#rowan jacobsen

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul

By Rowan Jacobsen.

[allthatiknowisthatiknownothing]

“Coffee is a muse in a travel mug.” - Rowan Jacobsen, American Terroir

[universitybookstore]

We here in Washington state like to think that we produce the best apples in the world! Yes, THE WORLD! Which is why we need to thank James Beard Award-winning author Rowan Jacobsen for his encyclopedic book, Apples of Uncommon Character: 123 Heirlooms, Modern Classics, & Little-Known Wonders; and, yes, there are some wonderful recipes here, too. Available now from Bloomsbury Publishing.

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on http://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/social-concerns/kelp-wanted/

Kelp Wanted

I know.  This is election day and we’ve got enough to worry about. But, I can’t help myself.  You need to know we have a seaweed problem.  We’re losing this natural habitat to harvesters who can’t keep up with international demand.   You and I may see seaweed as gunk we have to swim around in the...

[cnotk-food]

The New Rules of Oyster Eating

Twenty things you need to know.

[nprbooks]

Rowan Jacobsen’s Apples of Uncommon Character has apples, apples and more apples – 123 varieties, in fact. Team member Beth says it feels kind of like a Facebook for fruit: “profile photos taken from the most flattering angle, and a rundown of basic biographical data — origin, appearance, flavor, texture, season, use and region. (Of course, there's some good gossip, too — like how Golden Delicious ‘sired’ Jonagold, Mutsu, Gala, Pink Lady and many more).”

Other things Beth learned while reading the book: which apple variety inspired Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, and which one inspired Rambo. Read Beth’s review of the book here.

Images via Bloomsbury

[apisdorsata]

Vanilla is the most labor-intensive crop in the world.

Each vanilla flower, which opens for one day only, has a flap protecting the pollen, and deforestation has wiped out the stingless melipona bees that knew how to manipulate the flap. No other pollinators have mastered the trick, and today all vanilla is hand-pollinated by humans.

[apisdorsata]

The basic plant story of plant life, familiar to every grade-schooler, is that the plant grows and has a flower, and the flower turns into a seed-bearing fruit, and the fruit falls to the ground, where the cycle starts all over again. In the common imagination, the process happens all on its own. The fruit is the event. The flower is nothing, really, just the herald of the fruit. Eye candy. Growing up, I don't think I even connected the flower and the fruit. Flowers grew along roadsides--daisies and hawkweed and Queen Anne's lace. Fruit came from the supermarket. They were two things trees and weeds produced, not necessarily related But, of course, flowers are not there to please landscape artists. They are supremely functional, and their function is sex. Flowers' purpose is to swap genetic material with other individuals of the same species and reproduce. When that happens successfully, a fruit grows out of the flower No flower, no fruit. It's that simple.

Rowan Jacobsen