Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Feb 2026Roasted pork ribs with blackberries and honey with Stonehenge Nettle and Hazelnut Soup
City/Region: Britain
Time Period: 3000-1500 BCEAbout 2 miles from Stonehenge is Durrington Walls, the place that archaeologists believe was the living settlement for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Amongst the evidence of what was eaten, there are a lot of bones, about 90% of them being pig bones. Based on scientific analysis of the pig teeth found there, they were probably fattened on something sweet, which would have probably been honey or berries, so I’m using both to prepare these pork ribs.
This is a simple preparation, but these ribs are so good. The honey is the dominant flavor and the blackberry does come through. The other 10% of bones found at Durrington Walls were mostly cattle, so you could use beef ribs instead if you’d like, you’ll just have to cook them longer.
(more…)
August 14, 2026
What Did the Builders of Stonehenge Eat?
QotD: Postmodernism’s origins
Like many terrible ideas, postmodernism started with a question. The wreckage left over from the Second World War, the incomprehensible scale of the slaughter, the industrialised genocide, the atom bombs – all this brought about by the most advanced nations on earth, the ones that considered themselves civilised. How could the same cultures that brought us the Enlightenment, human rights, individual liberty and the scientific revolution also give us Auschwitz, slavery and the brutal repression of colonised people? As the second half of the century got underway, intellectuals were naturally inclined to question the West’s founding principles and what they saw as the illusion of progress. It was time to interrogate its assumptions, take apart its certainties, and puncture its claim to hold universal values.
Leading the way were the French intellectuals, who in the 1960s and 70s questioned the deepest of those assumptions, beginning with truth itself. Was there really such a thing as “objective truth”, or was it simply an invention of the powerful, something declared rather than discovered? Was “progress” a description of reality or just the story told by whoever won? These are serious questions from which they could make fair observations. They were right to point out that institutions serve their own interests, and grand narratives play a defining role in our understanding and interpretation of the world. The trouble is that the same intellectuals didn’t try to place the answers intelligibly within the larger story of our lives. Postmodernism made interrogating power the overriding intellectual move and the answer to its own question.
Postmodernism doesn’t lend itself to a simple explanation, which is appropriate, as we shall see. However, dig beneath the deliberately impenetrable jargon, and the core claims are as follows. There is no objective truth, only competing narratives. What we think of as “knowledge” is just something the powerful tell us is the case. Language doesn’t describe reality but constructs it. Science, reason, and universal liberalism are inventions of Western minds, specifically male ones, while the Enlightenment idea of the individual with supposed natural rights is just another concept made up by those most likely to benefit from it.
There’s an obvious paradox at the outset. In what sense is it true to say there’s no such thing as objective truth? The question is meaningless because the premise is nonsensical. As Roger Scruton put it, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
Despite the obvious contradiction, it’s an idea that has been pushed aggressively by campus authoritarians for decades. No narrative deserves authority, they say, while demanding intellectual obedience to a narrative of their own.
Frederick Alexander, “Postmodernism: The Idea That Ate Itself”, The Gadfly, 2026-04-03.
