Rachel Laudan

The Japanese are short of butter and considering emergency imports, according to the Wall Street Journal. How the worm turns, at least on the biggish historical scale. A hundred and fifty years ago, it would have been the very rare person in Japan who would have had even the faintest clue what butter was. The [...]

I’ve just returned from the main annual meeting of a group called the International Association of Culinary Professionals in New Orleans. It’s an interesting umbrella organization that offers shelter to those interested in food who don’t find a natural home elsewhere. I rubbed shoulders with food stylists, journalists, owners of gourmet shops, tour leaders, cooking [...]

Today I took a morning off work to explore. I live in Guanajuato, Mexico which was for hundreds of years one of the richest silver mining towns in the world. Figuring out how such an operation could work in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, without railroads or rivers for transport, a hundred and fifty miles [...]