Artwork from a cereal packet of Organic Kamut Flakes with raisins, showing a supposed Egyptian person holding a bowl of breakfast cereal

Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but...

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Old postcard of a Streamliner train, locomotive and cars are yellow with green roof, on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, with the huge flour mills in the background

Stone mills served us well in the business of turning grain into flour for thousands of years, but they couldn’t keep up with either population growth or new and better wheat. The roller mill came about through a succession of small inventions and the deep pockets of a few visionary entrepreneurs....

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Too funny. R. Scott Jones writes about solving his hair “issues” by getting clippers and adopting a buzz cut. I did the same, back in the day. He did have one worry:

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An overshot watermill wheel in Polperrow, Cornwall. The top half of the wheel with wooden buckets against the white stone walls of the mill. Above is the wooden sluice that feeds water into the buckets to turn the wheel, although no water is flowing. Some of the buckets have green plants growing in them.

The rotary quern was perhaps the first labour-saving device. Using water power, rather than muscles, to turn the millstone made it even more efficient. Without watermills, it is doubtful whether ancient Romans could have enjoyed their bread and circuses. Because they require capital investment and...

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Habits I have aplenty, some of them bordering on the obsessive. Do I need to weigh myself every morning if I record my weight only once a week? But rituals, very few. So what’s the difference?

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