Known as the meat of the vegetable world, mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be "sent back to the dung heap where they are born." In Mushroom, Cynthia D. Bertelsen examines the …
Poet Charles Lamb described the pineapple as "too ravishing for moral taste ... like lovers' kisses she bites-she is a pleasure bordering on pain, from fierceness and insanity of her relish." From the moment Christopher Columbus discovered it on a Caribbean island in 1493, the p…