Cryptoforestry

Taken from Penguin Atlas of Medieval History .

Earlier I wrote about IBM's attempt at computational gastronomy, finding it a bit of a trainwreck. Recently I have been accepted as a B...

Nature printing is a special technique for representing plants on paper that was developed in the 15th century (according to Wilfrid Blu...

Tupaia , Captain Cook’s Polynesian navigator, sketched a Maori man exchanging a large, live spiny lobster for a piece of cloth when the ...

Food writers write no more and generate your food memories and your recipe introductions with Livingstone . Examples: Foraging in Southe...

Recently I read Cynthia Bertelsen's compact but dense ' Mushroom, A Global History ', a book on the cultural and gastronomic his...

Example one: Bernal Diaz, author of the only eye-witness account of Cortez' conquest of Mexico writes: "I sowed some orange pip...

This is proving to be a good year for us fans of Snyderiana. Earlier this year the correspondence between Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (...

Here are two interesting papers on how to engage with historic cookbooks by historian Barbara Wheaton. One is called: A Structured Approach ...

A nice piece came my way via Twitter: " The 'Sioux Chef' Is Putting Pre-Colonization Food Back On The Menu " about Sean Sh...

One can take a random recipe, like Jamie 'proper delish' Oliver's rainbow salad wrap , and look up the year each ingredient ente...

Blackberry Picking Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy pur...

"... Omnivorous animals are faced with a dilemma, or a paradox. One the one hand they are equipped to try new food sources and have a ...

'Darwinian Gastronomy: why we use spices' (1999, PDF-link ) by Sherman and Billing is a nice and early example of an attempt to us...

One of the great things of Rachel Laudan's Cuisine and Empire (the New York Review of Book has a very good synopsis/review ) is that she...