Food is sustenance to the body during life. It is also essential to how we understand and navigate the process of death. — When someone close dies, your existence in the world subtly shifts position, causing uneasiness, instability, and anxiety. This shift may affect hierarchies within the family or societal structures, often bringing new responsibilities. Chief among those are the preparations to honour our loved ones. Funerary rites are affirmations of the strong…

Hospitality invites discussion while secretly undermining authority — Food has the potential to inspire and empower. It can transcend the everyday to become imbued with religious or political significance, gaining symbolic status. Furthermore, places where we eat can be sites for discourse, and communities can be transformed or healed. Ancient legends surrounding the birth of coffee point to…

The sacred and the profane converge to create poetry — Is it possible that the drive to express ourselves uses food as a language in the creation of recipes that are somehow universal? As a result of evolutional programming, our physical needs are air to breathe, the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise muscles, sufficient sleep, secure shelter for…

Take one humble ingredient… — In its ancestral form, the oat (avena sterilis) developed in the phosphorous-rich soils of the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. However, the domestication of oats occurred outside its center of origin. As Neolithic agriculturalists began the cultivation of primary cereals such as wheat, barley, and rye, the oat was…

History, culture and politics define our relationship to food and the story of food preservation makes a compelling case for this analysis. — Once, there was a time when food preservation was a necessity. Before fresh food arrived by sea or air to fill supermarket shelves it was an integral part of how people made effective use of food sources. Food preservation in some form is almost as old as humankind itself. As…

Eat a rainbow and support your health — Rainbows appear in myriad forms: double rainbows, twinned rainbows, supernumerary rainbows, reflected rainbows, lunar rainbows, and full-circle rainbows. The mythology around this meteorological phenomenon is endless. …