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The only good Mexico has ever done for wine is to send grape pickers to Napa Valley.

It's like living in a loaf of Wonder Bread.

The "cooking paradox": why it is that people now spend less time preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cook­ing or watching cookery programmes on television?

Is pig farming a strategic industry? Keeping down the price of a barbe­cue is a matter of national security.

The best-known test is the "marshmallow" experiment, in which children who could refrain from eating the confection for 15 mi­nutes were given a second one. Children who could not wait tended to have lower incomes and poorer health as adults. New

research suggests that kids who are unable to delay rewards are also more likely to become criminals later.

Titus Andronicus avenged himself on the barbarian queen Tamora by murdering her sons and serving them up to her in a pie. European food manufacturers did nothing so dreadful when they sold horse as beef in burgers and lasagne. Horsemeat is not dangerous.

One of the undersold boons of the internet is that it functions a bit like a permanent, rolling global coffee break.

One way to make a traveller smile is to go to Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which is about half way between Blue Ball and Paradise.

In 1937 George Orwell suggested that "changes of diet" might be more important than "changes of dynasty or even of religion".

Only the drunk, they say, drive in a straight line in Chicago. The sober zigzag to avoid falling into the city's axle-breaking potholes.

"A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar," read an ad in the Washington Post last month. "A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil a day."

Weeds like dandelions which you can find all over the world and which nobody really gives a second glance to are the happiest.

If yogurt is strategic for the French, olive oil has the same exalted status in Spain.

By tradition a British butcher is a jolly chap; and few could be jollier than

a man whose life was devoted, first, to making the perfect sausage, and, second, to matching it with the perfect foaming pint.

In Arthur Miller's 1949 play "Death of a Salesman", Happy's dream was a simple one: "My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women."

Early Hindu mythology held that pearls were made from dewdrops that the pearl mollusc absorbed when it rose to the surface of the sea at night to breathe.

Roquefort, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Felicien, gruyere, comte, munster, pont l'eveque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol. A spontaneous familiarity with the display on a three-tier cheese trolley is essential to the national identity of the French.

The Chinese love pork and as their incomes soar they want it more than ever. A domestic herd of 476m pigs, around half of the global pig popula­tion, already seems insufficient; China has been a net importer of pork since 2008.

Wisconsin state law prohibits selling milk to the public without pasteurising it first. But Mr Hershberger tried to get around this stricture by setting up a "club" which provided raw milk (also known as "moo-shine") to its members — until state food inspec­tors raided his farm, destroyed the milk they found and put him on trial.

Most Britons would rather eat scorpions rather than Hershey bars. There is a large Greek fly in the ointment.

Spain is the Saudi Arabia of olive oil, accounting for nearly half of global production.

California has been eating its "seed corn".

Recipes are like flying buttresses, you find out whether they work only by trying them out: no souffled sandwiches, no Chartres cathedral.

As Mrs Obama writes in her new book, "American Grown", not since Eleanor Roosevelt's victory garden during the second world war had anyone grown food on the White House lawn. And what a garden it is. Pak choi in springtime! Tomatillos in the summer! Seventy thousand bees producing hundreds of pounds of honey to donate to local homeless shelters and give to "visiting dignitar­ies and heads of state"!

Ataturk's aphorism: "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk."

Louis XIII cognac is a blend of up to 1200 different eaux-de-vie aged between 40 and 100 years old and the prices are starting from $1.500 — to $40.000 for a magnum of the Black Pearl edi­tion.

In making cookies, does the use of butter or margarine affect the size of the cookie?

France's tradition of making exquisite luxuries dates back at least to the court of Louis XIV. The sun king financed ebenistes (ca­binet-makers), tapisseurs (upholsterers), menuisiers (carpenters) and other artisans who made beautiful and largely useless things for the court of Versailles. Bernard Arnault might be his heir.