SweetPotatoes

When it comes to eating locally, it's hard to beat the original Thanksgiving dinner. Today's holiday diners have far more options than the Pilgrims, and the string beans, sweet potatoes, cranberries and such on your table may come from abroad -- but they probably didn't have to come too far.

Years ago, a teacher forced me to read Fernand Braudel's three volume history of the world. While most of the information contained in Braudel's amazing opus has, thankfully, managed to leak out of my brain, I still remember that he was a huge fan of the potato. In the 40+ plus pages that he spent...