Eat This Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jeremy Cherfas
The first record of tomatoes growing in England dates to the 1590s (though Wales has a slightly earlier claim). It isn’t until the 1720s, however, that recipes for their preparation start to appear. The delay has been blamed on fear of foods from outisde Europe, on the humoral theory, on piety and superstition, and probably lots of other factors too. While all those explanations have obvious attractions, the reality is much more prosaic than that.
Dr Serin Quinn tracked the true history of the tomato in England and found that temperature and technology, along with religious persecution, are much more convincing.
Notes1. Serin Quinn’s paper on The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method was my introduction to her work. 2. As mentioned, you may also find Rebecca Earle on The true history of the potato in Europe an interesting listen. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Cover image lifted from The Gardener’s Chronicle, banner from Hortus Eystettensis, 1640, at Wikimedia
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Eating habits are formed young and can last a lifetime, which suggests that school meals could be an excellent place to address nutrition and sustainability. Sweden, with universal free school meals for every child, offered a real-life laboratory in which to see the impact of school lunches that are essentially the same but designed to be healthier for the pupils and for the planet.
These were experiments in which the researchers were delighted to be rewarded with negative results. No differences in how much children ate, no difference in food waste, and no difference in satisfaction with the school lunches.
Notes1. The paper we discussed is Sustainable and acceptable school meals through optimization analysis: an intervention study, prompted by this comment in The Lancet: School meal programmes: improving health and equity in the European Union. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. I took the cover image from Swedish school lunch reform, nutrition, and lifetime income, which has some interesting information on the long-term impact of Sweden’s school meal programme.
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The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll. It was that ken who inspired Wendy Pojmann to investigate the whole phenomenon of barista cool and how the look of the professional Italian barista went out into the world, mutated in different ways, and returned to establish itself in selected spots in Italy. Pojmann concludes that “Barista Ken truly captures the globalized cool of espresso culture”.
Barista Ken, she also points out “may be … of mixed-race origins”. The bar owners and baristas that Grazia Ting Deng studied for her PhD, which later became the book Chinese Espresso, are by no means mixed race; they are pure Chinese. They are following in the footsteps of the many migrant Italians who took over neighbourhood bars to work for a better life. As they retire, and with children who don’t want to work in a bar, they sold to a new wave of migrants — from China.
As both Wendy Pojmann and Grazia Ting Deng discovered, very little is constant even in the fiercely traditional world of Italian espresso.
Notes1. Wendy Pojmann’s article is Barista Cool: Espresso Fashion Transformed. She is also the author of Espresso: the art and soul of Italy. 2. Grazia Ting Deng’s book is Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. Her website contains links to other interviews and articles. 3. For an update on the icon of the hipster barista, take a look at an article from The New Statesman 4. espressoHere’s the transcript.
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Collard greens are a kind of cabbage that grows as loose leaves rather than forming a tight head. They’re eaten widely in parts of Europe and in East Africa, but perhaps most strongly associated with the food of Black people in the southern United States. There are many mysteries surrounding collards, like how and why did they become so popular in the US South. To that can be added the recent discovery of collards in oasis gardens in Morocco, where again they are associated with enslaved people trafficked from West Africa. Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have done their best to unravel the mystery of collards in Morocco and how that may shine light on their place in Southern foodways.
Notes1. Collard Greens (Brassica oleracea var. viridis) in the Moroccan Oasis by Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi is published in Economic Botany. Fortunately, they also wrote about their work in The Conversation, which is where I first saw it. 2. If you want to see how they prepare collards in Morocco, Bronwen made a video. 3. While reading around the topic, I came across this lovely piece about food and belonging: Snow Falling on Collards. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Banner photo of the Draa valley by Richard Allaway. Cover photo of collards by Jeff Wright.
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“Food has long served as an instrument of statecraft,” write the authors of a new paper, and it isn’t hard to find examples of food weaponised in international relations and between factions in a single country. It can foment strife, through tariffs and blockades, as easily as it can promote peace through food aid. At the same time, conflict has an outsized influence on food and agriculture, from the mythical salting of a vanquished enemy’s fields to the very real genocidal famines today.
While political scientists are well aware of the ways in which food and agriculture can be used to achieve strategic aims, agricultural economists have tended to take a narrower view, worrying more about the perceived inefficiencies of subsidising farmers. Marc Bellemare and Bernhard Dalheimer want them to expand their vision.
Notes1. Marc Bellemare shared the paper on his website at The Geopolitics of Food and Agriculture. 2. Rather than list the many episodes Marc has helped bring to life, I’ll let you select the ones that interest you. 3. Here is the transcript, for which you can thank (and perhaps join) the podcast’s generous supporters. 4. Apologies for the rather banal cover art; abstract concepts are hard to illustrate, no matter how important.
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Trevor Warmedahl worked in commercial cheese operations large and small in the USA for about 10 years, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the uniformity of the final products and their dependence on purchased starter cultures and rennets. So he set off to learn about “other, older ways to go about the fermentation of milk and the care of dairy livestock and the making of cheese”.
That took him first to Mongolia, and another commercial cheese plant, but it was making the same, uniform, European-style cheeses that he wanted to leave behind. Nevertheless, that was the start of a six-year journey that he shares in his book Cheese Trekking.
Notes1. You can follow Trevor Warmedahl’s continuing journey on Instagram and via his newsletter. 2. Cheese Trekking is published by Chelsea Green. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Photos from Trevor Warmedahl.
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In the previous episode, Carl Ipsen explained how the EU regulations for extra-virgin olive oil include tasting notes, and that if an oil has any of the forbidden flavours, it cannot be classified as extra virgin. So I was very surprised to read (in an issue of Edward Behr’s Art of Eating newsletter) about oils being produced in Provence that go out of their way to develop some — but not all — of the EU’s “defects”. Just as with modern extra virgin, these old-fashioned oils rely on up-to-date equipment and the skill of the miller.
In this episode, the paradox of old-fashioned modern oil.
Notes1. Old-Fashioned Olive Oil from Provence is the piece that prompted this episode. A few months back, Ed Behr had written about modern olive oil. Both contain fascinating tasting notes and more besides. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. I lifted some images from the Moulin Cornille website.
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Carl IpsenExtra virgin olive oil, as a formal classification, owes its existence to the disastrous state of Italian olive oil in the 1950s. At that time, esterification, a chemical process designed to extract the last drop of oil from the crushed olives, was permitted. It could also be used to extract oils from all manner of unlikely sources, and those too found their way into “olive” oil.When extra-virgin was first codified, only around 20% of oil qualified. Today, you would be hard pressed to find any oil on sale that does not claim to be extra virgin. Is that any guarantee of quality? Not really, says Professor Carl Ipsen, author of a forthcoming new book tentatively entitled A True History of Olive Oil. In it, he traces the evolution of olive oil from its early role as a lubricant of industrial development, when less than 1% was considered edible, to today, when it is almost exclusively used for food.
Notes1. Carl Ipsen’s website contains links to some of his publications, including From Cloth Oil to Extra Virgin: Italian Olive Oil Before the Invention of the Mediterranean Diet, the essay that won the Sophie Coe Prize in 2021. 2. Here is a transcript. Thank supporters of the podcast.
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Jan Dutkiewicz (left) and Gabriel RosenbergA lot of people who care about these things will tell you that the food system is broken. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg insist that it is not. Bits of it may not work as well as we might like, but overall it delivers greater abundance, diversity, and nutrition at a lower cost than at any time in history.
They argue the point at length in their new book Feed the People! Why industrial food is good and how to make it even better. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg write engagingly and the book is a good read. And for those bits of the food system that are not working so well, they offer plenty of evidence-based recommendations that could help fix them.
Notes1. Feed the People! is published by Basic Books. 2. How the New Food Pyramid Fits Into the Broader Conservative Project is their nuanced look at the vexed topic of food guidelines in the United States. 3. Gabriel Rosenberg has a newsletter, The Strong Paw of Reason, and there’s more of Jan Dutkiewicz’s work at The New Republic. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Banner photos of the authors by Tim Atakora and Harris Solomon.
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Bird’s Eye View of United States Penitentiary Lewisburg, PAOne of the things I found most interesting about the previous episode, Cooking in Maximum Security was that prisoners in Italy not only cooked pretty elaborate meals, but that it was their right to do so. The ability to make at least some food for themselves seems to be taken for granted among prisoners in Italy. Not so in the United States, where Hollywood has made us all aware both that food is often the spark that ignites a riot and that some prisoners can get away with cooking much more elaborate meals. It surprised Edward Hasbrouck too, who shared memories of his brief time in a federal prison with a friend we have in common. He agreed to talk to me about his experiences of food in prisons gained at Lewisburg Federal Prison in the early 1980s, long before ramen became the bedrock of prison food systems.
Notes1. Edward Hasbrouck’s main website contains loads of information about travel and more besides. The non-profit he mentioned is Papers, Please! – The Identity Project. 2. I’m grateful to Peter Rukavina, who shared a link to Matteo Guidi’s episode, which is how Edward Hasbrouck found it and where he commented. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Banner photo from an old postcard of Lewisburg Penitentiary.
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Matteo GuidiAn extremely unlikely source (see note 3) tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book. Notes1. Matteo Guidi has built a website for Cooking in Maximum Security that gives a lot more information. 2. Matteo’s site has purchase details, but you might do better going directly to Half Letter Press. 3. It was Cory Doctorow’s fabulous Pluralistic that sent me in search of Matteo Guidi. 4. Banner and cover images by Mario Trudu, taken from the book. 5. Here is the transcipt.
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Miriam Laker Oketta, left, and Esnatt Gondwe MatekesaI’m proud to revisit an episode from 2022, in which two country directors of the charity Give Directly told me how cash transfers in Rwanda and Malawi make a real difference to the lives of poor people there. The reason is Give Directly’s Pods Fight Poverty campaign, which aims to raise $1,000,000 for families in Rwanda. They’re more than 10% of the way there, and I hope this podcast can add to the total.
The reason I made the episode in the first place was to ask whether cash enables people to improve their food security and nutrition. As I heard, it does, which is why I am happy to be part of the campaign.
Notes1. Please consider making a donation. 2. Miriam Laker Oketta and Esnatt Gondwe Matekesa both stressed how evidence guides Give Directly’s activities. The website’s section for research on cash transfers provides summaries. 3. The specific study Miriam Laker-Oketta referred to is Benchmarking a WASH and Nutrition Program to Cash in Rwanda. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. There’s a lot of economics literature on the problems of gift giving. Tim Harford offered some guidance.
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Luisa WeissIt can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon became one of the most-read food bloggers. She was also part of a lively, supportive community, regularly reading and conversing with more than 40 other food bloggers. One thing led to another and she found herself first in cookbook publishing and then with a contract to write her first book, a memoir with food. Two cookbooks followed. We met in Berlin to talk about all that and more.Notes1. Here’s a link to Luisa Weiss’ website. 2. She also, and this is both impressive and useful, managed to salvage all of the original The Wednesday Chef when it’s original host, Typepad, decided to close everyone down earlier this year. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Banner image liberated from an archive copy of The Wednesday Chef.
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Robert Spengler IIISettled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.
Notes1. Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press. 2. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website. 3. Here’s the transcript. 4. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana
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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.
Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.
Notes1. Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935. 2. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.
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In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.
That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.
Notes1. I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise. 2. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled. 3. Here is the transcript.
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After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.
Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.
Dough
Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed.To make an apple pie the Wallonian way
Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”].
After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.
Notes1. The published paper is Tasting the Past? Developing a Methodology for Researching Historical Tastes in Global Food History, which is behind a paywall, but … 2. Here is the transcript. 3. Banner photo courtesy Marieke Hendriksen. Cover photo detail from Still Life with Fruit Pie and various Objects, by Willem Claesz. Heda 1634, from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. This one has a lid, and may not be apple, but that’s OK.
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Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating. Her latest, The Miracle of Salt, is no exception. Recipes for everything from Acadian salted scallions to zucchini in golden sand sauce (for which you’ll first need to make some brined egg yolks) are seasoned with chapters on flavoured salts, salt harvesting techniques, the geography of salt and plenty more. About the only thing we deliberately didn’t talk about was lacto-fermentation, although there’s plenty of that too.
