Matthew Wills has advanced degrees in library science and film studies and is lapsed in both fields. He has published in Poetry, Huffington Post, and Nature Conservancy Magazine, among other places, and blogs regularly about urban natural history at matthewwills.com.
The Arts and Crafts and Slow Food movements twinned pleasure and democracy though supporters of these artisanal crusades developed a reputation for elitism.
In the mid-seventeenth century, John Graunt, the “father of English statistics,” claimed dozens of young women in London died of green sickness every year.
![A Chelsea Pensioner, wearing a sprig of orange blossom [?] in his buttonhole, sipping a dish of tea. Engraving by J. Jenkins after M. W. Sharp, 1840](https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/consuming_the_empire_alt_1050x700-600x400.jpg)
