How the chilli pepper conquered China
07 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Chilli peppers took a few years to reach China after their initial encounter with Westerners, but ra...
It’s coffee, but not as we know it
29 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Sierra Leone, a hunt for long lost species of coffee succeeds
Alexis Soyer
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A brief look at the life of one of the first celebrity chefs
Questions of Taste
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Are there any universals about more complex kinds of gustatory taste? And how do we learn to talk ab...
You are what you drink
11 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Walpole — like all great politicians — understood how to use his tipple to send a signal
Disputations about taste
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I know taste is entirely subjective. But I’m also willing to think about good taste and bad taste ...
The Man Who Tried to Feed the World
13 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Norman Borlaug gave birth to the Green Revolution, with little thought for the unintended consequenc...
Russian Food: Old and New
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Beyond the North Wind, the true heart of Russian Food
The book of the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
16 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A young Russian woman blogs her way through the only cookbook her grandmother knew -- and gets her o...
Orange-fleshed sweet potato to feed hidden hunger
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A food people don't like, and don't even know they need, turns their lives around
Another cup of coffee culture
17 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It took more than a hundred years, but eventually the United States too developed a recognisable cof...
Coffee culture in Italy and England
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Espresso is the canonical coffee of Italy, even though the original espresso was something entirely ...
Why a spurtle makes a superior porridge stirrer
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With a bag of porridge oats in my baggage, I set off for Georgetown University and a date with scien...
Cow sharing in the European Alps
23 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Unlike car sharing, when you buy a share in a cow, you are not free to drive her wherever you want. ...
Pasta Grannies
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Vicky Bennison set out to record Italian grannies making pasta and along the way created terrificall...
Cashews, the World Bank, and Mozambique
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Mozambique used to be the world's largest supplier of cashew nuts. Then along came the World Bank, t...
How capuchin monkeys learn about food
11 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Capuchin monkeys are resourceful and smart, which helps them to select a good diet from all the pote...
Fifty ways to cook a carrot
21 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
You can't judge a book by its cover. 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot is not really about carrots.
Porridge
07 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How did porridge go from a fine breakfast food, albeit one that's easily abused, to the stuff of foo...
Radish redux
23 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"All the intrigue of a murder mystery and all the painstaking, arduous pursuit of an archeological d...
When in Rome
09 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Alfredo sauce, made famous in the 1920s, dates back to at least 1390. That, and other surprises of f...
A sweet sour story
26 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A downturn in the house-building business set Maurice Gilbert at Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park on the...
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or
12 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ignorance, paranoia and greed have damaged the olives of the Salento almost beyond recognition.
Housekeeping
13 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We all deserve a break from time to time.
Eating Alone
29 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Some people hate eating alone, others love it, but we all have to do it at times.
Celebrating Passover and Easter
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From the first last supper to the resurrection roll.
A historian of bread on the history of bread
01 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
William Rubel doesn't think there is good bread or bad bread, but he knows what he likes.
Prehistoric food globalisation
18 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The first farmers and their crops moved much further, much earlier, than previously thought. As they...
We need to talk about meat
04 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Meat exercises the imagination in a way no other food can match. Some people have always wanted to b...
Better baking through chemistry
18 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Fake news. A Senate bought and paid for. Newspapers printing press releases verbatim. And all more t...
Moxie Bread, Louisville, CO
04 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Insights into building and running a very successful small bakery, plus the "super colloidal suspens...
Food and diversity in Laos
21 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The staggering agricultural biodiversity that is such an important aspect of Lao food is on display ...
Facts about Champagne: Part 2
31 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's nothing new about persuading influencers to quaff your brand of bubbly
Facts about Champagne: Part 1
24 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
From the all-seeing Dom Pérignon to the young bucks of London’s high society, champagne’s true ...
Good things from Nürnberg
10 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What makes the lebkuchen from Nürnberg so special?
Is that a pickle …
26 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jan Davison has written Pickles: A Global History, the perfect accompaniment to her previous book, E...
What a bunch of turkeys
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Spaghetti Carbonara Day, read by the author. (I didn’t steal it; I set it free.)
Just that which is deserved
12 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Is dessert a pointless overindulgence, or perhaps the most interesting and creative part of a good m...
A communal oven in Christchurch, New Zealand
29 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A communal oven helps a community to bake bread and rebuild after two massive earthquakes.
Food, power, pubs and politics in Ireland
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The law that protects pubs from the perceived challenge of restaurants was passed by a Parliament fu...
