Rachel Laudan

I’ve just been putting the finishing touches on a keynote that I’ll be giving for a conference on the Taste of Home next week in Brussels. It’s a conference I’ve been looking forward to.  I have wanted to meet the Social and Cultural Studies of Food group led by Peter Scholliers for some time.  My [...]

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is [...]

What’s old is new again.  Physicians and philosophers in Ancient Greece and Rome (and the rest of the Ancient World) believed that what you ate and how you digested it affected, or even determined, how smart you were and what your character was. An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal sums up some recent [...]