Rachel Laudan

This morning’s post is for those obessionistas like me who can’t resist digging into the strange and multiple paths along which people have taken plants, in this case the black-eyed pea (aka the cow pea or Vigna unguiculata). It was first domesticated in West Africa, botanists tell us. A couple of years ago I posted [...]

Mr Keys* and his Spanish friends located in the United States dedicated themselves to promoting the benefits of a [Mediterranean] diet that was only strictly followed in Crete and that . . . with the passage of time . . . became transformed into the Mediterranean “style of life.” In the first half of the [...]

Of all the difficult things to turn into food (and most plants and animals are difficult to turn into food), cacao beans and their processing rank way up there. Let’s leave to one side the fermenting and cleaning and just think about the grinding of cacao. Because of the oil content, grinding cacao beans is [...]