Notes1. The Miracle of Salt is available at bookshop.org and elsewhere. 2. Naomi Duguid’s website. 3. A few years ago we talked about Exploring the World through Food. 4. Here’s a transcript, thanks to supporters of the podcast 5. Banner photograph by me, of the salt flats in Trapani, Sicily.
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The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explanation for the high nitrogen isotope ratios in Neanderthal remains. Normally, such high ratios are the result of eating lots of meat. John Speth thinks there’s a better interpretation.
Speth is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert on how hunter-gatherer societies survive, now and in the recent past, and that makes him a valued colleague of archaeologists trying to interpret the remains of Neanderthal societies. At the start of the summer, he was a co-author on two papers that shed light on Neanderthal diets. One identified the site at Neumark Nord as a fat factory where people extracted valuable bone grease in quantity. The other offers a more convincing explanation for why Neanderthals seem to eat as much meat as lions and tigers.
Notes1. The two papers we talked about are Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago and Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes. Science also had an interview with Melanie Beasley, who did the maggot work, on its podcast. 2. And the previous episodes with John Speth are Neanderthal Diets, a very early episode about how Neanderthals might have boiled starches, and It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you, the paper that prompted Melanie Beasley to measure the nitrogen isotopes of maggots. 3. Here’s the transcript. 4. If you’re wondering why the banner is an old and extremely inaccurate reconstruction of a Neanderthal, the Field Museum, a worthy institution to be sure, makes its images available only from Getty Images, which charges through the nose. I hope they’re both happy with that arrangement.
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Dr Joseph GoldbergerPellagra — a terrible disease characterised by the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death — was first noticed in northern Spain in 1735 and in Italy soon afterwards. Physicians had no idea what to do about it. They established that it was a new disease, and quickly worked out that it was something to do with maize and that it seemed to afflict only very poor people. In Italy, sharecroppers grew and ate maize at the expense of any vegetables. And in the southern US, workers in mill towns subsisted on ground maize imported from the midwest because all the local land was down to cotton.The struggle to understand the causes of pellagra and how to cure and prevent it played out first in Italy and then in the United States, where 1906 saw a large outbreak in Alabama. Competing explanations were driven by large egos and expediency rather than evidence. That was true even after Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service proved that the disease was not contagious and that the deficiency could be quickly reversed with a proper daily diet or a tablespoon of dried yeast.
Notes1. Pellagra and Pellagrous Insanity During the Long Nineteenth Century, by David Gentilcore and Egidio Priani is available under open access 2. Dana Landress recently published Famished for Freedom: Pellagra and Medical Clemency at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 3. I consulted loads of other publications; let me know if you want a source for anything. 4. Photograph of Joseph Goldberger from the Library of Congress. 5. Here is the transcript.
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Alessandro Biavati, chef. Quite by chance, I booked a brief cycling holiday at an agriturismo based on a farm that is home to Quin Italia, an enterprise that aims to be the first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. The food at the agriturismo was excellent, as it usually is, but there were only two items on the menu that featured quinoa: a beer and a plate of deep fried croquettes that owed more to chickpeas than to quinoa. That was just one of the points I raised with Alessandro Biavati, chef and part-owner of Agrilocanda val Campotto.Notes1. Both the agriturismo and Quin Italia offer a lot more information on their websites. 2. Just in case anyone in Italy wants to support cycling, here’s the website for FIAB. 3. There’s a transcript, of course, with thanks to supporters of the podcast.
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Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian and lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet. We talked about fad diets, and how they are inevitably unsustainable. About weight-loss drugs and whether they are being oversold. About the frustration she feels faced with bad advice, and how the Mayo Clinic’s caution may make it slow, but also makes it sure. About her dismay faced with questions about singular foods and singular nutrients. I learned a lot.
Notes1. Tara Schmidt hosts the podcast On Nutrition from the Mayo Clinic Press. 2. I was fascinated to discover how many official dietary guidelines exist, though I should have pursued my question further. I’m interested in why people don’t meet them, not whether they could if they wanted to. 3. Here is the transcript, with thanks to all supporters. 4. Here is my episode on Fad diets. There may be some others in the section of related links below, although the thingie that does that has been playing up. You can always search for “diets”.
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Flavia Giordano and Carla the Italian greyhoundPuglia is massive. I mean that quite literally, not as youthspeak, though that too. Its northernmost point is actually north of my home in Rome, though admittedly not by very much, which is strange when you consider that for most people, Puglia is only the high heel itself. That’s true for me and for several past episodes here.
A new book that explores the whole province, and more particularly its food and ingredients, flashed through my feeds a few weeks ago. After just a quick look at the contents it seemed obvious that my next move ought to be to hop on a train to Polignano a Mare to talk to the author, Flavia Giordano. So that’s exactly what I did. It was a long day, and entirely worthwhile.
Notes1. Flavia Giordano’s book is Puglia: A cooking journey through a land and its unique ingredients, and the simplest way to get hold of a copy is to join Flavia for a tour or a class, easily booked from her website. Of course, you should also follow her on Instagram. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. The banner image is from an early 16th century Turkish Book on Navigation and shows the town of Bari and part of the surroundings, from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Cover artwork, Puglia’s colourful carrots, by me.
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For much of the world, food has never been as abundant or as inexpensive as it is now, but at what cost? The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the cost of diet-related ill health is somewhere around $7 trillion, which is far more than the “profits” of food and agriculture. Those profits, like the cheaper, more plentiful food they stem from, take no account of the external costs of climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and, ultimately, human health.
Professor Tim Benton has spent his career working at the interface between agricultural and food politics and environment.
“If we don’t get to grips with these challenges,” he told me “then ultimately the only thing to happen is some big calamity at some point in the future, where the planet bites back and says, I’ve had enough.”
Notes1. Tim Benton’s paper with Rob Bailey — The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency — is a very readable summary. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. This is not the first time the podcast has looked at prices and externalities – search for prices – and it will not be the last.
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Jennifer ClappThe top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machinery, fertilisers, seeds, and pesticides. That kind of concentration, coupled with their size, gives these companies unprecedented power to set prices, often in collusion with their “competitors,” to block real competition, to stifle innovation, and to manipulate governments and policies. And while that may seem a problem of modern times, it’s actually a story that goes back to the beginning of industrial agriculture. Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario undertook a deep investigation of the history and behaviour of these companies for her new book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters.Notes1. Jennifer Clapp’s book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters is published by The MIT Press. 2. This recent article by Jennifer Clapp sets out some of her views on how to address global hunger, including ideas on reining in corporate concentration. 3. Here is the transcript.
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Emma McDonnellFor most of the 2000s, farmers in Peru earned a little more than one sol per kilogram of unprocessed quinoa they sold. Starting around 2007, the price began to climb as quinoa exports became a thing, averaging 9 soles per kg in 2014. The following year, the price halved, and it dropped again in 2016. It’s still around 4 soles per kg, so a lot better than it was, and quinoa production is double what it was. Nevertheless, the early promise of a sustained quinoa boom proved to be an illusion.Emma McDonnell was in Peru for the early years of the boom and for the subsequent bust, a story she recounts in her book The Quinoa Bust.
Notes1. Emma McDonnell has a website. Her book The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop is published by California University Press. 2. A previous episode — It is OK to eat quinoa — looked at the impact of the boom in purely economic terms. 3. An issue of the USDA’s Choices magazine looked at several so-called functional foods, including quinoa, asking whether they were a Fad or Path to Prosperity?. Both, maybe. 4. Here is the transcript 5. The banner photo uses a picture of quinoa growing in Ollantaytambo, Peru by Hector Montero. The quinoa close up on the cover is by Flickered!
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Jordan RosenblumPerhaps the only thing most people know about Jewish dietary laws is that pork is forbidden. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity. Author Jordan Rosenblum points out that at the time of the Roman occupation, the pig was “simply the most commonly encountered nonkosher quadruped.” The imagined qualities of the pig and those of the Jews aligned, a link that still survives in anti-semitic propaganda.I didn’t want to rehash the history of anti-semitism but I did want to know more about the relationship between pork and Jewish identity. I hope you will too.
Notes1. Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig is published by New York University Press. 2. Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 3. Cover art is a reproduction from a 19th century book about customs of the Middle Ages. The banner image is from a campaign by the Debby Agency for Burger King. I am told (by ChatGPT) that the Hebrew says “And may the house be filled with the smell of turkey bacon”. 4. Here is the transcript.
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Charlotte BiltekoffA new book takes a close look at people’s concerns about processed foods and how the processed food industry has failed to respond to them. The author, Charlotte Biltekoff, says she wanted to try and understand what was happening around her, as people in her milieu came more and more to demand real food rather than processed foods, while the makers of processed foods failed to understand the deeper reasons underpinning those demands. Industry wants consumers who, reassured on questions of safety and risk, will buy and eat its products. People want answers to questions beyond safety and risk. And never the twain shall meet.
Notes1. Real Food, Real Facts: processed food and the politics of knowledge is available from the University of California Press. 2. Other effects notwithstanding, a primary reason to avoid UPFs is that they encourage you to eat more. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Thanks ChatGPT for sharing your stereotypical vision of a Mom and a Female Scientist.
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St Brigid of Kildare is one of the three patron saints of Ireland and has a strong connection with food and farming. St Brigid’s day falls on 1 February and traditionally marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year.
In 2023, the Republic of Ireland designated the day a public holiday if it falls on a Friday, and failing that the first Monday of February, but the day has long been celebrated in a variety of ways. People make St Brigid’s crosses to a variety of traditional designs, using them to protect farm animals and ensure a good harvest. There are special foods too, and other ritual celebrations, some of which delve in the pagan past.
Caitríona Nic Philibin has studied the folklore surrounding St Brigid and shared some of the stories with me.
Notes1. I am indebted to Caitríona Nic Philibin and Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire for their work on food and folklore in Ireland, and especially An exploratory study of food traditions associated with Imbolg (St. Brigid’s Day) from The Irish Schools’ Folklore Collection. They offered a summary of their work: What food is associated with St Brigid’s Day?. And Pishogues, Brídeogs And Butter Witches at The Common Table gives a great deal more detail on food and folklore in Ireland. 2. The music at the start is from St. Brigid’s Jig by Louise Mulcahy. Another fine tune from the same set is St. Brigid’s Day by Caitlín Nic Gabhann. 3. Images of St Brigid’s crosses from the National Museum of Ireland. The icon of St Brigid I lifted from The Brigidine Sisters. 4. Here is the transcript.
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No apologies for once again casting my net in the fruitful waters of Basque cuisine and history.
There is a pintxo — those tasty bites of stuff on a toothpick — that consists of a plump Cantabrian anchovy, a pickled guindilla pepper and an olive. Some people reckon it is the original pintxo, invented by one of the regulars at a bar in San Sebastián. Others are not so sure. Everyone agrees, however, that it owes its name — the Gilda — to Rita Hayworth, who starred in the movie of that name.
Last time I spoke to Marcela Garcés, we didn’t have time to talk about the Gilda. This episode fixes that omission.
I also had to contact Chris Beckman again, to see if he could enlighten me on what he calls the Swedish Anchovy Conundrum.
Notes1. Here, again, is Marcela Garcés’ paper: In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context. 2. Christopher Beckman’s book is A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine. 3. What’s in a name? Mislabeling fish since the 16th century offers more information of the history of Swedish “anchovies”. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Still Life with Anchovies by Antonio Sicurezza. Piparra for Gilda by Javier Aramburu, and thanks to Marcela for the photo. I’d love to credit the photographer of the cover and banner image, but none of the places where I might have stolen it saw fit to give credit. If it is yours, let me know.
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A thorough trawl in 2020 brought to light more than 40 different kinds of policies around the world designed to improve diets to deliver better nutrition and health. And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.
That’s the gist of a new paper from a group of researchers in the UK. They argue that “a fresh approach is needed, one that considers the full picture of people’s realities”. Corinna Hawkes, lead author on the paper, took me through some of those realities.
Notes1. The published paper is The full picture of people’s realities must be considered to deliver better diets for all. 2. The earlier podcast, with Corinna Hawkes, Patrick Webb and Eileen Kennedy is We need to talk about diets. 3. Here is the transcript, thanks to generous supporters.
