All posts in October 2012

IF ANYTHING CAN BE SAID to be genuinely innate about human taste it’s our appreciation and enjoyment of the flavors of ripe fruit. We came down from the trees already addicts to fruit sugars, the evolutionary biologists tell us, so it wasn’t something we had to acquire a taste for. Fruity flavors were very likely…

EMILE ZOLA’S 1873 novel Le ventre de Paris (‘The Belly of Paris’) opens with a pre-dawn parade of horse-drawn carts laden with produce making their way to Les Halles, the city’s great public food market.  Although the story unfolds during the Second Empire (1851-1870), the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the eighteenth or even…