Rachel Laudan

Hawaii has a way of changing the way you think about the world. If you can once penetrate the tourist curtain, it’s one of the most interesting places in the United States, perhaps in the world. It’s a place where diasporas ended up from the Pacific Islands, from Europe and America, from Asia, each [...]

Here I’m continuing to muse on Richard Fletcher’s thought-provoking list of questions for an informal agenda for understanding conversion in The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. I find his questions are a very useful way of thinking about changing tastes and changing cuisines. The fourth question in his agenda is what did [...]

Lots of disciplines wrestle with understanding the diffusion of ideas, technologies, products and so on. I find browsing the work of archaeologists, economists, historians and others a fruitful source of ideas for understanding change in food.
For the last few months I have been dipping into Richard Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. [...]