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For a long time people have suspected that there is a kind of logic to what people buy as they have a bit more to spend on food. First, they change from coarse grains — things like sorghum or millet — to fine grains, wheat and rice, maybe corn. Then they switch up to protein from animal-sourced foods. This logic was even considered something of a law, Bennett’s Law, after Merrill Bennett, the agricultural economist who formulated the idea in the early 1940s. But it wasn’t really a law, because no-one had actually studied income and food purchases under controlled conditions.
Now someone has, with the first empirical test of Bennett’s Law. For Marc Bellemare, the lead author, the research, “changes your view of how the world works”.
Notes1. Income and the Demand for Food among the Poor, by Marc F. Bellemare, Eeshani Kandpal, and Katherina Thomas can be downloaded from JSTOR. 2. Marc Bellemare has a website where he explains difficult things clearly. You might also like to listen to his other episodes on the podcast. 3. As it happens, just last week the USDA published a chart showing Engels’ Law at work in the US. 4. Here’s the transcript.
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Anna Herforth, Imran Chiosa Will Masters, and Olutayo AdeyemiLet’s assume that people understand what they ought to eat to keep themselves healthy over the course of their lives and that the nutritious food to deliver good health is available in the market. More than one in three of the world’s people simply cannot afford a healthy diet. We know because the Food Prices for Nutrition team at Tufts University has developed tools that allow countries to use data that most of them are already collecting (to compile their Consumer Price Index) and from them calculate the cost of a healthy diet. The results have been alarming for some policy-makers, with encouraging results in at least one country.
Anna Herforth, who first told me about the cost of a healthy diet in 2021, was in Rome recently for a workshop on diet cost metrics with her colleagues Will Masters, who leads the Food Prices for Nutrition team, Olutayo Adeyemi, from Nigeria, and Imran Chiosa from Malawi. A chance too good to miss, despite the roar of the traffic beneath us.
Notes1. The website of Food Prices for Nutrition offers more detailed explanations and links to other places where the data are being used. This one lets you see the numbers for each country; the surprise is that even in high-income countries, large numbers of people cannot afford a healthy diet. 2. The first episode on this topic was The cost is too damn high. 3. Want a transcript? We’ve got you covered, thanks to the show’s supporters. 4. Cover photo by DALL-E.
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The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with the exception of the good people of Malaga, who developed a thing for deep-fried fresh anchovies. The rest of Spain resolutely ignored anchovies as food, spreading them instead on their fields as fertiliser. All that started to change in the late 19th century, when Italians, expert in the ways of salting fish, fetched up on the Basque coast to buy up all the fish that nobody else wanted. Among them, Giovanni Vella, who invented the modern tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil.
It was, according to Chris Beckman, author of A Twist in the Tail: how the humble anchovy flavoured Western cuisine, a win for everyone.
Notes1. Christopher Beckman’s A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine is published by Hurst & Co. 2. If you haven’t already heard it, the previous episode celebrates the anchovy in modern Spain. 3. Here’s the transcript. Also, from this episode, I am trying to make transcripts available in podcast players that offer this service. Let me know if you experience any difficulties.
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Marcela GarcésAnchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.
At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.
Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.
Notes1. Marcela Garcés’ paper is In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context. 2. La Centralita is in Albany, New York. 3. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of supporters 4. Banner photograph from Marcela Garcés.
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If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of protein in less than 100th the space of soya beans.
There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.
Notes1. Dustin Crummett is executive director of The Insect Institute. His paper: Is turning food waste into insect feed an uphill climb? A review of persistent challenges. 2. If not food or feed, how about “valuable raw materials for various industries”? 3. Here’s the transcript. You can thank the donors, and become one yourself. 4. Cover photograph from designer Katharina Unger’s Farm 432 concept, “a fly-breeding device for home use that continually collects fly larva as a protein source for less squeamish diners” 5. Banner photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim from Wikimedia shows black soldier flies making more black soldier flies.
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Silvestro Silvestori stands in front of some of the metal cans of his varietal olive oils.Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Salento, the heel of the boot of Italy. Thanks to badly botched responses it spread, carried by spittlebug insects that live in the plants under the olives. By 2019, efforts to control the spread of Xylella were more or less abandoned, and the disease had killed 10 million olive trees in the Salento.
People – including me – thought it might be the death of olive oil production in the Salento and the rest of Puglia. In the past couple of years, however, literal green shoots of resistant olive varieties have taken hold, and with them the opportunity for a new industry focused on high-quality, profitable olive oil. To learn more, I went to visit Silvestro Silvestori, who runs The Awaiting Table cookery school in Lecce.
Notes1. The Awaiting Table Cookery School runs lots of different courses, including an opportunity to plant new olive trees. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. Cover photo of a fiscolo, the jute mat used in older mills to contain the crushed olives in the press. Banner photo of FS17® La Favolosa from iocolivivai
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Louise GrayWinner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse gas emissions, but may be good for communities far away.Some universal truths did emerge from our conversation. Fruit and veg is almost always better for the planet than meat, and homegrown is generally preferable to imported. Exceptions, however, are not uncommon, and in the end questions outnumber simple answers.
Notes1. Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From is available from Bookshop.org and elsewhere. 2. We didn’t discuss the meaning of the word avocado, thank heavens, because the greatest service I can offer is to point out that nobody believes that words like nut or ball actually mean testicle. Let the Nawatl Scholar explain: the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”.. 3. The book Louise Gray mentioned at the end is The Avocado Debate by Honor May Eldridge. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Photo of Louise Gray by Nancy MacDonald. Others scraped by me from Instagram.
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Water is tricky stuff. It can be limpid and clear but dangerous, home to harmful bacteria and parasites. It can be murky, but perfectly safe to drink. It may smell of chlorine, which puts people off, but perversely that is a sign that no bacteria are present.
So how do we judge the quality of water? That’s the subject of a new book — The Taste of Water — by Christy Spackman at Arizona State University. She looks at the history of water purification and efforts to understand the complex interplay between the quality of water from a public health standpoint and the sensory perceptions that people use (or don’t use) to decide whether they trust it.
Notes1. The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage is published by University of California Press. Christy Spackman’s website offers insights into her work. 2. Wichita Falls, the town in Texas that used recycled water to cope with drought, is proud of its water purification. Scientific American had an article about the project. 3. Lithium in spa waters? Yes! See Lithium with your tonic, Sir? in the magazine of the Geological Society of London. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Banner photo by me in our local park. Cover photo by gcardinal from Norway, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Cheap supermarket meat has been making life difficult for independent butchers for quite some time now. England has lost 60 per cent of its butcher shops in the past few decades, Australia 80 per cent. I couldn’t find figures for the United States. Against that background, there has been an uptick of interest from young people wanting to learn the skills needed to deconstruct an animal carcass. What surprised me – and of course it shouldn’t have – is that women are learning butchery. I chatted with three of them.
Notes1. Olivia Potts’ article, which triggered my interest, is The Women at the Cutting Edge of Butchery. She has a website too. 2. Instagram is the best place to find Martina Bartolozzi and while Sophie Minchilli is also on Instagram, she has a website. Both offer great food tours. 3. Here is the transcript.
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Eleanor BarnettWe all know we’re supposed to reduce our food waste, but what exactly is the difference between waste and leftovers? For me, leftovers become waste when they turn green and furry, forgotten at the back of the fridge, but that’s a very narrow view. Eleanor Barnett is a historian whose book Leftovers: a history of food waste and preservation takes a much broader look at food scarcity, food surpluses and the byproducts of food production that people don’t or won’t eat. Our conversation reflected on the complex relationships among food waste, human behaviour, and systemic factors throughout history, advocating for a renewed appreciation of the value of food.
Notes1. Follow Eleanor Barnett as historyeats on Instagram. She also has a website. 2. Leftovers: a history of food waste and preservation is available from UK booksellers and will be published in the US in September. 3. Here’s the transcript. 4. Banner photo from Nareeta Martin on Unsplash. Cover photo by Kathleen Franklin on Flickr.
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One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that involves leavened grain. At one level, the search means that the house gets an extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year. At another, there are associations that equate ridding the house of chametz with ridding the mind of ego and other spiritual concerns. But what exactly is chametz? In trying to get to some sort of “truth” I discovered that there can be no right or wrong answer, only opinions, more or less persuasive, more or less accepted. In the end, the meaning of chametz rests on history and tradition, and new traditions are possible.
Notes1. I do have a list of all the sources I consulted, which I can share if needed. 2. Here is a copy of the script. 3. Banner image from the National Library of Israel. Cover image via Wikimedia Commons
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The last supper was a Passover Seder, and for two thousand years Passover and Easter have been linked. The links, however, are complex, which is why I am taking the opportunity to expand on a five-year-old episode.
The rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, although always open to interpretation and evolution. And yet, although different Christian traditions have their ritual Easter foods, there don’t seem to be any universals. The episode looks at these two contrasting aspects of ritual foods.
First, I talked to Susan Weingarten talks about the Seder dinner and especially an item essential on the Passover table that is not mentioned in God’s original instructions for the last supper of the Israelites in Egypt. While nobody knows how it came to be, every Jewish culture has its own version of haroset and its own idea of what it means.
Edna Holmgren and her daughter Lois Long at the Hall of Fame celebration in 1988Then, I spoke to Lois Long about a recipe made famous by her mother, Edna M. Holmgren. Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs won the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1969. Later, they were expropriated by some Christians to retell the story of the resurrection, though personally I doubt they will ever become universal.The RecipeThis copy of Edna Holmgren’s recipe is not quite the original. Lois Long told me that “the flour in the cinnamon sugar mixture was Pillsbury’s idea. I cut it down to 1 tbsp but I don’t like it. The original recipe has no flour.” I do wonder what it is there for. Possibly to soak up melting gooeyness, because many of the comments on the Hall of Fame website are complaints about the mess if the pastry isn’t very carefully sealed.
Notes1. Susan Weingarten’s book Haroset: A Taste of Jewish History is published by The Toby Press. 2. Huge thanks to Lois Long for sharing her time, her memories, and copies of some of her memorabilia. 3. The cover image is of an illuminated manuscript from the workshop of Valentine Noh in Prague, about 1470. The Passover plate is Italian majolica from The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Malta, just off the coast of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean, has always been of enormous strategic importance. As a result it has been claimed, and fought over, by empire after empire. Each time it was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food supplies because the tiny island — Malta is only 27 kilometres long — cannot possibly feed itself. Despite this history, going into World War II neither the British colonial government nor the Maltese people were prepared for the inevitable blockade. When rationing was imposed, however, the authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to those who were finding ways to evade the restrictions of the black market. It made sense to do so, as I heard from Maltese historian Noel Buttigieg.
Notes1. Noel Buttigieg’s paper is Breadways and Black-Market Intrigues in 1942 Malta. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. The banner photograph shows part of the Turkish fleet and military at the start of the 1565 Great Siege of Malta. It was created by Giovanni Francesco Camocio as part of an effort to rouse European support against the Turks. Cover photograph shows Maltese women washing clothes in the ruins of their homes at the height of the blockade, 4 June 1942. ©IWM (GM 904)
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Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world. The main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the diet, and in 1991, the UK’s Medical Research Council halted a trial of folic acid supplementation early because it was obvious that the supplement was preventing a large number of cases. At the time, the trial’s authors concluded: “public health measures should be taken to ensure that the diet of all women who may bear children contains an adequate amount of folic acid.”
The United States was relatively quick to act, mandating flour be fortified with folic acid in 1998, followed by around 80 countries worldwide. Countries with mandatory fortification have seen a drop in neural tube defects of between one third and one half. But not the European Union nor, until recently, the United Kingdom.
The European Union concedes: “There has been no real progress in preventing NTDs in Europe since folic acid supplementation was shown to be an effective preventive measure.”
Finally, the UK has put forward proposals to fortify white flour, but many doctors say they could do much more. Europe is still to act.
