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Spilling the Beans on the Origins of Food Idioms
The origins of some food idioms are a piece of cake to figure out; just use your bean. Others sound so bizarre they could make you go bananas. There are so many of them, I would have to be crackers to try to list them all, but here are a few that are particularly nutty: The apple of my eye: Accordi...
August 13, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
A Summer Reading List for Food Lovers
It's a sticky August afternoon, and the family members are facing their third day of vacation in a tiny beach town. The thrill of splashing in the surf and crafting sand castles has faded, replaced by streaks of sunburn around the edges of swimsuits and sandal straps. ("I told you to put lotion eve...
August 05, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Reading in a Whole New Way
As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change?
August 2010 |
By Kevin Kelly
The Disappearing Spoon: True Tales from the Periodic Table
Most of the time we don't think about the periodic table. Individual elements are always important—gold, oxygen, aluminum—but we rarely consider the table as a whole. It just hangs on the wall where it will be consulted from time to time (or perhaps admired for its aesthetics, like the one that han...
July 20, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Tom Swift Turns 100
Tom Swift is turning 100—and he still doesn’t look a day over 18
July 01, 2010 |
By Danny Heitman
Suggested Reading to Accompany our Anniversary Issue
First of all, go and check out Smithsonian's 40th anniversary issue, "40 Things You Need to Know about the Next 40 Years." There's lots of science, nature and technology stories, including ones about electric cars, how a wildlife refuge is dealing with rising sea levels, lab-grown body parts and ho...
June 29, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Hay Fever: Goat Farming and Cheesemaking in Vermont
Do you ever dream of retiring to some sort of quiet, rural paradise to raise a pretty little herd of goats and make gourmet cheese? I'll confess that I have.Well, that idyllic vision got sullied with reality this week when I picked up a new book called "Hay Fever: How Chasing a Dream on a Vermont F...
June 02, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Harper Lee's Novel Achievement
With To Kill a Mockingbird, published 50 years ago, Lee gave America a story for the ages. Just don't ask her about it
June 2010 |
By Charles Leerhsen
Green Eggs and Salmonella?
Beware the hidden hazards lurking within popular children's books
June 2010 |
By Abigail Green
Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir
I once told a friend about bonobos—"they're like chimpanzees," I said, "but they're peaceful and have sex all the time"—and he thought I was making them up. My computer doesn't think they exist either; it suggests alternative spellings including "bonbons" and "bongos." Bonobos are our closest livin...
May 26, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Mark Twain in Love
A chance encounter on a New Orleans dock in 1858 haunted the writer for the rest of his life
May 2010 |
By Ron Powers
Squeezed: The Secrets of the Orange Juice Industry
There are some food truths we hold to be self-evident, and one of them is that orange juice is inherently good. It's packed with vitamin C; it's what your mom tells you to drink when you feel a cold coming on; it looks like sunshine in a glass. Plus, it's delicious.Those things are true, but Alissa...
April 27, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Sea Pie and Dandy Funk
Usually reading about food makes me hungry, or at least curious to taste what's being described. But I just came across an example of something that I truly have no desire to try: Sea Pie.Working at a magazine often means receiving review copies of new books in the mail, whether I requested them or...
April 26, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty
When we think of wildlife trafficking, we usually think of stories like this one from the December issue of Smithsonian, which details the exotic creatures being stolen from Ecuador's rainforest. We don't think about the trafficking taking place here in the United States, and we certainly don't thi...
April 06, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Lewis Carroll's Shifting Reputation
Why has popular opinion of the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland undergone such a dramatic reversal?
April 2010 |
By Jenny Woolf
How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature
Classic writers reached the masses when Penguin paperbacks began publishing great novels for the cost of a pack of cigarettes
March 31, 2010 |
By Anne Trubek
How Food Shaped Humanity
A few months ago I wrote about the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, which claimed that eating cooked food was the central factor that allowed us to evolve into Homo sapiens. I recently finished another book, An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, that essen...
March 26, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
"Fair" Use of our Cells
I've been telling everyone I know that they should read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (If you haven't read my interview with the book's author, journalist Rebecca Skloot, please do.) This fascinating book details Skloot's search for the source of a laboratory cell line called "HeLa." The c...
February 02, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Children's Books Taught Us About Food
I read the other day that Kellogg's is teaming up with an Irish publisher and a bookstore to give away free books to children there who buy Rice Krispies cereal. I'm all for free books, and any effort to get children to read. The books they chose don't appear to have anything to do with food, but i...
January 15, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
Science Books for Kids
For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids' books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young:Almost Ast...
December 21, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
