The resurrection of the Carolina African Runner peanut has been greeted with joy throughout the land. ¹ That it came to America with enslaved people from West Africa is undisputed; few people, however, seem interested in what peanuts were doing in West Africa in the first place, given that their ancestral home is in South America. I decided to dig a little deeper.

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A while ago, a good friend introduced me to Marcus Didius Falco, the Roman detective who features in a whole slew of whodunnits by Lindsay Davis. Falco is an informer, working mostly for the emperor Vespasian, who roams about the empire solving mysteries and giving readers like me insights into ancient Rome.

Of course, I'm not a classicist or historian, which may be the reason I find the Falco novels such fun. Where else would I have cause to learn the intimate workings of Archimedes' hodometer? I mention that because it plays a key part in the book I have just finished, A Dying Light in Corduba. And because I am not a historian, I take as gospel everything Davis has to tell me about hodometers and everything else in the Roman empire.

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Things had got a bit out of hand with the iPhone as camera. Two things, actually. First, it is so great having a camera with me all the time that I had taken loads of photographs. Secondly, for lots of other reasons, I hadn't managed to do anything much with them, except post a few to Instagram. By do things, I mean keyword and tag and generally organise. ¹ So a couple of weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and import all the phone pictures into Aperture and start working on them. It was a long process. And then, about a third of the way through, I came across a really interesting article: Culling Your Photos: Learn To Sort Your Photos Like A Pro.

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Maybe you saw the recent story that a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 this year would cost $49.87, down on last year’s $50.11.

Once I’d picked myself off the floor at that price, which ignores the cost and time of preparation, not to mention potential family sturm und drang, I discovered that the main reason for the drop is that turkey is cheaper than ever. In fact, according to NPR’s version of the story, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said "October marked the 14th consecutive month of decline for eggs, meats, poultry and fish indexes".

Which makes the New York Times' claim that You Might Be Paying Too Much for Your Chicken somewhat fishy.

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The recent Eat This Podcast on foie gras, talking to Michaela DeSoucey, the sociologist who wrote Contested Tastes: foie gras and the politics of food, was really fun to make. Foie gras, the way it is produced, marketed and eaten is such a complex and interesting topic and Michaela DeSoucey is such a knowledgeable person that we talked for over an hour. The hard part was cutting it down to a more manageable length, and that meant that some stuff just inevitably had to be left out.

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