Notes1. The US Centers for Disease Control has an excellent series of pages on neural tube defects with links to a lot more research. 2. The European Union also has a page on Folic Acid and Neural Tube Defects. 3. Helena Bottemiller Evich recently did a great and personal write-up of prenatal vitamins in her newsletter, Food Fix. 4. Mun-Keat Looi’s article Folic acid: The case to rethink the UK’s food fortification plans is behind a paywall. 5. Here is the transcript. 6. Spinach salad by Lucy Clink, photographed by me. Folic acid molecular model by Ben Mills.
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Anthony MongielloA recent documentary tells the story of how a kid from Brooklyn invented the stuffed crust pizza, sued Pizza Hut for ripping him off, and lost. It is a fascinating story, and left me in no doubt about who actually invented the stuffed crust pizza: Anthony Mongiello, that kid from Brooklyn. But it was the incidental asides Anthony dropped in the documentary, along with a look at Formaggio Cheese, the company he built, that really made me want to talk to him about his family of cheese engineers and his own history as a cheese inventor.Notes1. Take a look at Formaggio Cheese if you want to get a better idea of the “75 different Fresh Mozzarella products” they offer. 2. Stolen Dough, the documentary, is available on a few streaming channels. 3. There’s a report of the case that I certainly am not competent to judge on its merits. Still, even if Pizza Hut did not infringe on Anthony Mongiello’s legal rights, the company’s moral judgement leaves a lot to be desired. 4. Would you like to see Italian mozarella di bufala DOP being made? Of course you would. 5. Here is the transcript.
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Harry RobsonSix thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food, and those pots have now revealed that in many respects the diets of the two cultures were more alike than different. The hunter-gatherers were processing dairy foods, while the farmers were cooking fish and other aquatic resources. That’s the conclusion of a massive study of more than 1000 pot fragments by 30 scientists. Harry Robson, one of the team leaders, explained the results and the light they shed onto the transition to farming.
Notes1. Harry K. Robson is in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. The paper we talked about is The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. Banner illustration shows early Neolithic farmers in Switzerland, by J. Näf, from this publication. Cover photograph of a pot from the Funnel Beaker culture in Denmark, made by the earliest farmers across the western Baltic, CC-BY-SA by Arnold Mikkelsen, The National Museum of Denmark.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the average baby wouldn’t have a tooth in its head for another five or six months. Amy Bentley, a professor at New York University, has charted the rise and continuing rise of baby food, from its earliest emergence in upstate New York and Michigan to its proliferation today. Commercial baby foods made sense, she thinks, as a safer and more convenient alternative to home-made options, and still today may form the bedrock of the best-nourished period of a child’s life. But they also reflected an American exceptionalism rooted in the triumph of World War Two.
The adorable infant in Gerber’s advertisements was originally a pencil sketch that the artist said she would finish in colour if selected. Gerber preferred the sketch, and “repeated requests” prompted the company to offer a reproduction, suitable for framing, in exchange for 10¢. Strangest of all, some people seemed to think the baby was Humphrey Bogart, who was 29 qwhen the sketch was made. A little old for baby food.
Notes1. Get a copy of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet from an independent bookshop. And here is Amy Bentley’s website. 2. I’ve been trying to keep you up-to-date with the lead contamination story in Eat This Newsletter, but just last week Marion Nestle took a look at lead and pesticides in baby food. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. I took the photos of baby food.
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In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elusive contribution to flavour, best described as “you know it when it’s missing”.
Priya Mani eventually identified the strange thing in her soup as a lichen called Parmotrema perfolatum, commonly known in English as black stoneflower. Lichens are an odd group of plants made up of algae or bacteria living within the cells of a fungus. You’ve seen them on rocks and trees, I’m sure. Black stoneflower turns out to be ubiquitous in Indian cooking, though its presence is not often remarked. Its popularity may now be threatening its survival.
Notes1. Priya Mani has two Instagram channels, @priya.mani.design and @cookalore, which is a showcase for her Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Cooking. 2. Her article Tasting a Tasteless Taste: Stoneflower Lichens as a Spice in Indian Food is in Art of Eating No. 111 and, contrary to what I said in the podast, seems to be available to read. 3. With apologies for the delay, here is the transcript. 4. Banner photo by Priya Mani. Cover photo of putative Black Stone Flower by s_bala. 5. You do know about John Wyndham’s book Trouble with Lichen, I hope.
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The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize, and a lot of work to understand the genetic changes from teosinte to maize. The big problem was that the genetic work also seemed to contradict the story, by finding remnants of different types of teosinte. A new research paper sorts out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding.
Notes1. A summary of their research by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and his colleagues is available at Science. 2. Here is the transcript. 3. Cover photo, sculpted head of a Mayan maize god, “represented as a vigorous youth with flowing hair likened to corn leaves”, he was considered to be the quintessence of beauty and refinement. Taken by me at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. Banner photo by William H. Martin, who became very rich making these sorts of postcards.
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Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is defrauding customers, and yet there is very little public outrage, except in the immediate wake of yet another revelation of wrong-doing. Honey adulteration is nothing new, as I heard from historian Matt Phillpott, who has been studying the practice ancient and modern.
Notes1. Matt Phillpott writes Honeybee Histories on substack. 2. Here’s the transcript. 3. Banner photo by Jennifer C on flickr. Cover photo, robot bee designed by Cat7. Single bee by Brad Smith on flickr.
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Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop Type 2 Diabetes. But while nutritionists were happy to recommend (low-fat) yoghurt, which seemed to offer similar protection, nowhere was ice-cream mentioned. David Johns wrote that article, and had previously looked into guidelines on cutting salt and the Big Sugar anti-fat conspiracy that never was. An interesting person to talk to about the intersection between nutrition science and public policy.
Notes1. Could ice cream possibly be good for you?. 2. Was there ever really a “sugar conspiracy”? is behind a paywall, but you should be able to find a copy if you look. Or ask. 3. Likewise Controversial Salt Report Peppered with Uncertainty. 4. Transcript for your reading pleasure.
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Today is the 80th anniversary of the roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of the Jews of Rome. That much I knew as I was planning this episode. More recent events took me and everyone else completely by surprise. I am sticking to my plan.
Rome’s former ghetto has become a tourist attraction, with an interesting museum under the Great Synagogue and plenty of other sites to see. And where there are tourists, there is food. The foodification of the ghetto, however, goes well beyond overpriced snacks. Both sides of the main street, the via del Portico Ottavia, are almost completely lined with restaurants. What I find most mysterious about this is that one of the most popular Roman foods, carciofi alla giudia, is freely available all over Rome and beyond. What makes this deep-fried delight Jewish? And how has food in the ghetto changed?
To help me understand the transformation of Rome’s Jewish foodscape I enlisted the help of Micaela Pavoncello, a member of the Jewish Community, and Sean Wyer, who has been studying the changes in the former ghetto.
Notes1. Micaela Pavoncello runs Jewish Roma Walking Tours and offers a wide range of tours and other activities. 2. Sean Wyer’s paper Gourmet and the Ghetto: The “Foodification” of Rome’s Historic Jewish Quarter is available from his website. 3. Finally, the transcript 4. Cover photograph by seventyoneplace, used with permission. Other pictures by me.
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Every aspect of large, industrial food creates a niche for people who want a less standardised alternative, and if the stars align you may have producers nearby who are willing to fill that niche. So it is with Big Milk. There are small dairies who offer fresh milk produced to the same exacting standards of hygeine without being further processed. Not raw milk (which also has its adherents and suppliers), but whole milk that has been pasteurised and nothing more. Almost as soon as I had published the episode on milk early last month, I was excited to come across an article about one such place, Saltrock Dairy in the southeast of Ireland. Saltrock operates a mobile vending machine from which customers can buy whole milk in recyclable bottles. I immediately made plans to talk to Cath Kinsella, whose brainchild it is.
Notes1. Saltrock’s main online presence seems to be on Instagram. 2. Caroline Hennessy’s article first alerted me to Saltrock. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Thanks to Saltrock Dairy for the photographs.
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In her latest book English Food: A People’s History, Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due recognition that “‘the English’ are not a single entity” and that the past necessarily illuminates the present. Impossible to cover all that in a single episode, or even several, we set out to explore what happens when the vast bulk of the English do not have enough to eat. Food riots are a recurring feature of rural life in England, often the result of bad weather and always exacerbated by the action — or inaction — of the ruling classes. As Diane told me at the outset, “it might be faster to talk about what rebellions don’t have a food element”.
Notes1. You can buy English Food: A People’s History online from an independent bookseller. It has just won the Guild of Food Writers award for Best Food Book of 2023. 2. Those uprisings: * Jack Cade’s Rebellion * Pilgrimage of Grace * Oxfordshire Rising
- An episode from the vaults dealt with Food prices and social unrest in the context of the Arab Spring and more recent manifestations.
- Swing letters from the British National Archive.
- Here is the transcript.
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Anne Mendelson’s new book Spoiled is subtitled The Myth of Milk as Superfood, and at its core argues that while there’s nothing wrong with fresh milk, at least for those who can digest it as adults, the belief that you cannot have enough of a good thing has created a monstrous industry. Dairy farmers have always had the short end of the stick, because fresh milk is inevitably a buyers’ market. Cows have been manipulated to divorce them from any kind of natural life. And milk drinkers are being fobbed off with a tasteless white liquid reconstituted from its constituent parts and with no hedonic value. And for what?
Mendelson places the start of the rot with George Cheyne, a Scottish physician whom she considers the original celebrity doctor. Partly as a result of avid personal networking, Cheyne became grossly obese. He was also often depressed, declaring that those “whose Genius is most keen and penetrating were most prone to such disorders”. Someone, Cheyne does not say who, told him about a Dr Taylor of Croydon, who had cured himself of epilepsy by a total milk diet. Cheyne visited Taylor, learned about the diet, and dedicated himself to it. He did lose weight, which he regained as soon as he loosened his dedication to milk, and in Bath and London hawked his diet to elite patients, who suffered “nervous complaints” that seldom troubled the lower orders.
It was the first fad diet, complete with celebrity fans and anecdotal miracle cures of nebulous ailments, and its core belief dominated subsequent expert ideas on nutrition and paediatrics. In our chat, we explored the wide range of effects triggered by the belief in milk as a superfood.
Notes1. Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood contains a lot more on Cheyne and how his influential patients helped promote the virtues of fresh milk. 2. I was staggered by the claim that Chinese scientsts are engineering cows that do not produce lactose. I found one paper by Russian scientists, which seems not to have been cited by anyone. Yet. Also a vague connection to Boyalife, a Chinese biotechnology company, but no more. 3. The transcript is here. 4. Banner image a detail from Landscape with a Milk Maid and a Beau by Paul Sandby. Cover photo by me, taken at the Wellcome Museum’s exhibit on milk which is on in London till 13 September. I loved it.
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Saghar Setareh left Iran in 2007 at 22 years old. She came to Rome to study graphic design and photography. The way she tells it, when she arrived she “certainly didn’t have a particular passion for food”. Slowly, though, that passion developed, first for Italian food and then by extension for the food of her homeland. Her book, which emerged from her passion, shares stories and recipes from Iran, from Italy, and from all the countries in between, and it is simply gorgeous, showcasing her multiple talents: writer, cook, photographer.
I know I’m going to have to scan the pages, so that I can cook from it without splattering it in the kitchen.
Notes1. Saghar Setareh has a website at labnoon.com where you will find more about her story and the book, including an explanation of labnoon. You can also see her photos on Instagram 2. Transcript will be a little while; I’m in a bit of a rush. 3. I was happy enough to snap the cover portrait myself, but with a photographer as talented as Saghar, you ask nicely, and you receive. The banner image is of her sour cherry pilaf.
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Koen Van Mechelen (left) and Olivier Hanotte (right) sandwich a large marble bust of a crowing cosmopolitan rooster.
