Gastro Obscura brings a wide range of food cultures to your screen.

The parent site Atlas Obscura is a site more appropriate for our History department on the fourth floor, with its focus on geography, travel and several takes on history and other subjects specific to that department.

One of their sub-pages though, Gastro Obscura, fits perfectly within our department and our large collection of recipe and other food culture books:

As you can see, searching can be broken down by food category and culinary region. Here I have selected “Food Festivals” in “North America” and here’s what came up:

There’s a lot to like about this site, other than it’s focus on food. I changed my search parameters to “Fruits & Vegetables” in the region “Middle East” and came up with only two hits. The one I chose to explore is called a Medlar:

So this fruit is unique enough on its own, but it also gives a few links to places from which you may be able to buy and/or taste the fruit:

There are many other fun aspects to this site, including the option to create a profile and add your own pictures and other content. Memphians could add as much Memphis-centric content as we can squeeze in, if we were to so desire.

Take a minute to log into the site and check out how much fun information about food and food culture is available.