Website Recommendation - The Old Foodie

This is a picture of Incas harvesting potatoes c. 1565. It is featured in a gorgeously illustrated book I have called The Origins of Fruit and Vegetables by Jonathan Roberts published by Universe Publishing in 2001. As some of you who have been reading this website since it's inception (which happens to be April 2004 - Happy Birthday Edible Tulip!) I have a thing, for lack of a better word, for historical/anthropological food stories. That is how I began writing about food. I worked as a columnist for two publications and wrote articles that traced the narrative of a particular food object or tradition. Food, after all, has never had a linear path. It is imbued by all things political, social, cultural, historical, theological, etc. It holds romance and tragedy in many of its embodiments (the cacao bean, absinthe, medicinal poisons that sweeten the tip of darts). Food and its ubiquitous stories keep me alive and mentally well fed.

I got an email recently from Down Under. The Old Foodie it seems is onto something. If you might find yourself interested in what David Livingstone ate for breakfast on his trans-African journey in the year of 1854 or what you might have been served as a decadent lunch on the Japanese cruise ship the M.S. "Santos Maru" of the Osaka Shosen Kaisha Line in 1934 or what the "neurotic and hypochrondriac" Renaissance Mannerist painter Jacopo Carruci da Pontormo wrote in his diary in 1554 with respect to food and medicine then you'll find yourself visiting this blog quite often.