On the first episode of THE FOOD SEEN in 2012, Caren Alpert, a San Francisco based photographer, takes a closer look at food … a much closer look. She uses a scanning electron microscope for her “terra cibus” project, magnifying the surfaces of food between ten and a thousand times, abstracting their textures, making them seems as if they were bird’s eye views of otherwordly landscapes. Table salt looks like ice floes, cauliflower resembles a canyon/chasm, fortune cookies turn into tributaries, and my favorite, cake sprinkles. This episode is sponsored by S. Wallace Edwards & Sons

"I thought why not take a closer look at what we eat every day...Sugar looks otherworldly under the microscope."

--Caren Alpert on The Food Seen

This week Cutting the Curd gets gets cut down to size, or rather gets shrunk, with the help of microbiologist Rachel Dutton who is a fellow at FAS Center of Systems Biology. There she is putting cheese under the microscope and using the simplified, experimentally tractable microbial ecosystems found growing on the surface of cheeses as models for the behavior of microbes in complex communities. These communities, and their rich assembly of metabolic capacities, contribute much of the diversity in flavors, smells, and textures of the hundreds of different varieties of cheeses. But don't worry if this all sounds over your head Anne Saxelby is there to guide you through world of cheese big and small. This episode is sponsored by Fairway Market.