Fascinating Stories About Semi-Skimmed Milk

IMAGE: An iconic example of the fictional book genre: J. R. Hartley’s Fly Fishing, invented to tug at our heartstrings in this Yellow Pages advert from the 1980s. A frail elderly man (left) calls several used-book dealers in vain, searching for a copy of Fly...

Domestication through Defecation

IMAGE: “Possible routes of development from Hunting-Collecting to other systems,” from Deforesting The Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis by Michael Williams, via Social Fiction. Click here for larger size. An important factor in the domestication...

Biofortified Humanoids

IMAGE: Red, yellow-green, and green pea aphids. Photo courtesy of Charles Hedgcock, R.B.P., via NPR. Over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an Edible Geography favourite, Jeremy links to a fascinating post about transgenic pea aphids. The pea aphid has been the...

The Amazing Allegorical Synthetic Fish

IMAGE: Rainbow trout, via. Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire popularised the ingenious idea that the biographies of plants provide us with a mirror in which we can see our own history, desires, and values. The triumph of corn, for example, tells us a wealth of...