All essays filed in this edition, newest first.
A weed from a Mexican valley became the most abundant crop on Earth, and it can no longer live on its own.
How a Peruvian tuber fed eight million people, then became the fuse for the worst famine of the nineteenth century.
The world's second-priciest spice owes its fortune to a single-day flower and the hands of an enslaved boy.
The banana is the world's favorite fruit and one of its most fragile, and history is repeating itself underground.
For six thousand years salt was money, power, and survival, until the same crystal quietly poisoned the fields that fed it.
A single domesticated plant became the chemical foundation of the American body, mostly without anyone noticing.
What science actually says about organic food, and what the label was really designed to do.