This Town in Iceland Is a Modern Pompeii

Iceland’s ‘Mountain of Fire’ volcano wreaked havoc with an island and the island fought
back

What if you could visit Pompeii or Herculaneum and meet the inhabitants who fled the horrific volcanic eruption of Mt.
Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and decided to come back, dig out their old houses from under tons of pumice, and bring the towns
back to life?
On the island of Heimaey, in the Westman island archipelago in the southern part of Iceland, you can do just that.
Through guided tours, multimedia presentations and eyewitness accounts from survivors, an astonishing story of
catastrophe and rebirth is vividly recreated.

On the morning of January 23, 1973 the Eldfell volcano erupted without warning, spewing lava over the fishing port of
Vestmannaeyjar. In quick dispatch the entire population of the island was evacuated. “People thought it was the end of
life here, “a guide recently told a small group of visitors who were listening with rapt interest. But within two years, most
of the 5,000 inhabitants had returned. “Try to imagine your house buried in ash,’’ the guide continued. “And you come
back to dig it out and move back in again.” For five months, Eldfell—the name means “Mountain of Fire” in Icelandic–
had its way with the island. Then, at last, the eruptions stopped. In all, half a million cubic meters of black volcanic ash
covered their town. One third of the houses had survived. One third could be dug out. And one third were gone forever.
Families started digging their way into their houses, literally picking up the pieces of their lives. Kids were overjoyed to
find their toy trucks. Some folks just came to say farewell to their homes and their island, but most stayed.

Volunteers came from all over Iceland and then from all over the world to help. They removed an astounding 800,000
tons of ash and rebuilt the destroyed city. At some places, like the cemetery, removal of the pumice was all done by
hand with garden shovels. Today, as the visitor enters the cemetery, he or she reads the words, “I live and you shall live.
The haunting phrase is repeated in one of the many eyewitness accounts available as part of the audio tour at the
Eldheimar museum, which is located in one of the houses that lay covered by 50 meters of pumice for 40 years.

Walking through the house is like entering a time capsule. Here dwelled a woman, her fishing boat captain husband, and
their three kids, all asleep in the early hours when the volcano erupted. Visitors are hushed as they pass by a dinner
plate, ceiling beams, a piece of clothing, a hanging lamp. They peer into the remains of the family fireplace, abandoned
rooms, light bulbs in ceiling fixtures, blown-out windows.

An audio guide leads tourists through the sounds and sights of the explosion and its aftermath in images, words, and
actual sound recordings. Visitors watch video footage of the evacuation and hear the announcement that was made to
inform all the inhabitants that they had to leave their homes and head immediately for fishing boats. And they learn
how the residents reacted: One man ran back to get his wallet. Someone grabbed a parakeet. Kids ran outside in
pajamas. One kid took a school book, not realizing it would be a while before he could go back to school. By some
miracle, all of the fishing boats were in the port that night because of recent storms, and the dazed locals climbed on
board. They spent about four hours at sea, and then were met by buses and taken to Reykjavik.

The immediacy of the museum recreation is startling, moving, sometimes overwhelming, and unforgettable. Outside of
the museum is a house that is still buried in lava, which looks like a huge pile of black coal.
Eldfell still looms large over the island. It remains active although it hasn’t erupted since that fateful night 44 years ago.
Today, when tourists fly into the local airport on Haimaey, they may not realize that part of the runway was constructed
from tephra, which is material that spewed into the air during the volcanic eruption. If they arrive by ferry, accompanied,
perhaps, by puffins and gannets flying overhead, they are likely unaware that the island that stretches before them has
increased by more than two kilometers since l973—about seven football fields– as a result of concentrated lava flow.
The island is easily accessed by driving 2-3 hours from Reykjavik and then boarding a ferry for a 30-45 minute ride.
Visitors can learn as much as they desire about volcanoes (at the museum), see the volcanic features and the new parts
of the island formed by lava, meet inhabitants and stop by other local sights, including a mountain that is considered
one of the least hospitable locations on earth, with winds gusting up to 110 miles per hour.

Using Your Heartbeat as a Password

Researchers have developed a way of turning the unique rhythms of your heart into a form of
identification

Your fingerprints. Your voice. The irises of your eyes. It seems that these days any part of your body can be used for
biometric authentication—the process by which your physical characteristics are used to prove your identity, allowing
you access to your cell phone, your bank account or your front door.

