Sublime

Nestlé’s hard-nosed lobbying of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—which regulates bottled water as a food product—to allow water drawn from a borehole to be labeled spring. It isn’t honest, Mascha thinks, and it devalues water that actually is collected from springs.

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addi

Christopher Columbus had first reported seeing Indians bouncing a ball made from the strange, sticky substance that bled from tropical trees, but it wasn’t until 1896, when B. F. Goodrich manufactured the first automobile tires in the United States, that rubber madness consumed the Amazon, which held a virtual monopoly on the highest-quality latex.

The other dominant banana company in New Orleans was founded by two Sicilian immigrants, the Vaccaro brothers, in 1899. They began with the importation of bananas from Honduras. They flourished because they bought up the city’s ice factories in order to preserve the bananas. At the time, the company was known as Standard Fruit, and is now part of t

Fair Labor Association,

I hate how many people who ought to be here in New Orleans are dead while the tourist theater continues. I hate the grief that rests all over this city. I hate that, post-Katrina, people couldn’t come home. I hate that strangers come in and vomit on its streets and buy its wares and demand to be entertained, and the truth is nobody can just say “Fu

Generic Coffee Shops

How ingenious that Dieter Schwarz who had made it possible to buy granola for a quarter of the price you could get it for in Japan.