The First Ever Food History Magazine Needs Your Help

Calling all food nerds! The first-ever quarterly food history magazine is in the works. But it needs your help to make it to newsstands.

Food and travel writer (and chicken historian — she wrote a whole book about the bird) Emelyn Rude rounded up a group of food historians to put together the first issue of Repast. The "Food of the Gods" issue will feature stories about butter carving, Mexican pulque, what Jesus ate and how American ambrosia salad came to be.

"There is a whole lot of interest these days in knowing more about what we eat and where it comes from," Rude writes to us in an email. "Getting the full story involves not just knowing your farmer or learning how something is grown, but also understanding the history of a dish or the origins of a certain type of vegetable."

According to Rude, a lot of the food we eat today came a long way to our plates by way of travel and politics. Take the Meyer lemon, for example.

"[The Meyer lemon] is native to China, where it was grown for thousands of years, and only made it to the United States thanks to a guy named Frank Nicholas Meyer, who was an official 'plant explorer' for the U.S. Department of Agriculture," Rude says. "Basically, if Uncle Sam didn't spend a whole lot of tax dollars sending people to far-flung locales to discover exotic fruits, Martha Stewart and Alice Waters wouldn't have been able to make such decadent tarts."

The second edition of Repast is already named the "Roots" issue. Learn more about the project on its Kickstarter page.