The Last Places

IMAGE: Ministry of Defence Main Building, photograph by JoanneB via Wikipedia. Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more...

Defrost Prior to Construction

When it was built in Chicago’s meatpacking district at the start of the 1920s, Fulton Market Cold Storage Company was touted as “an example of the very highest development in cold storage warehouse design.” IMAGE: Fulton Market Cold Storage Company...

An Omnivorous Perspective on the Jurassic

As a fun footnote to my last post: Last month, Popular Science offered an entirely speculative guide to eating dinosaur meat. IMAGE: Struthiomimus altus, an ornithomimid from the Late Cretaceous, as illustrated by Nobu Tamura. In consultation with David Varricchio, a...

The Impossibility of Historical Flavour

During the Edible Archaeology panel at Foodprint NYC, Bill Grimes, former restaurant critic and current obituary writer for The New York Times, briefly referred to “one of the great mysteries for all culinary historians — what did it taste like?” What did...