COOKING OVER A HOT SPOT – USING FOOD TO ILLUSTRATE GEOLOGY FOR NON-SCIENTISTS IN YELLOWSTONE

Tilden’s (1957) first principle of successful interpretation is that what is being interpreted must relate to the previous experience of a visitor. Smilkstein (2003) identifies that humans learn by expanding from what is known through what is being experienced. What is more universally experienced than cooking and eating? The Yellowstone supervolcano, erupted through rocks that go more than half way back to the origin of Earth, and the hydrothermal systems associated with still-hot magma, provide excellent opportunities to relate what visitors experience in this unusual and dynamic landscape to their previous knowledge, through linking geology with analogues from cooking and eating. These food-related analogues apply to many other geologic settings. The long-traditional demonstration of building a sandwich illustrates geologic principles of sequential deposition, faults, folds, erosion, eruption, and imperfect preservation. Candles on a birthday cake, 160 football fields in area, illustrate the age of the oldest rocks in the park. A jelly doughnut provides an (outdated?) analogue for subsurface magma. Boiling spaghetti sauce in a pan provides a ready demonstration of the difficult-to-grasp concept of boiling as cooling (hotter burner with cooler yet still-boiling sauce). The lid over the sauce provides an analogue for condensation of thermal gasses at the cooler surface in vapor dominated hydrothermal systems. The smells from cooking provide a ready illustration of chemical separation through boiling. A plate of pancakes provides an analogue for stacked caldera-filling rhyolite flows. For visitors familiar with pressure cooking, boiling at higher temperatures illustrates the increase in boiling temperatures with depth, and hypothetical removal of the lid while under pressure helps them understand hydrothermal explosions. For visitors who bake, crack patterns in muffins emulate fault patterns in resurgent domes. And, of course, there are always lava cakes!