In 1999, Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist, decided to cross a Belgian rooster with a French hen. The union of the Mechelse Koekoek and the Poulet de Bresse gave rise to a clutch of chicks that thrilled Vanmechelen with their diversity, and launched him on a path to create the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. One breed at a time, the CCP accumulated a huge amount of genetic diversity from chickens around the world. That diversity is now reversing out into the world through the Planetary Community Chicken, which uses the accumulated diversity to increase the resilience and productivity of village chickens in Africa. Olivier Hanotte, who triggered the PCC, joined me and Koen to talk about chicken diversity and what it means for art, for science, and for people.Notes1. You can find out more about Koen Vanmechelen’s many projects on his website and follow him on Instagram. 2. Olivier Hanotte talked to me about the past and future of African livestock, including chickens. He is on Twitter too. 3. More about ILRI’s partnership with Vanmechelen on the ILRI website and on Koen Vanmechelen’s own website. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Banner chicken profiles from Koen Vanmechelen.
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Coupons and ration books during war was a way for the British government to try and ensure that restricted items were distributed as fairly as possible, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well most of the time. At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with centrally cooked meals that people took home to eat, but soon blossomed into a far-reaching network of government-run restaurants. A new book — Feeding the People in Wartime Britain — from historian Bryce Evans uncovers the past and offers some ideas for the present.
Notes1. Bryce Evans’ website includes his post on bringing back national kitchens. Early on in his research, he prompted an article by the BBC. 2. Feeding the People in Wartime Britain is published by Bloomsbury Academic. 3. Cover and banner photos © Imperial War Museum.
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About two billion people around the world do not get enough micronutrients in their diet. This lack of vitamins and minerals — often called hidden hunger — has severe and lasting effects on individuals and their societies. One very popular approach to tackling hidden hunger is known as biofortification, engineering or selecting varieties of staple crops so that they produce higher levels of one micronutrient or another. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Hidden hunger is strongly correlated with the amount of energy people get from staples, so putting more micronutrients in those staples ought to be a good thing, except that there’s little evidence that it works and yields of biofortified staples are generally lower than those of unfortified varieties. That’s a waste of land that could be used to grow the fruits and vegetables that contribute to a more diverse diet, which offers a far better approach to micronutrient deficiencies.
All this and more is brought out in a recent paper in the journal Global Food Security. I interviewed one of the authors.
Notes1. What is Wrong with Biofortification, by Maarten van Ginkel and Jeremy Cherfas, can be read in Global Food Security. 2. A previous episode examined orange-fleshed sweet potato to feed hidden hunger, and there was evidence that OFSP can increase vitamin A status in children. I didn’t ask about yield. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Banner photograph from Western Bengal, by Krishnasis Ghosh for The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
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Miranda Brown successfully stretches Mr Song’s string cheese
I’ve long believed that the reason there is no milk or cheese in Chinese food culture today is because ethnic Chinese people are likely to be lactose intolerant. But that may well be an oversimplification. In looking at old texts, Professor Miranda Brown of Michigan University discovered recipes and advice on butter, milk and cheeses. So she set about trying to make the cheeses, with some success. As for intolerance, yes, a study in 1984 concluded that 92% of Han Chinese exhibit “primary adult lactose malabsorption”. Nevertheless, milk consumption is growing rapidly in China and the genetic basis of intolerance may be more complicated than a simple, single gene. Notes1. Miranda Brown is @Dong_Muda on Twitter. She wrote about Making Mr. Song’s Cheeses and in more detail about the cheeses and dairy in an article in Gastronomica which may be behind a paywall. She also has a recipe for cheese wontons. 2. Her colleague, Alice Yao, recorded an interview on The problematic history of lactase persistence research but her host, the Human Biology Association, doesn’t really get podcasting. 3. Here is the transcript. 4. Banner image from Two Water Buffaloes by Gao Qifeng (1889–1933), from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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Wally Thurman
Time was when chicken wings were barely a thing, appendages that nobody much wanted to eat. Chickens were bred to deliver big breasts and wings were an afterthought until the advent of Buffalo wings in the 1960s. Now, and especially in the run-up to the Superbowl and March Madness, wings are in much greater demand than breasts, which is reflected in much higher prices for wings.
I wanted to understand how the market copes with changing demand for the different parts of the whole bird, so I turned to Professor Wally Thurman, of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University.
Notes1. Purdue University (no relation to Perdue chicken) published a nice piece back in June 2001 explaining the complications that arise because Chicken Wings Come From Actual Chickens. 2. Of course I skated over the true history of Buffalo wings. If Calvin Trillin can’t get to the bottom of the story, who am I even to try? 3. In our conversation, we touched briefly on “wing-like things,” made from lower-cost breast meat. Just last week, I read about a class action lawsuit brought against a restaurant chain by a man who suffered “a financial injury” because he truly believed he had bought wings that had been deboned, rather than pieces of breast meat cunningly cut to resemble a wing. Nice try. 4. Here is the transcript. 5. Cover image adapted from Wikimedia Commons. Banner image from Ang Sarap.
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Ten years ago, the first episode of Eat This Podcast featured Ben Reade talking about some butter that he had buried in a Swedish bog, the better to understand the bog butter occasionally unearthed in Ireland (and elsewhere). The butter for that experiment was made by Patrik Johansson, using methods taught him by his grandmother, lightly churned with some modern food science. The result is a product that can be found only at a few fine restaurants. That is unlikely ever to change, as Patrik says he couldn’t possibly scale up production.
We talked about that, and much else besides.
Notes1. You can follow Patrik Johansson on Instagram. 2. Here’s the episode on bog butter 3. And here is the transcript. 4. Drum roll by MissloonerVoiceOver255
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Jessica Barnes
Egypt spends about 3% of its budget subsidising bread for about three-quarters of its population. Threats to that subsidy provoke massive civil unrest, helping to topple the regime in 2011. As a result, bread and wheat are fundamental to the government’s security and that of the people of Egypt. Wheat yields in Egypt are among the highest in Africa, but they are no match for the population, which is why Egypt is the biggest buyer of wheat on the global market. Even when government raises the price it will pay for local wheat, the farmers who grow it prefer to keep their harvest — for their own family food security — rather than sell it to promote the government’s security.These are just some of the challenges Jessica Barnes brings to light in her new book, Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt.
Notes1. Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt is published by Duke University Press. 2. Music by Ramy Essam. 3. You may be interested in an episode I did back in 2014: Food prices and social unrest 4. Transcript available here. 5. Cover photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy. Banner photo “courtesy Middle East Confidential”.
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Sean Wittenberg, Safe Catch CEO
There is an awful lot of disagreement on the subject of mercury in fish and shellfish and how harmful it might be to people. That’s especially true for tuna, which are top predators that accumulate mercury from all the fish they eat over their long lives. Many countries, including the USA, offer guidelines about how much tuna it is “safe” to eat, but there are problems with that. First, not all tuna is tested for mercury. And second, some individual fish contain way more mercury than others. Safe Catch is a relative newcomer to canned tuna, with a unique selling point: it tests every single fish, and to a standard 10 times more stringent than the level at which the FDA might take action.Sean Wittenberg, CEO of Safe Catch, told me how his company came about and how it operates.
Notes1. Safe Catch’s website. 2. Transcript, thanks to my generous supporters. 3. Astonishing tuna photograph by Tom Benson on flickr
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Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively identical. This has never suited organic farmers or any other smaller scale growers, including home gardeners. Finally, after a few false starts, a new regulation permitted the marketing of “organic heterogeneous material” from January 2022.
One of the organisations that campaigned for the new regulation is Let’s Liberate Diversity, an association of European groups. I went along to their 10th anniversary forum to hear how farmers and food producers were responding to the new regulation.
Notes1. Find out more about Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen and Biocivam Aude. 2. Let’s Liberate Diversity published a round-up of all the events at the Budapest forum. 3. The farmers Yumi Biagini is working with are looking for varieties from climate analogues, places that currently experience the kind of climate that they expect in the future. There used to be a marvellously easy tool to find climate analogues, but it seems to have vanished without trace. Best I can find is this explanation from Oregon State University. 4. Rouge de Bordeaux photograph from Moulin du Courneau on Instagram. 3F image from Drie Fonteinen. 5. Transcript.
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At the end of the previous episode on mothers’ milk Professor Amy Brown mentioned an important source of anxiety for new mothers: they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten, and that pushes them to use a see-through bottle and switch from breast to formula. It may surprise you to learn that the Italian Fascist regime came up with a solution 90 years ago. In this episode, Professor Diana Garvin provides some insights into Fascist breastfeeding, and a friend of mine explains how it lingered to traumatise mothers 50 years on, and continues to do so today.
As for why this episode is being published today, rather than on Monday, that’s because the Fascists chose 24 December 1933 to first celebrate the Giornata della madre e del fanciullo, the day of the mother and the child. Why Christmas Eve? Diana Garvin says it was “originally meant to coincide with the mother Mary’s labour pains. Ostensibly.”
That ostensibly is interesting, because while they might have been against the church, the Fascists must have known that Mary suffered no labour pains at all. At least not after the middle of the 14th century.
That was when Birgitta Birgersdotter, later to become St Bridget of Sweden, had a vision in the little town of Bethlehem, one of a series of visions that started when she was quite young, which had a profound impact on art and depictions of the nativity. Bridget relates how, in this vision, she “saw the One lying in her womb then move; and then and there, in a moment and the twinkling of an eye, she gave birth to a Son, from whom there went out such great and ineffable light and splendor that the sun could not be compared to it”. In another vision, Mary says “When I gave birth to him, it was also without any pain.” So, no labour pains.
Giotto’s Nativity from the lower church in Assisi, painted around 1310 and thus before St Bridget, shows a reclining Mary, who may well be exhausted by her labour.
Before Bridget, many depictions of the nativity show Mary lying down exhausted and resting, as a new mother surely would. After, she is usually shown kneeling before the baby emanating light, along with the manger, Joseph and a candle and various other details she envisioned.
Notes1. Diana Garvin’s latest book is Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work published by University of Toronto Press. Articles include Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy and Reproductive Health Care from Fascism to Forza Nuova. 2. I am very grateful to my friend Susan for sharing her memories of breastfeeding her son in Italy. 3. Huge thanks to Jennifer Wilkin Penick for alerting me to the significance of St Bridget in the history of art. 4. We have a transcript. 5. St Bridget’s words from The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden. 6. Cover photo by Lucy Clink. 7. Music: Jumbel from Blue Dot Sessions.
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It has been a difficult year for food supplies, and even more so for food markets. Prices everywhere seem to be higher than they have been for a long time, and that’s just in retail shops. On international commodity markets, things have been wild. Wheat shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but had started rising well before that, in mid 2021. Prices began to drift down in mid-May, while fighting was still intense and no wheat had yet left the Black Sea. As became clear, there was no great global shortage of wheat, although it had become scarce.
There was a lot of talk about speculators and starvation, which just happens to be the topic of a blog post by David Zetland, an American political economist who teaches at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He, like me, had long dismissed claims that speculators exacerbated price increases, but unlike me had changed his mind, at least in some cases. Of course I wanted to understand why, so I asked David to walk me through that and other some fundamental economic ideas as they relate to food and water.
Notes1. Crops, speculation and starvation was the piece that prompted me to book a talk with David Zetland. 2. His personal site is a gateway to his many other activities, including The Little Book of The Commons. 3. More can be said about crop insurance, a lot more, and soon I hope to find people to say it here. A good place to start is this piece by Aaron Smith at UC Davis. 4. A transcript! On time! 5. DALL-E made the images for me.
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“The corollary to white innocence is white passivity, the feeling that what one’s ancestors did was so messed up that it couldn’t possibly make a difference where one eats a barbecue sandwich.”
Asking for a doctor’s note when your guest says they are allergic or intolerant is not an option
There’s a huge difference between neophobia and picky eating, just as there is between food and nutrition. How best to undeertake the tricky business of helping children to eat well.
Organic growers and breeders in Europe are preparing to take advantage of their new freedom to sow biodiversity
How can the simple and vital connection between mother and baby possibly be considered shameful?
The average American starts in on a fad diet four times a year. A quarter give up after two weeks. What are they hoping for?
The ability to tax wheat moving through choke points gives empires their power, even today.
Wheat was money, when a store was no more than a store of goods to be exchanged for wheat.
Why did the participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries leave no trace of what it was about?
France abolished slavery in 1815 but the practice continued long after that in its west African enclaves
On the slopes of the Palatine Hill, supposedly on the site where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, a new food museum.
New studies make sense of tomato’s transformation from teeny-fruited weed to diversity diva.
