Archives

Some science, some history, some nutrition; in other words, a balanced meal.

How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over […]

Today’s dishes are data rich.

The fuss about Hampton Creek’s eggless oil emulsion has obscured other eggless players … and the real point.

The Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centuries. It was dark because the light of Rome had been extinguished, while that of the Renaissance had not yet burst into flame. And it was […]

Bread, tea and bird poop; a diverse diet trawled from the internet for your delectation.

A little bit of science, on how modern plant breeding has changed the nutrition of staple crops.

“Forget organic. Eat local.” Nice, simple advice, from the cover of Time magazine. But more or less pointless. There’s so much more to food systems than just the distance the food travels. Tim Lang coined the phrase food miles. We talked about the complexities of the food system.

Two very different approaches to the social baggage of chickpea purée.

“Never apologise, never explain” is all very well, but … I’ve been away, and I wasn’t able to do much finding or sifting the flowers of the internet. So, here you go: