A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
Updated below After my review of The Box and my port mapping exercise, I thought I’d sail back into port and unload a few port-related charts. The first shows the growth of three big West Coast ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. As international trade has expanded and the container shipping industry has become […]
As I work on a book review that will certainly take me a while, here’s a short rant about two elements of book design that can be irksome. (For what it’s worth, the book I’m reviewing — The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson, […]
Updated 8/23/15 Are you sick of seeing kale everywhere? Kale salad after kale salad. Kale green-smoothies. Kale chips. Dehydrated kale dust garnish. Or are you worried that kale’s recent entry on to some McDonald’s menus, will make it totally uncool? Broccoli leaves and cauliflower leaves could be the alternative you are looking for. They are […]
As I follow the news on insects as food (entomophagy), I have been wondering if the pace of articles has been increasing because it seems that every time I turn around there is another article about cricket flour or a new book about eating bugs. To answer my question, I visited the U.C. Berkeley library […]
One of my favorite posts at Mental Masala looks at the history and psychology of “insects as food” in European and closely-related cultures and U.S., Canada, and Australia. (A quick summary: These cultures have a long history of associating insects with disease and filth, which makes them unappetizing. In addition, not many large insects that […]
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been baking a “war bread” for quite a while. My long-time favorite one-day bread is the oat bread in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The original recipe is simple, delicious and nutritious, being a single-day bread that is enriched with rolled oats and oat bran. By […]
The light-bulb-based dough chamber that I posted about a few months ago was a good design and worked well. However, it requires an input of electricity to provide the heat (i.e., to run the light bulb), while there is already an appliance in my kitchen that offers “free” heat: my oven. My old oven (a […]
The software on the microfilm reader made me a little scan crazy, so I grabbed a few more fun bits from the March 27, 1898 edition of the New York Herald while my USB drive was working well with the microfilm reader’s software (something that didn’t happen the first time I visited the newspaper room). […]
Update, August 2016: Fixed broken links and updated Microplace’s status “If you eat, you’re an investor” is the motto of Slow Money’s entry into the crowd-funding marketplace. Called Credibles – a word derived from “edible credits” – it joins Kickstarter, Kiva * , the now closed Microplace ** and others as alternative sources of capital […]
(Updated 12/14/16: fixed broken links) The word “natural” takes a lot of abuse in the food business. It’s slapped on just about any product to as a lure to buyers, and yet, it doesn’t have much meaning, except in narrow circumstances. Recently, I ran across a somewhat unconventional usage on the “Pita Bite Crackers” from […]