Now, you can add your heartbeat to the list. Researchers at the State University of New York-Binghamton have
developed a way to use patients’ heartbeat patterns to protect their electronic medical records, opening the door to a
new method of biometric authentication.

As wearable health devices that monitor everything from blood pressure to respiratory rate become more popular,
there’s an increasing need to transmit health data electronically to doctor’s offices, explains Zhanpeng Jin, a professor
in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton who is working with fellow professor Linke
Guo and his student Pei Huang.

“During this process, the data transmission is vulnerable to cyber attacks or data breach, which may expose sensitive
user’s [electronic health] data,” Jin says.

Since mobile health devices would have already collected a patient’s electrocardiogram (ECG)—a measurement of the
heart’s electrical activity—the heartbeat data can simply be reused for security purposes. This has an advantage over
many existing encryption techniques, Jin says, because it's far less computing-intensive and uses less energy, which is
important when working with energy-limited devices like small wearable health monitors. Since the data has already
been collected, it adds little extra cost to the process as well.

While the peaks and valleys on people's ECGs may look identical to the untrained eye, they’re actually anything but.
Though your heartbeat speeds up and slows down, your ECG has a signature, much like a fingerprint, based on the
structure of the heart itself.

“The existing studies on ECGs have proved that the ECGs are quite unique by nature among different individuals,” says
Jin.
There's only one problem: these unique patterns are also changeable. A person’s ECG can change with physical activity,
mental states (like stress), age and other factors.
“We are still working on better algorithms to mitigate those influences and make the ECG-based encryption more robust
and resistant to those variabilities,” Jin says.

These issues would need to be overcome in order for ECGs to become a common biometric identifier like irises or
fingerprints. But, Jin says, the technology is ready to be used as a secondary form of authentication. Since, by nature, an
ECG only comes from a person who is alive, it could be used in tandem with another form of identification to both
authenticate a person’s identity and prove that they’re living. Gruesome as its sounds, the scenario of a plucked-out
eyeball or a severed finger being used to trick security scanners is something biometrics researchers must consider. An
ECG as a secondary form of ID would remove that issue.
Jin’s previous work has involved using a person’s “brainprint”—the unique electrical activity of their brain—as a
password, which also solves the “plucked-out eyeball” problem. In Jin's research, volunteers' brains responded
differently when presented with different words. The brainwaves reflecting those differences could be used as
passwords. But unlike heartbeats, brainwaves are not recorded by a personal health monitor, which makes them less
useful in the case of protecting electronic health records.

As more and more doctors diagnose and treat patients remotely through telemedicine, Jin and his team hope their new
technique can help secure vulnerable data. So one day soon, your heartbeat may join your fingerprints as yet another
key in an ever-increasing number of locks.

Much of the Cuisine We Now Know, and Think of as Ours, Came to Us by War
The long and winding road that brought "local" dishes to our plates

The relish on my plate is Sicilian, a tangy blend of sweet and sour flavors. I can pick out some of the ingredients—
eggplant, capers, celery—right away. I haven’t a clue, however, about the forces that came together to create this
exquisite vegetable dish.

Gaetano Basile, a writer and lecturer on the food and culture of Sicily, does know. He has invited me to Lo Scudiero, a
family-run restaurant in Palermo, as a tasty introduction to the island’s food and its history. He explains that the
appetizer I am eating, caponata, exists because of transformative events that took place more than a thousand years
ago. It was then that Arab forces invaded, bringing new crops, agricultural know-how, and other innovations that were
far above the standards of medieval Europe.

On the first day of the conquest, in June, 827 a.d., ten thousand men arrived from Tunisia. “They were not led by a
general as you might think,” Basile says, “but by a jurist, an expert in law. What was their business here? They were
Aghlabids from Tunisia and Fatimids from Egypt. These guys came here for a simple operation of religious conquest.”
But along with that mission they brought “so many things I can’t even list all of them,” Basile adds. “Hard grain, without
which we could not make pasta, and sugarcane. Sugar alone would have already been enough, since it means having a
powdered sweetener with which wonderful things could be made.”

We are sitting at a table, formally set with a starched tablecloth, sparkling glasses, silver chargers under the plates, and
a menu of traditional Sicilian dishes. I think to myself that Basile has thoughtfully chosen Lo Scudiero, meaning squire,
because it, too, reflects the cultural history I am eager to understand. Chargers, he says, were characteristic of the Sicilian
aristocracy, and place settings were thought to have been introduced with the arrival of Jewish families who came with
Spanish Muslims in the early ninth century. “They were the only ones to have tablecloths and napkins in an epoch when
many here were eating on the floor.”

