A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
At the 2017 International Food Blogging Conference in Sacramento, one of the sponsors was Avocados from Chile, the avocado promotion agency from that nation. The logic behind their promotional efforts in California is sound: United States avocado growers can’t meet growing U.S. demand The California avocado harvest is typically between April and September Chile is […]
One of my favorite posts featured a set of chocolate chip cookie charts, which built on an idea from Megnut’s Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie post. For her “mean” post, Meg collected a bunch of chocolate chip cookie recipes, calculated the mean (average) for each ingredient to create a new recipes, and then baked cookies. Her […]
One of my finds while bouncing through the Flickr Commons was this 1920 advertisement for “A Man’s Pie.” A “Man’s Pie,” it turns out, is a California raisin pie. Here’s some of the copy: A Man’s Pie Fresh — delicious. Buy it ready baked. Just phone to your grocer or bake shop and say, “Send […]
In this post, a look at two distinctive fruit crate labels. “Don’t Worry” Apples Fruit Crate Label I doubt that “Don’t Worry” brand apples would be a successful brand today. It’s easy for me to come up with a bushel of worrisome questions when choosing your food. Organic? Local? What pesticides? Imported? In season? By buying the trendy […]
(Updated, 3/15/17: new chart) For the last few months, I have been weighing oranges before and after peeling to see what fraction of the orange is edible (by weight). I had done similar work previously to measure the edible percentage of avocados, finding that Haas avocados are roughly 70% edible by weight across a span of 125 […]
(Updated 11/26/16: fixed broken links) As a child, I hated bananas. They were always around the house — my sister and brother loved them — and I liked banana bread, but their gluey texture and cloying sweetness repelled me. Nonetheless, when I went to Asia a few months ago, bananas were one of my food […]
Although the world of food is continuously getting smaller — name an exotic cooking ingredient and I can probably find it in Bay Area markets — when it comes to fruit, the world is still quite large. Many fruits just can’t travel more than a few hundred miles without a severe degradation in quality. Others, […]