Funerals, they say, are for the living. The stories we share about those who have come and gone tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the past. What do we want to remember? What would we rather forget? The answers change, as we do.
Acquired Tastes tells the life stories of people whom history has largely…
Sarah E. Tracy
Sarah E. Tracy has a doctorate in the history of science and technology.
Articles by
Sarah E. Tracy
The editors Jeff Dupuis and A. G. Pasquella begin their science fiction anthology with a lean introduction. They conjure an old friend of the food writing world, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, from 1825, left us with several gems of wisdom, including the opening line of Devouring Tomorrow: “You are what you eat.”
Brillat-Savarin’s original claim was “Dis‑moi ce que tu…
I met the chef Joshna Maharaj in September 2012. It was a team-building exercise: a day-long retreat to the University of Toronto’s Hart House Farm in Caledon. We were researchers gathered for the start of a fellowship year, and we were there to think about food. Maharaj was there to help us make some. Her…
The future is on our minds. And the future seems fraught. Lenore Newman’s Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food and Benjamin R. Cohen’s Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food bookend a growing anxiety about eating while modern: What do we really know about what we…