With the exception of those weirdos like the finger lime, all other citrus fruits are derived from natural and, before long, artificial crossbreeding, and then crossbreeding the crossbreeds, and so on, of those three fruits. Mix certain pomelos and certain mandarins and you get a sour orange. Cross that sour orange with a citron and you get a lemon. It’s a little bit like blending and reblending primary colors. Grapefruit is a mix between the pomelo—a base fruit—and a sweet orange, which itself is a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin.

Because those base fruits are all native to Asia, the vast majority of hybrid citrus fruits are also from Asia. Grapefruit, however, is not. In fact, the grapefruit was first found a world away, in Barbados, probably in the mid-1600s. The early days of the grapefruit are plagued by mystery. Citrus trees had been planted casually by Europeans all over the West Indies, with hybrids springing up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted what, and which mixed with which. Citrus, see, naturally hybridizes when two varieties are planted near each other. Careful growers, even back in the 1600s, used tactics like spacing and grafting (in which part of one tree is attached to the rootstock of another) to avoid hybridizing. In the West Indies, at the time, nobody bothered. They just planted stuff.

— Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet, Dan Nosowitz in Atlas Obscura

A search for “cheesecake,” for example, will result in 189 references, including Robert Abbot’s 1790 recipe for almond cheesecake, Hannah Glasse’s 1805 recipe for lemon cheesecakes, and E. Smith’s 1742 recipe for potato or lemon cheesecake. If this research on the evolution of cheesecake makes you want to learn more about Robert Abbot himself, you’ll find that his 1790 Housekeeper’s Valuable Present or Lady’s Closet Companion also included instructions for how “to make very good wigs.” Another quick search will yield that in the late 1700s, “wigs” were a kind of bun or scone, rather than a style statement—but that, as in Hannah Glasse’s work, cookery books of the era often did contain recipes for both wigs (buns) and to “preserve hair and make it grow thick.”

— A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Reina Gattuso in Atlas Obscura

Walking doesn’t improve the taste of coffee, but coffee improves the experience of being in the world. It blunts the harsher edges. Without coffee, there is public space and private space. With coffee, the whole city is your living room.

Usually, I think only rich people and babies get to blur these sorts of boundaries. Babies get security blankets; rich people get status sweatpants. The rest of us are supposed to generally contain ourselves.

— In Praise of the Walking Coffee, Rachel Sugar in Grub Street

But as soon as a truckload of 8,600 bags were unloaded at the company’s fulfillment centers, they were flying out the doors to customers, leaving the company out of stock until the next truck came in. It was the same pattern at grocery stores. As far as most consumers could tell, there was no flour anywhere, at any time, even though about half a million bags a week were being sold. ‘A shipment of product would come in the morning and be gone in a few hours,’ says Underwood. ‘If your trip to the store or your visit to the website didn’t line up exactly with those short times, you’d never see any.’

Pressed to produce more, the company formed a crisis response team, which met via video chat three times a day, every day, for the first several weeks after the initial surge in demand. ‘The first thing we had to do was agree on what we could accomplish,’ says Colberg. ‘During a crisis there are a lot of problems to solve, and you won’t be able to solve them all. We decided the one we had to solve was how to get more all-purpose flour to consumers.’

— Inside King Arthur Flour, the Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession, David H. Freedman in Marker

The goal of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, according to Nosrat, is to get home cooks cooking, but the show breaks new ground in so many other ways: through its revival of the instructional cooking show format in a TV era when travel documentaries dominate; through its unprecedented casting of women and people of color as culinary experts; through its focus on the ‘grannies’ who historically perform so much domestic labor uncredited; even through its radical vision of unalienated labor and food production. But while these parts of the greater subversive mission are deliberate choices, Nosrat’s simple act of eating on camera might prove to be one of the show’s most revolutionary triumphs.

— Netflix’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Changes the Rules for Who Eats on TV, Jenny G. Zhang in Eater

Not long ago, you could see this playing out on the menus of hip restaurants across the country. At AL’s Place in San Francisco, squash tahini was served with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah; in LA, there was preserved Meyer lemon and lacto-fermented hot sauce in Sqirl’s sorrel pesto rice bowl, and a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh at Kismet. Over in Nashville, Cafe Roze put a turmeric egg in its hard-boiled BLT and miso ranch in its barley salad. Up in New York, Dimes served a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.

— Alison Roman, Bon Apptit, and the Global Pantry Problem, Navneet Alang in Eater