Making sense of modern recipes
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Unless you already know what you're doing, modern cook-books may be a recipe for disaster.
Food in prison
17 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"Food is essentially the sentence," says Clair Woods-Brown.
Winding Down
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this r...
A Perennial Dream
30 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough." Wes Jack...
It’s a Hard Grain
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The qualities that make durum wheat so attractive for pasta have nothing to do with the size of the ...
Anything but Grim
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day....
Bread and Political Circuses
27 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can't deliver either.
Wheats and Measures
26 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.
Tradition!
25 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Nathan Myhrvold is right: "The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”
Slow, but Exceedingly Fine
24 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bakers who grind their own grain are all utterly in love with the flour they get. I'm jealous.
Brown v. White
23 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. You can get great wh...
Sourdough by Any Name
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It needn't actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a n...
Breaking Bread
21 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and...
Back to Basics
20 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There's a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the...
The Bread that Ate the World
19 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps there's more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.
Allied forever
18 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!
Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations f...
Water and Power
16 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that ...
Risen
15 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.
The daily grind
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you ge...
Bread from the Dead
13 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. Thi...
The inside story
12 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. The rest of us ca...
It’s not natural
11 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Synthetic wheat; it isn't natural, but it is a very good thing.
Dwarf wheat: On the shoulders of a giant
10 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Credit where credit's due: The Father of the Green Revolution had an unacknowledged father himself.
Red Fife
09 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today's Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn'...
Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov
08 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the 'building material' required ... ...
Bake like an Egyptian
07 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, wher...
Hulled wheats
06 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".
At last: agriculture
05 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the ...
What exactly is wheat?
04 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?
Crumbs; the oldest bread
03 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder ...
Boil in the Bag
02 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It's a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don't need a heat-proof container to boil water.
The Abundance of Nature
01 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn't all that difficult.
Our Daily Bread 00
26 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It's magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of ...
Food as Power
28 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal t...
Food safety and industry concentration
14 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How do farmers' markets and concentrated food industries that depend on long food chains stack up wh...
Who owns whom in the food industry
30 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The number of firms that own the food brands you see is much smaller than you think. That's not good...
Whatever happened to British veal?
16 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped ...
Hoptopia
02 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A hop crop flop in Europe made the fortunes of growers in the Pacific north west of America, none mo...
A visit to Hummustown
19 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Eating is a political act, as Wendell Berry reminded us. Which is why I was very happy to sample the...
Barges and bread
05 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Even before the Romans, grain arrived in what was to become London by water, and it continues to do ...
The Hamlet Fire
19 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Imperial Food Products fire wasn't really an accident; circumstances conspired to make it extrem...
From little seeds …
05 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A second visit to Scariff in County Clare, Ireland, to hear from the people working hard to save Ire...
Bread as it ought to be
22 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, m...
Little bits of 2017: Part IV
08 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Nealon on the plague-stopping power of lemonade.
Little bits of 2017: Part III
01 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jaan Altosaar on his practical approach to food
Little bits of 2017: Part II
25 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread
Little bits of 2017: Part I
18 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Parke Wilde on SNAP and nutrition
Feeding people is easy
04 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
First let's decide what kind of food supply system we want, then use that to bring about a renaissan...
A cheese place
20 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A trip to the Sheep's Head peninsula in West Cork and one of the pioneer cheesemakers there, Jeffa G...
Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture
06 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Many of the things you might believe about the history of agriculture in America just aren't true.
Ireland’s apple collection
23 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Apples picked to perfume a room. Undocumented apples and apples with false papers. Foundlings that c...
Antibiotics and agriculture
09 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Antibiotic resistance is one consequence of feeding animals large amounts of antibiotics -- about th...
1000 days of noodle soup
11 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How an empty kitchen in Boston triggered a breakfast obsession and a new book on noodle soup.
Pushing good coffee
30 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If you really want to do good by spending more on your coffee, you need to look beyond Fair Trade an...
It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you
14 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
John Speth on how food we may consider disgusting is essential for survival in the Arctic, with adde...
Back to the future for the wheat of tomorrow
31 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Wheat growers are making use of hugely diverse evolutionary populations to give them the seeds they ...
Getting to know the cinta senese on its home turf
17 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A breed of pigs, well known as far back as 1338, almost vanished in the 1960s. Now it's back, and it...
A brief survey of the food of Corfu
03 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Signs of the Venetian occupation are everywhere, as are the imprints of French and British rule. But...
Changing Global Diets: the website
24 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A picture is worth way more than 1000 words when it reveals food trends over the past 50 years for m...