Food accounts for 13% of cities’ carbon emissions every year. But a small league of C40 Good Food Cities, from New York to Quezon City, is hoping to change that. BROOKLYN, New York – Little about the culinary center serving New York’s Health + Hospitals agency evokes a home kitchen. Hair-netted cooks mix the ingredients for salsa verde in white bins the size of babies’ bathtubs. A row of combi ovens, gleaming and tall, roast hundreds of sweet plantains at a time. Nearby, a 200-gallon water bath chills reduced-oxygen packets of just-steamed yellow-and-white “sunshine” rice, preserving their freshness. And yet,…

As Europe starts opening up to travelers again, it’s more exciting than ever to think about the cultural treasures that await. For me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:    This woman’s haunting face makes it clear right away that — despite the sumptuous beauty of this painting — it doesn’t tell a happy tale. The Lady of Shalott knows she’s floating down a river to her doom.  The English artist John William Waterhouse depicts the…

In a small dry corner of England, Aquagrain is creating a super-absorbent biodegradable hydrogel that could help crops grow in degraded lands. Aquagrain is a finalist for the 2024 Food Planet Prize. NEEDHAM, United Kingdom – In one of the smallest units in a sprawling industrial estate in the tiny English village of Needham Market, a scientist has been painstakingly refining a soil improving product. Made using animal carcasses, this hydrogel can hold enough water to transform degraded land into fertile soil. It may seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but Dr. Arjomand Ghareghani, the inventor of Aquagrain, has patented…

“COVID and the Anti-Vaxxers”   JK, it’s a 13th-century image of hell from the Florence Baptistery. Europe has suffered through many plagues and pandemics over the centuries — and in the Middle Ages (before they had the miracle of vaccines), they thought it was God’s anger or the devil that was making their lives miserable. They had no science to ignore — unlike today, when many in our society insist on bringing this avoidable misery upon our community.  Back then, life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” leaving medieval people obsessed with what came after: Will I go to heaven or hell?…

Transfarmation is an organization helping former factory farmers move from debt-laden, environmentally damaging practices toward a sustainable future. Transfarmation is a finalist for the 2024 Food Planet Prize. ANSON County, North Carolina, USA – There is a sweetness to Tom Lim’s caress while he cradles his pet rooster, Cuti. It’s another irregular winter season in North Carolina, but a cold front just rolled in the night before. Cuti is shivering. Lim finds a sunbeam outside his garden chicken coop and carries the rooster into the warm light, petting the glistening feathers until he becomes still and comfortable. A water pump…

  I believe a regular does of travel memories can be good for the sou. Here’s one of my favorites — and I’d love to hear some of your most memorable travel tales, as well.  It’s the summer of 2008, and I’m hanging out in the living room of my B&B in the Amsterdam suburb of Haarlem with my hosts Hans and Marjet. Reaching for my Heineken, I notice it sits on a handbook the Dutch government produces to teach prostitutes about safe sex. Thumbing through it, I say to Hans, “It’s both artistic and explicit.”  “It’s Victoria without the secret,” he whispers…

Could an all-natural steam seed treatment replace mainstream agricultural chemical treatments? ThermoSeed, a finalist for the 2024 Food Planet Prize, thinks so. UPPSALA, Sweden – When Bjørn Stabbetorp, CEO of the Agricultural Division of the Norwegian agriculture co-op Felleskjøpet, began approaching farmers in southern Norway in the late 2000s to convince them to use an all-natural steam seed treatment coming from their Swedish neighbors, he was met with mixed responses. “Some farmers bought the argument that it would be good to use less chemical products,” he says. “But others were more skeptical about ‘natural treatments.’ They wanted to stick with…

  While I know otherwise, I often find myself wondering if the name “Afghanistan” comes from some ancient word for “tragedy.” Afghanistan is in the headlines yet again — swiftly, and with almost no resistance, taken over by Taliban overlords, who envision a medieval-style caliphate. To someone of my generation, this weekend’s events feel like déjà vu from a lifetime of watching that troubled corner of the world. First, in a decade of warfare that spanned nearly the entire 1980s, Afghanistan hobbled the USSR. And now — after spending two decades, nearly a trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives…

Roads & Kingdoms is proud to co-release this short film about the opening of the great Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan’s first restaurant in North America—and the first prominent restaurant in Toronto to call itself Palestinian. OPEN is shot entirely on film by an all-volunteer crew, blending Kodak Super 8, 35mm point & shoot, medium format, and Polaroid. We were first introduced to Fadi Kattan by Roads & Kingdoms co-founder Nathan Thornburgh in the fall of 2024. Fadi’s reputation preceded him, mostly through the groundbreaking cookbook he’d just published that was topping all the year-end lists. When Nathan explained that Fadi…

With the fall of Afghanistan, I’ve been reflecting on my travel experiences there as a 23-year-old backpacker on the “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Yesterday and today, it’s a poor yet formidable land that foreign powers misunderstand and insist on underestimating.   In this journal entry from 1978, stow away with me on the bus from Mashhad, Iran, to Herat, the leading city in western Afghanistan.  Saturday, July 29, 1978: Mashhad to Herat  My Spanish friend woke me at 5:45. I think I would have slept all morning if he hadn’t have come in. We caught a ride down to the station and,…