Kai Ryssdal: Pork bellies were basically flat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange today — $1.04 a pound, but that’s not the important part. What matters is what you think of when you think of pork.

More than half of the 7.5 million bales of cotton produced annually in the U.S. will be used in clothing manufacturing. The finishing techniques used to make cotton fabric smooth, water-repellent and ...

These days it’s hard to imagine that fabrics were ever made out of anything other than cotton or synthetic fibers, yet it wasn’t too long ago that hemp and flax-based fabrics — linen — were the rule ...