ROME—The humble noodle, that starchy life raft upon which the Western world has floated its collective neuroses for centuries, has lately become a geopolitical flashpoint, a climate bargaining chip, and the last reliable currency in a planet that can’t decide whether to starve or drown first. From the wheat plains of Saskatchewan to the gas-starved…
From the orchards of Normandy to the rooftop gardens of Singapore, a new pollinator has checked in—one that arrives by drone propeller and leaves behind a QR-code receipt instead of pollen. Meet the Apple Bee: not an actual insect, but the latest attempt by humanity to fix a problem we created by throwing more humanity…
Indiana: Where the World Sends Its Grain and Gets Back a Basketball Museum with Legislature Attached by Our Man in the Middle of Everywhere From a café terrace in Lisbon, the talk is of wheat futures and Russian blockades; in Lagos, container rates out of the Port of Long Beach; in Mumbai, the price of…
KANSAS, USA—From a distance of 6,000 miles, the place looks like a sociological petri dish left too long under the heat-lamp of good intentions. Europeans who can’t tell Topeka from TikTok still speak of Kansas in the hushed tones normally reserved for extinct volcanoes: it blew once—something about The Wizard of Oz, wheat, and the…
**The Global Rashee Rice Reckoning: How One Grain Became the World’s Most Overachieving Carbohydrate** In the pantheon of foods that have accidentally conquered the world, rashee rice sits somewhere between quinoa (the grain that made Bolivian farmers unable to afford their own lunch) and avocados (the fruit that funds Mexican drug cartels). This particular strain…