Discussions about food often “bump up against philosophy” according to an actual philosopher, whose book helped me to think more clearly about food.
Yoghurt is good for you, no doubt about that, although it probably will not confer eternal life.
As an artist, looking down on Google Earth, Mishka Henner saw things that made him wonder — and that have the power to make all of us think, a bit.
Farrell Monaco has studied, and brought back to life, the canonical bread of Ancient Rome. Now she brings an ancient bakery back to life.
It may not contain wily aristocrats or superstitious peasants, but the true history of the potato is much more interesting.
Rachel Roddy had no intention of producing an encyclopaedia of pasta. Her book is more informative than that, and more readable.
A dish that is today an icon of Indian food dates back only to 1947, using an ingredient that became widespread only in the 1920s
The story of perhaps the greatest transformation in the history of food and how it continues today
India gained independence in 1947 with nationalist politicians promising food for all and an end to the rapacious imperial administration. What happened next?
Diet for a Large Planet shows how the world is still living with free trade policies from the 19th century
Jess Fanzo takes a close look at what’s wrong with global food systems and how it might be possible to change them.
Green Saffron is a new kind of spice merchant, that cares as much about how its spices are grown as their taste.
Coffee that tastes of light black tea — a good thing — and is able to cope with warmer climates.
Skill and craft over automation, complexity over simplicity, and diversity over monoculture
There’s one group of people that functional foods and superfoods can definitely help: the people who grow them.
There may not be a recipe, but there’s always someone sitting behind your shoulder going tsk, tsk, tsk.
These days, population is barely considered as a factor in food security. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved.
Using land that could be used to feed people to feed animals is a terrible waste, but for today’s modern breeds it is absolutely essential.
Is our excrement simply a waste product, to be dumped out of sight and out of mind? Or is it a valuable resource that we squander at our peril?
Persuading people to drink tea from the subcontinent more or less created the modern propaganda machine
The DNA of chickens, sheep and cattle tells slightly different stories about their domestication
Her aunt’s gnocchi were enough to set Teresa Lust on a long and roundabout journey to learn more about Italian and Italian food.
Coffee leaf rust is bad, but at least in the short term it may not be the threat you think it is
Food for settlers in New Zealand used to be mutton, mutton, mutton and potatoes or potatoes. Not any more.
Chilli peppers took a few years to reach China after their initial encounter with Westerners, but rapidly became a very hot item.
Are there any universals about more complex kinds of gustatory taste? And how do we learn to talk about taste?
Robert Walpole — like all great politicians — understood how to use his tipple to send a signal
I know taste is entirely subjective. But I’m also willing to think about good taste and bad taste and even to use that as part of a value judgement. How about you?
Norman Borlaug gave birth to the Green Revolution, with little thought for the unintended consequences of his work.
A young Russian woman blogs her way through the only cookbook her grandmother knew -- and gets her own book out of it
It took more than a hundred years, but eventually the United States too developed a recognisable coffee culture.
Espresso is the canonical coffee of Italy, even though the original espresso was something entirely different. How did espresso happen? And what happened when it got to England?
With a bag of porridge oats in my baggage, I set off for Georgetown University and a date with science
Unlike car sharing, when you buy a share in a cow, you are not free to drive her wherever you want. So what do you get?
Vicky Bennison set out to record Italian grannies making pasta and along the way created terrifically watchable videos
Mozambique used to be the world's largest supplier of cashew nuts. Then along came the World Bank, to help.
Capuchin monkeys are resourceful and smart, which helps them to select a good diet from all the potential food around them.
You can't judge a book by its cover. 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot is not really about carrots.
How did porridge go from a fine breakfast food, albeit one that's easily abused, to the stuff of foodie dreams?
"All the intrigue of a murder mystery and all the painstaking, arduous pursuit of an archeological dig." For a radish.
Alfredo sauce, made famous in the 1920s, dates back to at least 1390. That, and other surprises of food in the Eternal City.
A downturn in the house-building business set Maurice Gilbert at Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park on the road to award-winning apple juices.
Ignorance, paranoia and greed have damaged the olives of the Salento almost beyond recognition.
William Rubel doesn't think there is good bread or bad bread, but he knows what he likes.
The first farmers and their crops moved much further, much earlier, than previously thought. As they did so they grew the confidence, the resources and the knowledge to move up into the mountains and down into the river basins.
Meat exercises the imagination in a way no other food can match. Some people have always wanted to ban carnivory. For others it is an essential fuel. And now, meat is central to nutrition, sustainability, health and capitalism. What does meat mean?
Fake news. A Senate bought and paid for. Newspapers printing press releases verbatim. And all more than 100 years ago.
Insights into building and running a very successful small bakery, plus the "super colloidal suspension of fat and sugar" that is a specialty of the house.
The staggering agricultural biodiversity that is such an important aspect of Lao food is on display at a new website.
From the all-seeing Dom Pérignon to the young bucks of London’s high society, champagne’s true history is absolutely intoxicating.
Jan Davison has written Pickles: A Global History, the perfect accompaniment to her previous book, English Sausages.
Is dessert a pointless overindulgence, or perhaps the most interesting and creative part of a good meal out? I know what I think.
A communal oven helps a community to bake bread and rebuild after two massive earthquakes.
The law that protects pubs from the perceived challenge of restaurants was passed by a Parliament full of publicans
Unless you already know what you're doing, modern cook-books may be a recipe for disaster.
What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.
"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough." Wes Jackson
The qualities that make durum wheat so attractive for pasta have nothing to do with the size of the semolina particles from which it is made.
"I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day."
Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can't deliver either.
Bakers who grind their own grain are all utterly in love with the flour they get. I'm jealous.
If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.
It needn't actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.
All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.
There's a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.
A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!
St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.
A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.
Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.
Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.
How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called Bake Like an Egyptian.
That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. The rest of us can call it what we like.
Credit where credit's due: The Father of the Green Revolution had an unacknowledged father himself.
Today's Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn't matter. People want Red Fife because it is Red Fife, not just any old high-quality Canadian wheat.
"In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the 'building material' required ... And to use their most valuable qualities for hybridisation."
In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.
Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".
Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.
Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?
It's a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don't need a heat-proof container to boil water.
It's magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.
In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal there was to refine sugar rather than feeding it to locomotives. Human muscles would make far better use of the energy than steam engines. The problem Pyke tried to tackle remains essentially unsolved: where is the power for food production to come from?
How do farmers' markets and concentrated food industries that depend on long food chains stack up when it comes to food-borne illness? Truth is, nobody really knows.
The number of firms that own the food brands you see is much smaller than you think. That's not good for consumers or suppliers.
Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves.
A hop crop flop in Europe made the fortunes of growers in the Pacific north west of America, none more so than in Oregon's Willamette valley. Ezra Meeker, the hop king, promoted the gemütlichkeit of hop-picking in the old country as the frontispiece to his book; the reality was somewhat different.
Eating is a political act, as Wendell Berry reminded us. Which is why I was very happy to sample the food on offer by Syrian refugees in Hummustown.
Even before the Romans, grain arrived in what was to become London by water, and it continues to do so today, although the mechanics of the trade have changed beyond recognition. One of the last people to move grain by water upstream from London shares her experience and the history of moving grain by water.
The Imperial Food Products fire wasn't really an accident; circumstances conspired to make it extremely likely If it hadn't happened in Hamlet, it would have happened somewhere else.
A second visit to Scariff in County Clare, Ireland, to hear from the people working hard to save Ireland's vegetable heritage and make seeds available to a new generation of gardeners.
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing.
First let's decide what kind of food supply system we want, then use that to bring about a renaissance in real farming.
A trip to the Sheep's Head peninsula in West Cork and one of the pioneer cheesemakers there, Jeffa Gill.
Many of the things you might believe about the history of agriculture in America just aren't true.
Apples picked to perfume a room. Undocumented apples and apples with false papers. Foundlings that could give a supermarket apple a run for its money. Others that don't taste too good but are catnip to blackbirds. A heritage orchard in County Clare, Ireland.
Antibiotic resistance is one consequence of feeding animals large amounts of antibiotics -- about three times the amount given to people in the US. Why is it so hard to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture, and how else might we tackle the problem?
How an empty kitchen in Boston triggered a breakfast obsession and a new book on noodle soup.
If you really want to do good by spending more on your coffee, you need to look beyond Fair Trade and other certification schemes.
John Speth on how food we may consider disgusting is essential for survival in the Arctic, with added disgusting goodness from Paul Rozin.
Wheat growers are making use of hugely diverse evolutionary populations to give them the seeds they need.
A breed of pigs, well known as far back as 1338, almost vanished in the 1960s. Now it's back, and it's delicious.
Signs of the Venetian occupation are everywhere, as are the imprints of French and British rule. But there are also unique aspects to food and culture on Corfu.
A picture is worth way more than 1000 words when it reveals food trends over the past 50 years for more than 150 countries.
Australians devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. They could eat better for less money, but "affordable luxuries" get in the way.
Alternative food facts tramp across the landscape the hordes of the undead. Tom Nealon's new book Food Fights & Culture Wars aims to lay some of them to rest.
Perhaps you’ve heard about IBM’s giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that anyone can use.
You can eat a perfectly nutritious diet for a lot less money than the US government says you need. But would you want to?
Food has always been a marker of social status, only today no elite eater worth their pink Himalayan salt would be seen dead with a slice of fluffy white bread, once the envy of the lower orders.
Giving up on animals as a source of food is a luxury that many people cannot afford. For poor people in developing countries, a bit of animal source food can greatly improve their health and wellbeing.
Is the Carolina Runner No.4 peanut "the first peanut cultivated in North America" and does it matter anyway?
Continuing the short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes by getting to grips with the origin of "gherkin" and other names we give cucurbits.
Starting a short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes with a look at the Great Epping Sausage Scandal.
Bad diet is now the number one risk factor for disease. Is the world going to tackle the problem?
If you going to breed vegetables for flavour -- perish the thought -- you need someone to help you decide what's good. Enter the Culinary Breeding Network.
Foie gras offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a sociologist who got caught up in foie gras just before the topic exploded all over the food scene in Chicago.
A new technique for asking how one taste affects another confirms a recent change of opinion. White wine is often a better choice than red to accompany cheese.
Who knows what evil lurks beneath the wrinkled skin of an "economy" English sausage? And what delights won for the Cumberland and the Newmarket their coveted status of Protected Geographical Indication? Jan Davison, that's who. She wrote the book on English sausages and is the guest in this latest episode.
Did you know that malt whisky owes its existence in the marketplace to the stock market crash of 1973-74?
Neither did I, so when one of the people I interviewed for the craft distilling episode a few weeks back made that claim, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, if you just plug "scotch whisky economic history" into an online search engine, you don't find anything of real interest, at least not in the first few thousand hits.
Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru? Seeking answers to basic questions.
A story of exploration, aristocracy and promiscuity, all in the service of better food. What more could you want?
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they're spreading, at least where they're allowed. British Columbia has gone from 5 to 50 in about three years. The USA now has more than 1000 registered small distilleries, almost a third of which are so-called "seed to sip" farm distillery operations. The British Isles too have seen a mushrooming of small distilleries. This episode is just a taste of things to come.
It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is relatively benign all year round and you can grow a great deal of produce without too much difficulty. But what do you do when you are at an altitude of more than 2000 metres with a growing season that is usually less than three months long? You do what you can, which in the case of Elkstone Farm, near Steamboat Springs in Colorado, means building four greenhouses, one of which is capable of ripening figs, citrus and even, occasionally, bananas. But it isn’t all greenhouses. Outdoors there’s a tangle of many different kinds of annual and perennial crops, which during the short growing season provide an abundance of fruits and vegetables.
Climate change and global trade combine to make it ever more likely that new pests and diseases will threaten food supplies. A classic example is playing out now in Puglia, the region that includes the heel of Italy's boot. The disease is caused by a bacterium -- Xylella fastidiosa -- that clogs the xylem vessels that carry water up from the roots. No water means leaves shrivel and scorch and eventually the host plant can die. In 2013, Xylella was found for the first time in Europe, in olive trees near Gallipoli. Plant health plans swung into action, to try and eradicate, or at least contain, the disease. And so did politicians and activists, blocking progress with ignorance, half-truths and manipulation. In consequence, the disease has now spread to cover the whole of the Salento peninsula.
