A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
Mexican food is hugely popular in the United States — salsa has been outselling ketchup for years, some of the fastest growing restaurant chains sell Mexican food, the taco truck craze is at its peak — but it took a many years and many innovators for this to happen. Gustavo Arellano’s Taco USA: How Mexican […]
The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself. Like the Parthenon, […]
Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles, by Kevin Roderick (with research by J. Eric Lynxwiler) has been on my list for many years and I finally read it last month. On my handful of visits to Los Angeles, I have probably driven the entire length of Wilshire Boulevard, covering a lot of the same […]
From Chaos to Order If you watched a ship loading or unloading in the early 1950s, it wouldn’t look that much different than it would have in the 1850s or even the ancient world. Sure, the port of 1950 might have forklifts and motorized cranes, but like long ago nearly every piece of cargo would […]
People have been debating yoga’s purpose, its scope, and how to practice it for centuries. So not surprisingly, the history of yoga in America is also convoluted and complicated. Stefanie Syman, in “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), makes a great effort to explain yoga’s place in […]
Long-time readers of Mental Masala will know that I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, with almost a dozen posts related to my Washoku cooking experiences. In October 2010, Ten Speed Press released another book by Andoh, Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions. I got my copy […]
When I went looking for a book to read on the long flight from Singapore to San Francisco (and during the several hour layover in Hong Kong), I wanted to find something about Southeast Asia. I ended up choosing Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: or, the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course […]
(Updated, 11/27/16: fixed broken links) After the jump, short reviews of A History of the World in Six Glasses, by Tom Standage and Jack Turner’s Spice: The History of a Temptation.