Rachel Laudan

Rajagopal Sukumar, who often comments on this blog, just posted on the recent failure of the Doha round on his own blog. It has prompted an informed and discussion. I hope to contribute something to the discussion in the next couple of days. In the meantime, if you, like me, find it awfully [...]

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. [...]

Back to the issue of food on the move. Here are some general observations about the origin and diffusion of dishes.
Independent invention versus diffusion
The case of North African harisa and Mexican adobo illustrates this nicely. Here you have two very similar techniques (soaking chiles, grinding with herbs and spices, adding oil). Were [...]