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“The British used to fuss for hours over fancy designs, but when it came to the flavor, they’d say, 'Oh, sponge will do.' That’s all changing now.”

Beyond the locavore movement of shopping at farmers markets and joining community-supported agriculture organizations (CSAs), we are global eaters, excited to explore the tables of Thailand, China, Japan, Peru, India, Ethiopia, and more at ethnic restaurants.

For the past 20 years, Jeffery Pilcher has investigated the history, politics, and evolution of Mexican food, including how Mexican silver miners likely invented the taco, how Mexican Americans in the Southwest reinvented it, and how businessman Glen Bell mass-marketed it to Anglo p

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” —Hippocrates Dr. Michael Fenster is making a house call to the Culinary Historians of Chicago. And he’s going to ask all of us if we are healthier today compared to previous generations.

Everyone has favorite recipes they’ve loved and lost.

Pasta, now a near-ubiquitous food throughout the world, has achieved global status after a long, complex history involving multiple points of origin and several periods of rapid expansion of its popularity. In the West, one such period occurred in the late Middle Ages in the western Mediterranean.

According to Southern cooking icon Nathalie Dupree, Southerners lie awake at night and remember their grandmother’s biscuits, their Aunt Sue’s mashed potatoes and gravy, the grits from the mill down the road, and the boiled peanuts their grandfather taught them to cook i