faces and personal particulars. He built his repertoire of hospitality magic tricks by holding court in the same dining room, with the same diners, year after year. Still, if a visitor is coming in for a meal from across the country—an esteemed chef, say, or a noted critic—a few clicks through Google Images arm even the greenest host on staff with the power of a strong first impression.

If we’re going to worry about the unintended cultural consequences of the Internet, then, it might be less important to fret over the privacy of the diner than the mental acuity of the maître d’. If it’s no longer necessary to read the daily newspaper in order to identify potential guests, nor critical to remember who prefers their butter salted and who favors Bordeaux over Burgundies, have the demands of the job been foisted onto the synapses of artificial intelligence?

“No,” says Nick Peyton, the maître d’ and owner of Cyrus Restaurant in Sonoma, California. “I’ve been doing this since the 70s, and the basics haven’t changed. Your whole intent is to provide personalized experience—it’s not just great food or great ambience or technically perfect service. There’s a catharsis that happens in that communion over the table. Your job is to add to that.”

So far, computers fall short in the communion department, but Peyton doesn’t reject the notion of the Internet as a performance-enhancing device. Like Niccolini, his head is crowded with a vibrant cast of food-loving characters, assembled through years managing the Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco, Restaurant Gary Danko, and now Cyrus.

With so much information already stored, Peyton’s use for digital tools revolves more around memory than research (though in the twenty-five minutes that elapsed between my initial email to him and our phone conversation, he managed to review all the links in my signature, glance at my headshot, and arm himself with facts about my background).

At Cyrus, as at so many restaurants nationwide, the collective memory of maîtres d’ is now stored in the elephantine database that is OpenTable.com.

“The minute somebody says, ‘We like sitting across from each other,’ or ‘I’m lactose intolerant,’ you’ve got that forever and ever. You’re not relying on something fallible like your brain,” Peyton explains, adding with a laugh, “It’s sort of magic, too. People say, ‘You’ve got an incredible memory!’, and you say, ‘Why, yes, we do!’”

Psychic powers aside, OpenTable has provided restaurants with a valuable logistical upgrade, consolidating what were once physical guest history files and reservation books into a single, readily accessible location. But if all of this seems like an irreproachable convenience—a system that organizes and updates your clientele for you, eliminating occupational hazards like illegible penmanship and carpal tunnel syndrome—you underestimate the swiftness of backlash.

At Animal in Los Angeles, a two-year-old restaurant run by an artisanally-inclined young team, hosting is an intentionally low-tech affair—no OpenTable, no computerized profiles. “We do everything by hand,” says General Manager Helen Johannesen. “It’s not as important to me who’s coming in as the experience they’re having. Dinner is dinner. It’s a private experience in a public place.”

Johannesen’s outlook seems to spring not just from a distaste for Internet-dependent hospitality, but also from working in a town where an unusually high percentage of faces can be recognized without the aid of Google Images. Before taking her post at Animal, she worked at Tom Colicchio’s Craft, where Googling the day’s customers was the norm. “Being in Century City drew lots of big-name, industry people, so we’d always look them up, sometimes just out of curiosity.” The ability to preview the evening’s lineup in great detail played into a culture of celebrity favoritism, which Johannesen is allergic to now that she runs her own ship.

With so many personal lives already on display in LA, she and her team take the opposite tack—at least when it comes to entertainment-industry customers. “There are some restaurants where knowing everything about everyone to an overarching degree translates as some kind of power,” she reflects. “We prefer to forge relationships with people while they’re here, because they’re here.”

Her favorite connections with guests are spontaneous and organic, grown from the conversations that take place tableside. Figures from the food world, on the other hand, get her excited enough to Google. “If there’s a chef coming in that I know by name but I’m not entirely sure what they look like, I’ll look up their picture.”

Despite Johannesen’s predilection for low-profile operations, Animal has received significant press, and the butcher-chef-founders Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo don’t spurn the attention. But most of the action is still contained within the restaurant’s walls. You won’t find menu updates on Twitter or party photos on Facebook (at least not on an official Animal page), and you won’t even find the restaurant if you don’t know exactly where to look—there’s no sign outside the entrance.

And that, of course, is another variation on the subtle suspension of reality that makes dining out add up to more than just a good meal. At Animal, that might mean getting lost in a lesson on pig butchery; at the Four Seasons, it might begin when Julian Niccolini seems to know you by name; at Eleven Madison Park, you might be pleasantly disoriented by Miss DiCapua’s detailed knowledge of your last great meal—but only if she knows her trick will charm you. Even the digital native acknowledges that it’s possible to learn too much. “It’s all about knowing just enough about a person to make them feel at home,” she says, adding that her favorite conversation-starter predates the Internet. “It’s amazing how many people you can connect with just by knowing their area code.”

I work with clients to strategically transition from print to digital, redesign existing media platforms, develop story and content plans, launch new websites, and integrate social with editorial.

Clients:

GOOD Magazine
Gastronomica
Webbmedia
Stanford University
UCLA
Butler, Stern, Shine & Partners
Fahrenheit 212
Plaid Creative
Oakland Museum of California
Institute for the Future