A succession of invaders came—among them Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, followed by the Islamic army of Arabs,
Berbers, Moors, and Cretans. Then the Normans and other outsiders arrived, until 1860, when Sicily became part of the
united Kingdom of Italy. These conquests left culinary marks, as foreign explorations and invasions usually do. Basile
starts ticking off a long list: pecorino cheese made from sheep’s milk has Greek origins (the cheesemaking of the Cyclops
in Homer’s Odyssey, he points out, is set in Sicily); Arabs introduced the grain dish couscous, still a specialty of the
western Sicilian city of Trapani; rice, also an Arab import, stars in arancini di risu, or rice croquettes, typically Sicilian.
And the Normans? “The Normans were a bunch of barbarians,” says Basile. “By the time they invaded southern Italy,
they already had a reputation as robbers, murderers, rapists, and horse thieves.” But they didn’t come with nothing:
They brought salted cod, or baccala, a dish most commonly associated with Portugal and Spain.

It wasn’t just new food that the invaders introduced. They brought better farming techniques as well. Clifford Wright,
who has traced the history of Sicilian-Arab foods in two books, Cucina Paradiso and A Mediterranean Feast, points to
the Arab approaches to irrigation and agronomy, which led to larger crop yields. Before the Arabs, Sicilian peasants had
avoided planting in the hotter summer months. After the Arabs, the land was in cultivation all year round. The new
immigrants planted lemons and other heat-tolerant fruits and vegetables that would increase the bounty of the harvest.

“Sicily became quite famous for its fruits and vegetables, and that can be traced back to the Muslim era, when the
gardens probably began as pleasure gardens,” says Wright. Pleasure gardens were designed as places of repose, and
for Muslims, a reminder of the paradise awaiting the virtuous. “They were eventually turned into ‘kitchen gardens,’”
Wright continues, describing them as “experimental horticultural stations” to develop better propagation methods. But
at the same time, they were places of beauty. “The gardens were lush with vegetable crops, flowering bushes, and fruit
trees, and graced with water fountains and pavilions,” Wright explains in A Mediterranean Feast. During the 300 years
that the Arabs ruled Sicily, its agriculture and economy grew, and institutions evolved. In fact, when the Normans seized
power, they kept many practices of their predecessors, including the organization of the government and, in the upper
classes, the wearing of flowing robes.

Humans are bound to food by necessity first, and then by choice. The types of food you eat distinguish your country
from another country, your group from another group. When new influences come—whether from conquest or colonial
exploration or the popularity of a TV cooking show—there is a period of adaptation, and then often the full incorporation
of a new technique or ingredient into the country’s culinary lexicon. The potatoes and tomatoes that went from the
New World to Europe in the Columbia Exchange of the 15th century were first scorned by Old World diners who feared
they were poisonous, then in time became emblematic of their cuisines. In its original form, Sicilian caponata would
never have been made with tomatoes, but today there are versions that include them and they are considered perfectly
Sicilian.

Food constantly evolves, as do taste buds. To the Western palate, Japanese food seems so distinctly Japanese, yet it
went through many modifications once the country opened to the West in the 19th century, explains Katarzyna
Cwiertka, the chair of modern Japanese Studies at Leiden University and a scholar of East Asian food. “New ingredients,
new cooking techniques, and new flavorings were adapted to Japanese customs,” she says. “The changes were really
tremendous.”

Military canteens played the role of first adopters. Once Japanese soldiers became accustomed to a food, they would
eventually introduce it to the wider public when they returned to civilian life. Such was the case with curry, which started
appearing in Japan in the late 19th century. It was a borrowing not directly from India, but from the British Empire. “The
Japanese start to serve it as a Western food,” says Cwiertka. “It enters military menus and canteens and continues after
[World War II] into school canteens. By the 1950s and 1960s it is a national dish. When you ask Japanese students abroad
what they crave most, they would say ramen or curry. And ramen [of Chinese origin] is also not a Japanese food.”

What the Japanese have done—over and over again, Cwiertka points out—is move foreign foods into the category
of washoku, the genuinely Japanese. They adapt and absorb foreign culinary influences this way. “It’s more like the
invention of a tradition than a tradition,” she says.

