Global Culinary Traditions Italy without tomatoes. Thailand without chillies. India without potatoes. Almost every “traditional” cuisine you can name is a recent product of global trade — and the trade was rarely gentle. Here is a fact that reliably unsettles people: there were no tomatoes in Italy until the sixteenth century, no chillies in Thailand … Read more
Food Movements & Culture Wild food is genuinely rewarding and genuinely risky. This is a guide to starting responsibly — with expert instruction, legal permission, and a healthy respect for what you don’t yet know. Read this first This article is an introduction to foraging as a practice, not a field guide and not an … Read more
Food Movements & Culture It began as a protest against a burger chain near the Spanish Steps. Four decades on, its actual argument — good, clean, fair — has aged better than almost anyone expected. The founding story is almost too neat. In the mid-1980s, plans for a McDonald’s near Rome’s Spanish Steps prompted a … Read more
Food Movements & Culture The phrase now appears on menus at chains that source from national distributors. Here’s what it originally meant, what’s genuinely valuable in it, and how to tell the real thing from the marketing. “Farm-to-table” has had the career trajectory of most successful food ideas: born as a genuine reform, adopted by … Read more
Food Movements & Culture Broccoli stems, parmesan rinds, herb stalks, chicken bones, stale bread. The scraps you bin are, in most traditional cuisines, simply ingredients — and often the best ones. A curious thing happened to home cooking in the twentieth century: it acquired a category called “scraps.” Broccoli stems became waste even though they’re … Read more