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I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is identical to that of a crispy one. But the experience falls far short of enjoyable. A crisp needs to be, well, crisp. If it isn’t, it actually tastes bad. That’s not quite so true of […]

Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as you could hope for. I found out about that because I was checking out her new book, The Resilient Gardener, which offers all kinds of advice for making the […]

What matters is not how little beer you make, but how carefully you make your beer.

Bling, the Urban Dictionary tells me, is an onomatopoeic representation of light bouncing off a diamond. Or a Bob Kramer original hand-made chef’s knife, which goes for $2000 and up. Of course some people might be able to justify spending that kind of cash on what is, after all, one of the key tools of […]

Good beef frozen is better than bad beef fresh.

This history of domestication and agriculture encompasses North America too.

Not all progress is bad. Rachel Laudan makes a powerful case that modern methods of making sugar and salt are far superior.

I did not know that that the famous Monty Python spam sketch was recorded on 6 June 1970. At least, that’s the claim of a Tumblr obsessed with Minnesota in the 1970s. (Wikipedia says only that “[i]t premiered on 15 December 1970”.) However, I need no encouragement to share a programme on Spam that I […]

The big question is, why do amateur growers and those who choose not to care even need the protection of EU seed legislation?

Most of what you think you know about potatoes and nutrition is wrong.