In the first century A.D., Pliny estimated that the average Roman citizen consumed only 25 grams of salt a day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not inclu...
In 1928, Celulosa Cubana, S.A., founded by sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda, began making bagasse paper in Tuinucu, Cuba.
Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.
According to Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because, having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen.
The Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could be softened in brine....
Softness overcomes hardness.
Nonviolence is more effective than violence, that violence does not work.
Epithet of the drunkard’s biscuit.
Ahimsa, or nonviolence,
Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented ham, for they salt-cured meat and knew how to domesticate the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership pronounced pigs...
Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could b...
Then in the fifth century an Algerian bishop, Augustine of Hippo, wrote the enduring apologia for murder on the battlefield, the concept of just war. Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Ca...
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 All our invention and...
The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.
Pegasus claims that making red-algae paper uses less energy than making paper from wood pulp because there is no need to remove lignin. They also say that ethanol is a by-product of the algae papermak...
One of history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component and becomes a force for war rather than p...
Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb either.
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that to...
It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.
It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese. Less choice parts of pigs fed on this whey qualified to be sent to the nearby...