The coconut has developed a bit of a faddish following in the West.

Today, devotees add coconut oil to coffee, dab it on acne and, following Gwyneth Paltrow's example, swirl it around in their mouths to fight tooth decay. Starbucks has launched a coconut-milk latte. And the coconut-water business has ...

Today's restaurants abandoning the tipping system are part of a long heritage of people — including Emerson and Twain — raging against the gratuity system.

With New York restaurateur Danny Meyer banning tips in his restaurants and Berkeley restaurateurs Andrew Hoffman and John Paluska joining the ...

In the new Meryl Streep period movie Suffragette, Englishwomen march on the streets, smash shop windows and stage sit-ins to demand the vote. Less well-known is that across the pond, a less cinematic resistance was being staged via that most humble vehicle: the cookbook.

Between 1886, when the first American ...

Candy corn is as ubiquitous at Halloween as tiny witches and skeletons knocking on neighborhood doors. And it turns out the story of how this and other sweet treats came to dominate the ghoulish holiday is a bittersweet one – in which enterprise and racism are as intertwined as the ...

Editor's note: There is an offensive word in this post. It's an important part of this discussion.

What goes best with a hot cup of tea? A heaping spoonful of gossip, of course.

Almost from the time tea was popularized in England in the 1600s by Charles II's Portuguese ...

"China, China, China," rants Donald Trump, the presidential hopeful who loses no opportunity to blame America's economic woes on China and its "unfair" trade policies. But how did the fortunes of the free world and the Middle Kingdom become so inextricably intertwined? What started it all?

The roots of U.S.-China ...

Sales of green tea are rising in the U.S and the U.K., driven largely by evidence of the health benefits of this stimulating elixir. So it's ironic that a little over a century ago, this so-called superfood was demonized as super toxic.

"For most of the 19th century, there was ...

Born 223 years ago on Aug. 4, the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is celebrated for such works as his sublime odes to the skylark and West Wind. But he was also a radical thinker — and his revolutionary politics stormed in his teacup.

Slender of build and Spartan ...

On the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte's most celebrated statement about food and warfare — "An army marches on its stomach" — is worth recalling.

Except there is no record of him saying it. Just as there is no record of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat ...

This week marks the 70th anniversary of VE Day, the great Allied victory over Hitler's forces in Europe during World War II.

What you may not realize is that the war helped forever change the American palate, as returning GIs brought home a craving for a pungent, fragrant herb they ...