Illustration of Cassava

Plant of the Month: Cassava

Cassava can grow in hot climates with little rainfall. It may be the "root crop of the century."
Pavlova cake on a white background

Food and Culture

Food is complicated. That creation you love from The Great British Baking Show? It's been the subject of arguments over culture, identity, and copyright.
Garlic Mustard

Plant of the Month: Garlic Mustard

As garlic mustard naturalized in North America, it became a popular plant to forage for impoverished and rural communities.
Astronaut Loren J. Shriver, Mission Commander of STS-46, attempts to eat floating sweets on the flight deck of the shuttle Atlantis during its orbit of the earth, August 1992.

Food…in…Space!

A brief history of astronaut food, from nutrition cubes to space salads.
Painting of a woman's hand holding a pomegranate

The Paradoxical Pomegranate

Aphrodisiac and contraceptive, enflaming and cooling, the pomegranate was a balancing act, mediating between opposing states.
Tobacco sharecropper's wife cleaning up table after washing breakfast dishes. Person County, North Carolina, 1939, by Dorothea Lange

How the New Deal Documented Southern Food Cultures

Photographers and writers hired by the US government presented the foodways of the South to a wide audience.
Artocarpus heterophyllus

Plant of the Month: Jackfruit

The newly hot alternative to meat has a long history.
Whole Foods organic products

How the “Organic” Label Leaves Small Farmers Out

The USDA's requirements for organic labeling make it easier for large agri-business than the smaller farmers you'd think of as "organic."
Ground mustard

The Mystery of the Mustard Family

An archaeological dig turned up eight bottles of mustard powder in one eighteenth-century homestead. Why the condiment love?