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This time for your delectation, stories of interdependence, local specialties, appropriation and imposition, here, there and everywhere.

In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what remained of the region’s rich agricultural biodiversity. Almost 100 years before, the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov became convinced that this was where “the original evolution of many cultivated plants took place.” Soft club wheat, with its short ears, […]

Cheese mountains, whipped egg whites, edible petioles and anti-vegan thugs. Why not subscribe?

Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does not make sense I had no idea that the statistical correlation of air pollution and the epidemic of “diabesity” was stronger than the correlation with sugar. Or that among the indigenous people of Canada, those who still spoke their tribal […]

Bread, butter, cheese. And that’s not all: rice, melons, banana flavour too.

Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown. It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History … knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully […]

More investing stuff I’ve found, from data on organic enterprises to “processed” food. I’m late posting this here, but if you subscribed to the newsletter, you wouldn’t care.

The Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums but not others. It ought to be on all of them. This is a seriously interesting museum for anyone who likes butter, and in my book, that means just about everyone. (I refuse absolutely to say anything about […]

A book goes back to the people who made it possible.

What do you get when you whip leftover chickpea water with oil?