Rachel Laudan

An interesting side effect of the “food crisis” (I’m still not sure I like that name) is that the hunt is on for agricultural land outside the nation state. The New Zealand dairy cooperative is looking to rent or buy land in, say, Brazil. The Chinese are looking for farm land in Africa and [...]

The Chinese Mengniu Dairy in Inner Mongolia is about to become one of the largest dairy farms in the world.
It’s been in operation since 1999, trades on the Hong Kong stock exchange, and has a lot of foreign investment.
Global milk production has increased by 240% in the last 40 years. The fastest growth is [...]

For the past several weeks I’ve been perusing John F. Richards’ The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (California, 2005). There’s a lot of it to peruse. The book runs nearly 700 pages. For a food historian, the fascination is that this is the other side of food history. [...]