I have actively engaged in researching nutrition and American eating behaviors for the past twenty years, at least. I have not even attempted to extricate my personal involvement in our food system from the 30,000-foot view of the state of things. Questions about food and what it does to our bodies color every day for me, both as a participant and an observer. So it rather surprised me when one instance of how food affects life jumped out and crystalized as a definitive impet

Oliver Evans's Grist Mill: First Automated Industrial Processing in the World c. 1790 Several weeks ago, I asked my daughter who has access to Stanford's magnificent Green Library, to borrow a book I needed for my research on wheat. Oliver Evans: A Chronicle of Early American Engineering by Greville Bathe and Dorothy Bathe was not available through any of my usual channels, as only 500 copies had been printed in 1935 by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Like the ineluctable course of a grist-mill water wheel, the profession of milling wheat is coming full circle. My new book on the history of food processing in the United States starts with the story of Oliver Evans, a brilliant inventor hobbled by his humble roots. Evans, a fussy sort of precisionist, reviled the rancid, rock-strewn, maggoty flour that his local Delaware Valley grist mills cranked out. Perhaps even worse to this pioneering process engineer were the product

This week, my VERY active, healthy, tri-athlete, twenty-six-year-old daughter is eating like a poor person -- or at least like an idealized, nutritionally conscious poor person. She, along with other MBA students across the country, is trying to eat on $4.50/day, which is what the USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) clients attempt to do. Real SNAP participants augment the paltry allowance at their local Food Banks, church socials, and other gatherings whe

The Social Sex is launched. Fun book tour winding down. Whew! On to next projects. 1) Refined (LOTS more to come) 2) Rewrite of my historical novel, Sempervirens, to be renamed, Stumptown Waltz. Nevertheless, I'll never forget that laden word, Sempervirens. It was jogged loose from the corner-of-mind where I had temporarily stashed it by this VERY nerdy little "Rangsta" YouTube that actually taught me several things. It's worth a listen (once). "Rangsta" Rap: Marbled Murrelet