food - Observations

Productivity Growth And Olive Oil Production

I was wondering how olive oil made recently, and curiosity led me to contrast methods of production over the past two thousand years: An olive press from Biblical times: An old-fashioned olive oil mill (unclear how old it really is though): Large scale modern

Dailies

How White Bread Became Ubiquitous

Rachel Ludan on why our ancestors switched from eating wholemeal to white bread. In a nutshell: higher energy density, easier digestibility, higher social status probably made white bread more popular than wholemeal bread even though it was more expensive.

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The Importance Of Agriculture

Rachel Laudan on Jared Diamond's thesis that agriculture was the worst mistake mankind ever made: The agriculture-as disaster theory rests, at least in part, on ignoring the work involved in processing and cooking food. If you take cooking and processing into account, agriculture was

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Food From Thin Air

This headline from an article in BigThink grabbed my attention. The article doesn't dive into how the food is actually made, but this interview with the founder fills in the gaps: The idea seems to be to do a highly efficient type of photosynthesis:

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Chip Shop Menus

On the diversity of chip shop menu's throughout the UK. Notable quote: The story of the deep-fried Mars bar began in 1992, in a small town near Aberdeen called Stonehaven, with one teenager daring another to go into local fish bar The Haven and

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Milling Grain

Food historian Rachel Ludan has a really interesting article on how tedious milling grain (especially maize) used to be, particularly for women. To me this again goes to show how laborious life was in the past, and how thankful we should be for the

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The Great Medieval Bake Off

The British Library's attempted to replicate some medieval baking recipes. The most tempting dish IMO is sambocade, "a curd tart flavoured with elderflowers".

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Stone Age Diet

This paper by J. A. J. Gowlett is a short overview of what we know about the diet of our species. I was surprised to learn we've been eating roots and tubers for millions of years: Comparisons of diet with living apes and modern

food

Acquiring Tastes: A Theory Of Novelty

Here's a hypothesis I've had for a while: Beyond a certain age, your brain punishes excessive novelty in food. Sure, small extrapolations of things you already like are fine: fried chicken is chicken + crispy and so it's universally loved, even by those trying it

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