Rachel Laudan

I was delighted when last week the Old Foodie, who ferrets out the most wonderful quotations, posted this:
“Pleasure is the thing proposed, and because there can be none without some Appetite, new ways are invented and contrived to make an Artificial one, when that which is Natural is either wanting or satisfied. They must [...]

That’s the question Liz Williams of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum asked me. Well, lot’s the time that’s exact what we do. For breakfast we have milk and cornflakes. Plain food by any standard since cornflakes like most cereals was invented by a plain food enthusiast, in this case Kellogg. [...]

That’s the (latest) title of a presentation I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery last week. The draft paper and the handout can be found in the Culinary History Articles section of this blog.
In essence what I want to say is that for most of history, people wanted the most refined, [...]