Portside

Part of the allure of sour is the physical shock, followed by uncertainty: Is this pain or pleasure? The sensation can be overwhelming.

Pretty much everyone agrees that eating oatmeal—assuming you’re opting for a type free of sugar and unhealthy additives—is a good idea. But it’s important to differentiate the different types of oatmeal: steel-cut, rolled, quick-cooking, instant.

The Department of Agriculture is giving away the $1.2 billion in foods it’s buying to help farmers hurt by trade negotiations. Some U.S. school cafeterias expect free food shipments, one little known consequence of President Trump’s trade disputes.

A surprising aspect of Julia Child, as discussed in a new volume about her conversatons with journalists, is her passionate political engagement.

Only one in 7 kids eligible for free summer lunch actually gets one. Low participation likely results from factors including lack of accessible meal distribution locations, inadequate information about free meals, and transportation barriers.

Iowa is unrecognizable from centuries ago, when Europeans took the land for themselves. What were prairie and wetlands are now neatly partitioned grids of intensely cultivated land: the model for the farm as factory.

Air, bottled water and seafood were the biggest sources for ingested microplastics. If you live somewhere with clean, safe tap water, relying less on bottled water is a great place to start reducing your plastics exposure.

Seed saving is an ancient practice of saving seeds and reproductive matter from plants for future use. For Native Americans, it is spiritually meaningful because they believe that seeds are living, breathing beings from whom they are descended.

Meats traverse different narratives from field to plate, and the texture of those journeys emerges in their related greenhouse gas emissions as much as their flavor profiles.

New research provides evidence of how extraordinarily different one person’s “smellscape” may be from another’s. It’s not that some people are better smellers; it’s that any one person might experience certain scents more intensely than their peers.