Rachel Laudan

Samuel Palmer, Gleaning for Wheat under a Harvest Moon, 1833 from Feasts and Festivals Sometimes things just come together.  Last week I spent a good bit of time at a seminar on Nutritional Anthropology and more writing about how in nineteenth-century Europe, famines ceased to be a regular part of life, as well as going [...]

It’s a brown tomato.  It came in a plastic box with half a dozen confreres at my local Wal-Mart in Mexico City.  Inside it’s still brownish.  Tastes fine.  Disconcerting, a bit.  It was new to me. But here’s the back story on the demand for these tomatoes from the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Sonia [...]

The Pacific is a terrifying ocean.  It’s not so much the storms.  The Indian Ocean and the north Atlantic, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn trump it there.  It’s the sheer size.  Flying to Hawaii, when we lived there, and looking out the plane window every hour or so for the six hour [...]