In the view of people much more expert than I, there may now be no stopping Xylella. Rodrigo Almeida, of the University of California, published an article in Science last week, asking Can Apulia's olive trees be saved? As he is an expert, I see no reason to present a different point of view, so you may find the podcast one sided. So be it.
Notes
Rodrigo Almeida's article is behind a paywall, but if you want a copy, I'm sure I can help you find one. Thomas Simpson is keeping a website that offers quick and helpful translations of articles about Xylella. It is a great resource if you want to know more about the foolishness. While I have your attention, let's hear it for expertise.
In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what remained of the region’s rich agricultural biodiversity. Almost 100 years before, the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov became convinced that this was where “the original evolution of many cultivated plants took place.” Soft club wheat, with its short ears, rye, barley, oil plants, grain legumes like chickpeas and lentils, melons and many fruits and vegetables; all showed the kind of diversity that Vavilov said pointed to the places where they were first domesticated. As he wrote, “it is still possible to observe the almost imperceptible transition from wild to cultivated forms within the area.”
What van Oudenhoven found was bewildering; incomprehensible diversity in the fields and unspeakably dull food on his plate. It only started to make sense when he began to talk to Pamiri people, and especially the older women, about their food and culture. The result was a book – With Our Own Hands: a celebration of food and life in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and Afghanistan – by van Oudenhoven and his co-author Jamila Haider, which documents a culture that remains in danger of disappearing.
That book recently won the Gourmand International award for Best Cookbook of 2015, which is why I am now repeating the conversation I had with Frederik van Oudenhoven in July of last year.
Notes
With Our Own Hands is published by LM Publishers and is available from them and other booksellers. For other notes, see the original episode notes. There are plans to make a documentary about the people and their culture. Watch a trailer here.
Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does not make sense I had no idea that the statistical correlation of air pollution and the epidemic of “diabesity” was stronger than the correlation with sugar. Or that among the indigenous people of Canada, those who still spoke their tribal language have far lower incidence of type 2 diabetes and obesity than those who have mostly lost their language.
Does that let sugar off the hook as a dietary demon? There’s no doubt that as a potent source of calories, sugar can be a problem. But as a specifically toxic substance, as many authors have claimed? Emsden makes a good case that there is more to blame for society’s dietary woes than pure, white and deadly sugar.
Personally, I’m not convinced there’s anything worse about sugar than that it packs a lot of calories into a small volume – but then so does peanut butter, even without added sugar.
Notes
Order Sweetness and Light from Amazon. The media’s latest sugar binge began recently with an article by Ian Leslie in The Guardian. Katherine Docimo Pett, aka Nutrition Wonk, followed up with a lengthy response. You may find Marion Nestle’s summary easier going. Or you may want even more meat, from Nutrevolve or Sheila Kealey. Banner artwork by Lucy Clink.
Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown.
It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History ... knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully unaware of the men and women who created the plant varieties that keep us fed. I say as much at the beginning of the show, when I guess that perhaps one in a hundred people can name a plant breeder, and that the name they’re most likely to come up with is that of Norman Borlaug. (The true stats, from a very small, self-selected sample, are somewhat different. Two out of 13 – about 15% – can name a plant breeder, although neither of the names they came up with was Borlaug’s.)
I thought Borlaug might be the most familiar plant breeder because he is credited as being the Father of the Green Revolution, for work that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Nazareno Strampelli, an Italian plant breeder, exactly foreshadowed Borlaug’s work by about four decades. His wheats doubled production in Italy and beyond and were crucial to the second green revolution ushered in by Borlaug. He was born on 29 May 1866, 150 years ago as I write this. He deserves to be better known (as do all plant breeders, actually).
Notes
There is very little about Strampelli’s life and work in English. I am indebted to Sergio Salvi for his books, articles and time, without which I could not have produced this episode. Music for the show graciously provided by Jon Fuller, aside from bits of soundtrack lifted from archive Italian newsreel. The banner image I grabbed from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator; it’s a little in joke for anyone who does know even a smidgen of the history of wheat. There is so much more to the story of Strampelli and the early days of plant breeding; would you be interested in an e-book?
The Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums but not others. It ought to be on all of them. This is a seriously interesting museum for anyone who likes butter, and in my book, that means just about everyone. (I refuse absolutely to say anything about the impact – if any – of butter on health, not least because there’s nothing certain one can say.) It sits next to the grand Butter Exchange, built when the Cork Butter Market sat like a colossus astride the global market. The Irish butter traded through Cork was done in by refrigeration, fell to the lowest level possible, and then emerged again after Ireland joined the European Union, by returning to the principles that made the Cork Butter Exchange great. The Butter Museum tells the whole story. This episode tells a bit of it.
Notes
Regina Sexton is @culinaryireland on Twitter. The Cork Butter Museum really is worth a visit. The banner photograph is my own, and the butter curls are by Dennis Miyashiro, used with permission. I snarfed the music from SoundCloud. I still have no idea how permissions there work.
By rights, there should have been an episode last week, but there wasn't because I was just back from New York and the James Beard Awards, and I just didn't have time to put something together. Also, of course, I didn't win -- that honour went to Gravy, from the Southern Foodways Alliance -- and richly deserved it was too.
If I had won, I'm sure I would have found time to record something, but it was an immense honour just to be nominated again.
So no episode, because nothing to say, but I have been thinking about the show, and the main conclusion is that I need to carve out more time for myself to make Eat This Podcast. To do that, though, I need to spend a little less time on paid work. And that's the biggest change I want to make here.
After a lot of soul-searching, I'm going to put Eat This Podcast on the line and open a Patreon account. In case you don't know about it, Patreon allows you to engage with people who are making things you like with a regular cash donation. You can do different amounts, and you can do it either per item -- per show in my case -- or per month.
Anyway, the point of this episode is to let you know why the show is late.
Next week, I will, definitely, for sure, have a new show -- and details of how you can help me make more and better shows.
Quinoa -- that darling of the health-conscious western consumer -- came in for a lot of flack a few years ago. Skyrocketing prices caused some food activists to claim that the poor quinoa farmers of the high Andean plains in Bolivia and Peru were no longer able to afford their staple food. Every mouthful we ate was taken direct from a hungry peasant. Some people even gave up eating the stuff. Other writers retaliated by saying that high prices were the best thing that ever happened to those poor farmers. And agricultural economists saw an opportunity to prove their worth.
The results are in. High prices are indeed good for farmers. And they had no impact on nutrition among either quinoa farmers or those who merely buy it from time to time. If you gave up on quinoa, you can take it up again with a clean conscience.
But that's not to say all is perfect. In this episode, the impact of high prices on quinoa farmers, the problems to come and how western consumers can be part of the solution.
Notes
There’s quite a lot about quinoa’s various ups and downs over at the other place. This is a good place to start. Bellemare, Fajardo-Gonzalez and Gitter’s paper is Foods and Fads: The Welfare Impacts of Rising Quinoa Prices in Peru. Andrew Stevens’ paper is Quinoa Quandary: Cultural Tastes and Nutrition in Peru. Bioversity International has lots of information about Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services. Lots more from Andean Naturals at their website. The banner photograph I took in Cotacachi, Ecudaor. And the cover image uses a Wikimedia image by Christian Guthier - originally posted to Flickr as Homegrown Quinoa!, CC BY 2.0.
At this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food I talked to Jon Verriet, who’s been researching the history of the haybox. That’s an insulated container, into which you put hot food, which then keeps cooking thanks to the retained heat. Jon made the point that hayboxes often see an upsurge during times of war and hardship, when they can be promoted as good for the country because they save energy and money. Environmentally-aware types also like them, to save energy as they cook their lentils.
Researching the haybox myself, I came across its modern incarnation, the Wonderbag, which neatly ties those two motivations together. When you buy one, perhaps for environmental reasons, you’re actually paying for two, one of which goes to a poor family to save money, fuel, time, water, everything. I thought that was worth a follow-up, and so sought out Sarah Collins, a South African social entrepreneur who developed the Wonderbag.
Notes
The Wonderbag website tells the story and links through to the Wonderbag Foundation. The University of California at Berkeley study mentioned in the podcast concluded that the Wonderbag saves 8–21% of the time family members spend cooking, 10–36% of fuel costs, and allows families to spend 36–60% more on food. Banner photograph thanks to Annie Templeton at Goedgedacht Trust. Cover photo by Edrea du Toit for Netwerk 24. The haybox through history episode, for convenience.
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When it comes to cradles of agriculture, West Africa does not often get a look in. The Sahel is better known as a place of famine than of feasting, but it wasn’t always so, and even today the Bamana people of Mali have a rich food culture.
Stephen Wooten – that’s him in the picture enjoying a meal with his friends and collaborators – is an anthropologist who has been working in Mali since the early 1990s. He gave a great talk at this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, after which we had a chance to talk about food in Mali and how it evolved from gathering and hunting through herding cattle and sheep to settled agriculture, along the way domesticating some important cereals such as millet.
There's a lot more to the food culture though. Women and men work separately but together to ensure that the community can eat, with a strict division of labour and equally strict sharing of responsibilities.
Notes
The banner photograph, by Stephen Wooten, shows the antelope headdress worn by dancers in the Ciwara performance, a celebration that recounts the mythical origins of Bamana agriculture and that, like Bamana food culture, requires the participation of women and men.
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I'm on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I've bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than admit defeat and just leave well enough alone, I decide to record a little reflection on the food of Indonesia, at least, the food I've eaten so far, halfway into the trip.
I forgot to mention durian. I guess that tells you all you need to know about how little of an impression it made. Yes, it smells. Yes, the taste and texture are odd. It wasn't that bad, but I certainly won't be packing one in coffee grounds and triple-wrapping it to bring it back with me, as one colleague advised.
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Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been here almost 25 years she developed something of an obsession. On the one hand, she watched “a bewildering decline in the quality and craftsmanship of Italian food together with a skyrocketing deification of it”. On the other, “in a vicious circle, the decline stimulated the explosion of the gastronomic nostaliga industry, which in turn, hastened the very process it claimed to quell”.
This is not something you would notice. The modern idea is that Italian cuisine has always been more-or-less what it is, and that if there were a difference between social classes, it was more about how often they ate certain dishes, or the quality of the ingredients, than about what they actually ate. As Karima Moyer-Nocchi discovered, that rose-tinted view is at odds with what actually went on.
In an attempt to make sense of the changes, Moyer-Nocchi turned to women, now aged 90 and more, who had grown up under fascism and who, perhaps, could shed light on the recent history of Italian food. She gently coaxed their memories of food from them, and created a book that is part oral history, part academic history, and that puts the current mania for Italian cuisine in perspective. There’s no way we could cover it all in one interview, but I think you can get some idea of how things have changed, mostly for the better, and also how little one knows about the real history of food in Italy.
Notes
The book is Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that if you follow that link straight to Amazon and buy it, I get a teeny reward. The banner image, from a photograph by Henri Roger-Viollet (I think), shows Mussolini taking part in the first wheat threshing in Latina in 1932, a temporary victory in the Battle for Wheat. The podcast cover image is from a photograph by Mario Giacomelli. In another episode about food in Fascist Italy, I talked to Ruth Lo about the festa dell’uva
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This year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food was dedicated to The material culture of cooking tools and techniques and was full of fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed a talk on the hay box, the original slow cooker. The principle is simplicity itself. Bring a pot full of food to the boil and then insulate it really well so that it cools down very slowly. The food continues to cook as it cools down and if your insulation is good enough you can come back hours later to find a hot, properly cooked meal.
The haybox actually has quite a long history, with three Gold Medals awarded to a Mr Johan Sörensen at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Various patents were granted to Sörensen and others, and the idea was promoted for "fishermen, pilots, and others whose small vessels are not generally so constructed as to enable them to procure hot food while at sea" and, eventually, domestic cooks.
