Rachel Laudan

Of all the difficult things to turn into food (and most plants and animals are difficult to turn into food), cacao beans and their processing rank way up there. Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is [...]

Linguists have developed ways to reconstruct dead languages like Proto Indo-European, the language from which many of the languages of western Eurasia, including Celtic, Latin, Sanskrit etc are descended.  Not the whole language perhaps.  But lots of words and some idea of the society they represent. Pretty nifty.  So how do they do it? Linguists [...]

It’s a cliché that farm subsidies benefit large farmers at the expense of small farmers.  Now along comes Mike Smith of Truth in Food to offer a new way of looking at subsidies.  And anything that challenges a cliché is good with me if it’s based on evidence. As the chart below shows, while it’s [...]