Smart Mouth: Extending the range of a food lover, and a marriage
Washington Post, September 2, 2011 When I was in my early 20s, on break from university in England, I spent a whole month in Budapest because I’d read in a guidebook that there are three great world...
View ArticleJeju Island: Paradise with a Dark Side
I’m standing with a social worker beneath the palm trees outside a municipal building in the main city of Jeju Island. We’re talking about a nearby naval base, which the South Korean government is...
View ArticleEating History
The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been...
View ArticleGoing Organic
Ten years ago I visited Slovenia to do a report on organic farming for the Bay Area-based organization Food First. I was drawn to the former Yugoslav republic because it had recently joined with...
View ArticleMenu for a Hot Planet
In many ways the human race hit the skids when we stopped throwing spears and gathering berries. Once we started planting seeds and harvesting the produce, we grew shorter, fatter, sicker, and...
View ArticleThe Hunger President
One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. The quote comes from Stalin. The policy comes from Donald Trump. Trump famously changed his policy on Syria after seeing photographs of a couple...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Black Death Undermined Feudalism. What Does COVID-19 Mean for Capitalism?
You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen...
View ArticleChoco Pies vs. Cold Noodles
In the blockbuster 2000 film JSA, two South Korean soldiers accidentally find themselves on the North Korean side of the Joint Security Area, at the border between the two countries. They meet their...
View ArticleRussia’s Agricultural Warfare
Saudi Arabia is pissed off at Russia. It’s not as if the Gulf state has released any angry statements to the press. Rather, Riyadh has made clear its displeasure in an indirect way. It has offered to...
View Article