A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
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 […]
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 […]
(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.