Food in the Americas
People give food meaning. It’s easy to trivialize, because food is everywhere. But love of food is love of life…
Category: Food and Nutrition
What Food? Who Eats It? Why Does It Matter?
Searching for food together with growing, cooking, and eating it has consumed more time than any human activity except sleeping for most of human history. Curiously, historians have never…
Sustainable Agriculture
Famine and undernourishment are not due to lack of food availability. Rather they result from the inability of people to grow their own food or to purchase it from those that grow it. In other…
In Search of Mexico’s National Cuisine
Growing up in the Midwest in the 1970s, I ate a bland diet of meat and potatoes and soothing Jell-O salads. Mexican food remained unknown territory until my brother moved to Las Cruces…
Rigoberta Menchú and the Politics of Food
I think everyone who reads Rigoberta Menchú’s famous 1982 testimonio remembers the part in editor Elisabeth Burgos’s prologue when she describes how she won the Guatemalan woman’s…
Nutrición, Lactancia Materna y Fertilidad
“2 de febrero, 2000: Es la hora de la siesta en Namqom. Todo está calmo, atemporal, borroso” Yo estoy sentada en la salita de enfermería en en el Centro de Salud. Desde aquí escucho roncar a…
The Maya Hand Down a Recipe for Chocolate
Inside the Harvard Peabody Museum Annex, rows and rows of metal shelving reveal hundreds of clay pots and shards, all catalogued with numbers on their sides. Most of these are decorative…
Global Food Fights
The international debate over genetically modified crops pits a cautious, consumer-driven Europe against aggressive U.S. industry. Today’s backlash against the commercial use of…
Diet, Poverty, Lifestyle and Health
On a summer day in the early 1970’s two Harvard Medical students boarded a small plane in Turbo, Antioquia, Colombia and flew to an isolated community in the northeast of the province…
Culinary Collections Recipes and Beyond
The smells of roast suckling pig “lechón” and spicy enchiladas waft through the book stacks of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies’ Arthur & Elisabeth Schlesinger Library…
The Commercialization of Oaxacan Chocolate
I spent the fall semester of my junior year in Harvard in Mexico. While I’d heard a lot about coffee in Chiapas, I never imagined that what would really capture my attention was chocolate in…
Border Crossings in my Boston Cuban Kitchen
Deep in the middle of a Boston winter, depressed by the frigid temperatures and the early descent of darkness, I go to the Jamaica Plain Hi/Lo market for a total immersion in the warmth…
From Big to Small, Toxic to Green
Agricultural policy in Cuba has not lacked in audacity. From the wide-sweeping land reforms of 1959 and 1962, to the disastrous drive for a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970, to the banning of…
The Art of Peruvian Cuisine
The Spanish brought rice to Peru and first cultivated it in the coastal areas. Peruvians love rice and will eat it along with its Quechua equivalent, the potato. In fact few meals are complete…