For Maria Grammatico, ties to the past are what matter most. Her bakery in the misty mountaintop town of Erice, in
western Sicily, turns out pastries of such seductive aroma and delicacy that they have become famous throughout Italy.
(I make the detour to see her during a Sicilian vacation, but she is, on this rare occasion, out of town. Later I pose
questions by phone.)

The medieval town with cobblestone streets is 2,400 feet above the plains of Trapani. Driving up these dizzying heights
on a narrow road, it’s hard not to think of the visit to Grammatico’s home village as some sort of quest, which for fans
of her cooking, it is. She has dedicated herself to pure ingredients and time-tested techniques. The result is classic Sicilian
pastry—redolent with almonds and jams—just as she knew them as a child. The almonds she uses must come only from
Avola, on the eastern side of the island. (They contain more oil than most almonds, so sweets turn out better,
Grammatico explains.) Her milk comes only from local cows—and it’s crucial, she says, that they are milked by hand. “Of
course this makes a difference!” she insists in a voice that brooks no dissent.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in his 1958 novel, The Leopard, describes a fabulous banquet scene where the island's
memorable desserts are lavishly on display. It is 1860, a pivotal year: Garibaldi's troops have landed in Sicily; the march
to the unification of Italy has begun and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies will soon end. Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina,
stands before a table piled with sweets and considers the role of nuns in local pastry making— a Sicilian convent tradition
since the 18th century: “Huge blond babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds
and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolatecovered pastry, brown and rich as the topsoil of the Catanian plain…” Don
Fabrizio selects the pastry known as minni di vergine, made in the shape of breasts—an apparent reference to Saint
Agatha, the Sicilian saint whose breasts were cut off by the Romans. “Why ever didn’t the Holy Office forbid these cakes
when it had a chance?” Don Fabrizio muses. “Saint Agatha’s sliced off breasts sold by convents, devoured at dances!
Well, well!”

These desserts are still Sicilian standards, and Grammatico learned how to make them in the most traditional way—
from nuns. In the aftermath of World War II, when Sicily was struggling to recover from the devastation of bombings
and loss of life, Grammatico’s mother was caring for five children. She was widowed and poor, barely able to feed her
family. Given these circumstances, she sent her two oldest to live with a group of nuns at the Istituto San Carlo in Erice.
Grammatico was 11 at the time, deemed old enough to take on a harsh routine of kitchen and household work.

The livelihood of the convent was baking. Especially on holidays and holy days, the people of Erice would go to the
convent and, speaking through an iron grate, place their orders. After a short wait, the pastries would be ready and
delivered.

The nuns were secretive about their recipes for the cakes and cookies. They used a variety of stones to weigh ingredients;
each stone indicated a certain specific weight in grams or kilograms. They tried to make sure that Maria and other
helpers would never see the exact proportions for any particular creation. But Maria had moxie. When her formal duties
were over she would snoop from a careful distance, looking to see which stone was used; later she would calculate
proportions, which she wrote down on a piece of paper, kept close to her chest so the nuns wouldn’t find it.

After 15 years in the convent she left to make her own way in the world. She was 26. To the alarm of the nuns, she
started her own bakery just around the corner from the convent. She had a meager income, just a few molds, little else.
Nonetheless, “they were jealous,” says Grammatico. “The recipes were secret. They wouldn’t give them to anyone.” She
chuckles. “I’d stolen them.”

Now 76, Grammatico still dedicates much of her time to making pastries. She also runs a cooking school, popular with
Americans, she says. She works every day, dressed in a chef’s coat, typically with a scarf around her neck. Her fingers
move nimbly as she fashions small marzipan flowers to place on top of her confections. There is no hint that any of this
routine has become drudgery. Quite the opposite. When she talks about the process of baking, she describes the
almonds that are so essential to Sicilian pastry as beloved, like children. As with a child (she has none of her own), “you
never get tired of them.”

But Grammatico questions whether this celebrated tradition has staying power. I ask her if young people want to learn
how to make Sicilian pastries the old way. No, she says, she doesn’t think so. “It requires sacrifices,” she says.

Reflecting on her words later, I wonder if she has forgotten all those aspiring chefs who have made the pilgrimage to
her mountaintop just to learn from her. Food, whether caponata or almond pastry, evolves, and often we find it far from
its original home. While I fully expect there to be a pastry shop in Erice for a very long time, it’s also possible that the
next great practitioner of this Sicilian art will be running a bakery not in Sicily, but in some faraway place.