The Materials Matter team contributes a chapter to this volume to describe our new course at Binghamton University. It draws chemistry and physics into conversation with archaeology, art history, and the history of science through an interdisciplinary focus on a particular class of materials—pigments.

In my book, From Farm to Canal Street, I tell the story of how Chinatown's food network operates amid—and against the grain of—the global trend to consolidate food production and distribution.

Immigrant farmers from Southeast Asia have brought knowledge of tropical fruit and vegetable production from their home countries to south Florida. They developed a new style of farming, a commercial ‘homegarden’. Although biodiverse agricultural systems are generally not thought to be commercially viable, Florida homegarden farmers actively manage crop diversity as an economic strategy.