In his talk, Jon Verriet traced the ups and downs of the haybox from around 1895 to the present day. It was most popular in times of war, but always with a moral element to it, even if the moral lesson shifted slightly. Notes
There’s a terrific account of The Self-acting Norwegian Cooking Apparatus in the New York Medical Journal, vol 10 (1870). Do not be distracted by either the preceding item (The Effects of Hashish) or the one after (When to Trephine). Thanks to Hedon for the link. The most recent incarnation of the haybox is the Wonderbag, created by a development worker after a restless night and now offering to save the planet and pull people out of poverty. Aside from that, most of the online writing about the haybox is survivalist stuff. I’m not linking to that. The banner image is from Ford Madox Brown’s The Hayfield. I’d like to think that his supper is under one of the little haystacks. The cover illustration is from The Fireless Cook Book, by Margaret J. Mitchell.
Rachel Roddy, after about 10 years of hard slog, is an overnight sensation.
She's just scooped the André Simon award for best food book in 2015, a very big deal indeed for a first book. I'd been warming up this second helping for a day or two before that news came through last Friday. My original reason for revisiting this episode was that her book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, is due to be published in the US tomorrow, 2 February, under a somewhat different title: My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking The different titles were just one of the things we talked about and that are worth sharing again; Rachel's well-deserved award provides an extra reason.
There's a lot more packed into the original, full-length episode. Rachel talked about how a website turned into a book and about how she's discovering life and cooking in one of the less glamorous towns of Sicily, the subject of her next book.
As promised, another second helping from one of 2015's episodes, before we get to the new stuff. This time, I'm remembering my trip to the little place in St Martin's Lane in London that serves a couture version of koshari, the iconic street food of Egypt. And one trouble with these second helpings is that there's not much new to say about the topic or the episode, so I'll just point you to the full episode from March 2015 and let you explore there. (I will also repeat the relevant show notes below).
Speaking of new stuff, a couple of weeks ago, I was depressed about not being able to go to the Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food this year. Thanks to the great generosity of a friend, I was able to go, and the first new episode of the year will be one I recorded there. There wasn't any tulip bulb soup on offer this time, and perhaps that's just as well.
Notes
Koshari Street is at 56 At Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4EA. And online Anissa Helou is also online and her book Mediterranean Street Food is still available.
As ever, I’m taking a little break and bringing you some repeats from 2015. This one is prompted by an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that I’ve just listened to. They decided to cook a peacock for reasons that I think had something to do with the role of spices in global trade and the birth of capitalism in the 17th century. And who should they call on as their expert guide but Christianne Muusers.
Long time listeners may remember that it was almost a year ago that I met Christianne at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food. We talked about the very antithesis of conspicuous consumption represented by a heavily-spiced peacock pie: tulip bulb soup, which kept some Dutch people alive through the hunger winter of 1943–44.
The Amsterdam Food Symposium takes place again next week, on 15 and 16 January 2016. Unfortunately I really don’t think I can afford to go this year, which is a great shame.
Notes
Details of the Symposium here. Christianne Muusers’ site is called Coquinaria and there’s some more information on tulip bulbs as food from Green Deane. The tulip in the photo is China Pink, and I took it. The banner photo shows some Dutch ration coupons, from Wikimedia. Thanks for the inspiration to Planet Money’s We cooked a peacock, especially if it brings in a few listeners.
How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over the past 60 years, the productivity of the three major cereals – wheat, rice and maize – has gone up 3.2 times, more than keeping up with the 2.3-times increase in population. And the total production of those three has gone up from 66 per cent of all cereals to 79 percent over the same period. Largely as a result, we no longer see the same large-scale famines that we used to.
Yield, however, isn’t everything. Nor are calories, which some people have embraced as a better measure than yield. The world produces enough calories for everyone (ignoring for now the fact that there are problems with distribution) but calories are not enough.
As Ruth DeFreis says in the podcast, “If calories were everything, why would we have a billion iron-deficient people?”
Ruth and her co-authors have come up with an alternative measure, nutritional yield: “The number of adults who would be able to obtain 100% of their recommended DRI [dietary reference intake] of different nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare”.
To me, this makes intuitive sense. Food – as opposed to, say, biofuel – is for nourishing people, not powering machines. So of course there’s more to it than calories. I’ve tried saying as much to pundits gung-ho for yield or calories, even before I read the paper, but with no great success. So when the topic came up again I jumped at the opportunity to speak to the lead author.
Notes
Ruth DeFries recently published The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture is in the 17 July 2015 issue of Science. My side of the little rant is at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. The calorie-fans can put their own side up if they’re so minded. A couple of weeks later, my compadre Luigi wrote about the Science paper and added his own views.
The Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centuries. It was dark because the light of Rome had been extinguished, while that of the Renaissance had not yet burst into flame. And it was supposed to be a time when the culture and economy of Europe slumped. Peasants in scattered rural settlements scratched out a living in ignorance and obscurity. Recent archaeological excavations, however, have changed the way people look at the Dark Ages.
Richard Hodges, President of the American University in Rome, wrote a book back in the 1980s called Dark Age Economics, and it subscribed, more or less, to the prevailing wisdom. Recently, though, he has completely written the story, and Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit reinterprets this fascinating period in Europe’s development. He presented a very brief introduction at the recent sustainability conference organised by the American University of Rome and the American Academy in Rome, where he said that farming in the Dark Ages was much more productive and sustainable than people previously thought. Luckily, the American University in Rome is close at hand.
There is a lot more I would have liked to go into; the spread of the plough, animal breeding, the wool economy. I confess I find this sort of thing very beguiling, and I hope you do too. Maybe another time.
Notes
Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit is published by Bloomsbury. I remember reading Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society when it first came out, and it made a huge impression. (As did Marv Harris, but that’s a story for another day.) The extreme weather events of 535–536 were news to me; they shouldn’t have been.
“Forget organic. Eat local.” Nice, simple advice, from the cover of Time magazine. But more or less pointless. There’s so much more to food systems than just the distance the food travels. Tim Lang coined the phrase food miles. We talked about the complexities of the food system.
That sink is where Rachel Roddy, an English woman in Rome, prepares meals to share with her partner Vincenzo, their young son Luca, and a horde of appreciative readers of her website and, now, her first book.
Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, features the sink on its front cover. That probably makes it one of the most famous sinks in Rome. So naturally when Rachel and I got home from our meeting in the new Testaccio market, it was the first thing I wanted to see. And photograph. Our conversation ranged widely, from book titles and domain names to the links between the food of Rome and the food of Manchester. And although she says she's a romantic and prone to nostalgia, it is also clearly the case that Rachel Roddy loves learning about food and cooking, loves sharing what she's learned, and loves telling stories. Simple ingredients, for a satisfying cookbook and website.
A couple of other links. Rachel mentioned her friend Fabrizia Lanza and the farm and cooking school she runs in Sicily. Here's what Rachel wrote recently about a wonderful idea called Cook the Farm. If you decide to follow the link, do give yourself time to pursue Rachel down all her intriguing rabbit holes.
It’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused consumers unable to read a label? All of the above? In a nutshell, on 12 August 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, informing him that two of Hampton Creek’s products:
are in violation of section 403 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C. § 343] and its implementing regulations found in Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 101 (21 CFR 101).
Just Mayo and Just Mayo Sriracha are the two products, and their crime is that they do not contain eggs. So they cannot be called “mayo”. Who sicced the FDA on Hampton Creek? has become the big question, as a pile of emails winkled out of the government by a Freedom of Information Act request seem to show that the American Egg Board orchestrated a campaign against Hampton Creek.
I mentioned the story in my newsletter three weeks ago, which prompted Peter Hertzmann, an independent researcher and a friend, to suggest that the reality, as ever, is not quite so straightforward. Peter was good enough to fill me in on some of the background.
Notes
Peter Hertzmann’s website is well worth exploring for all sorts of good things. The American Egg Board is just one of several commodity checkoff programs. There have been some very interesting challenges to the whole idea of a mandatory checkoff, one of which recently featured on BackStory, a history podcast. I did ask if I could use it, but no reply yet; you can hear the segment here, but you will need a sharper legal brain than mine to decide whether mandatory funding of something called government speech raises First Amendment concerns. What got Peter and me into the sciencey discussion of mayonnaise and emulsions was his mention of the Harvard University Science and Cooking lecture series. I’m mortified to admit that I didn’t know about it. Many of the lectures are on YouTube, and one in particular that Peter pointed me to showed Nandu Jubany from Can Jubany restaurant in Spain making an aioli from nothing but garlic, salt and olive oil, and a bit of water. You can see him do that from about 13:30 to 17:30 in this video, but the intro, on emulsions, is worth watching too if you want to a better understanding. I’m sharing, without comment, some of the AEB material obtained by Ryan Shapiro. The FDA’s letter is, of course, online. The banner image of a mayonnaise emulsion under the microscope is from a scientific paper on substituting eggs with a modified potato starch.
Megan Kimble -- that's her on the left -- is a young journalist in Tucson, Arizona. Back in 2012, she set out to stick it to the processed food man, by eating only unprocessed food for a year. Her book Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food tells the whole story.
It's odd that two books that have at their core the prevalence of processed food came out within a month of one another, but while Anastacia Marx de Selcado explains how it is that the US military came to occupy supermarket shelves, Megan Kimble simply wants nothing to do with processed foods. Her reasons boil down to taking control of what she eats and boosting the local economy. Along the way she discovers she can't really do without chocolate, so she learns to make her own.
Notes
Megan Kimble has a website.
Have you ever stopped to wonder what drives the incessant innovation in processed food? Who thought that an energy bar would be a good thing to exist? What was the logic that drove the development of the cheese-flavoured powder that coats so many snacks? Even instant coffee; why was that needed? The answer to all these questions, and many more, can be traced back to the US Army’s Natick Center, outside Boston, Massachusetts. That is where the Combat Feeding Directorate of the US army, with the help of academics and large food processing companies, designs the rations that sustain American soldiers and much of the rest of America and the world. Soldiers need rations that are lightweight, that don’t spoil over time, and that can withstand some pretty brutal handling. The rest of us pay for the same. Author Anastacia Marx de Selcado’s book Combat-Ready Kitchen, published in early August, lifts the lid on how the army has invaded almost all aspects of processed food. Notes
Combat-Ready Kitchen is available from Amazon and elsewhere. If you buy from that link, I get a tiny pittance. Anastacia Marx de Selcado has a website, of course. The banner photograph shows a high pressure processing production line, © Moira Mac.
The O-Pipin-Na-Piwin Cree Nation have suffered generations of maltreatment at the hands of various official entities. Moved from their homelands further south, they now occupy small scattered settlements in northern Manitoba, where summers are short and the land infertile. Having adapted to some extent to their new circumstances, large dams, built to supply energy to the rest of the province and beyond, flooded their traditional fishing and hunting grounds, destroying their livelihoods even further. Being so remote, the supply chain for outside foods is tenuous and expensive, with prices way beyond those found further south. No wonder, then, that the people are suffering an epidemic of malnutrition and its attendant diseases. But after years of maltreatment, the people are starting to reclaim their foodways and learning new ways to feed themselves sustainably. Andi Sharma, a policy analyst with the Northern Healthy Foods Initiative, told me about the problems and some of the incipient solutions.
Notes
The banner image is part of a very early map of the area now occupied by the indigenous people and Manitoba Hydro. The Northern Healthy Foods Initiative is trying to improve food security in a variety of ways. I didn’t spend much time following up on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but I’m struck by the historical similarities between Canada and Australia, and, again, by the power of food as a political weapon.
The heat here in Rome has been something the past couple of weeks. Not up to 2003 of blessed memory, but hot nevertheless. The last thing I needed was for the fridge to start playing up, but it did, making horrible noises. Ignoring the disaster foretold, I defrosted the darn thing, which not only solved the problem (temporarily) but also provided inspiration for this episode of Eat This Podcast. At the back of the fridge I found things I had completely forgotten. That prompted me to dig around in the back of the store cupboard too, where there were lots of other things of which I was vaguely aware, but not aware enough actually to have used them. All of which prompted a musing on store-cupboard essentials, gifts from well-meaning friends, and the whole neophilia-neophobia tension. I hope I didn’t ramble on for too long.
Some the things that did not make it into my rambles:
The whole business of gleaning that gave rise to grano arso I find fascinating. Gleaners were surely the first dumpster divers. The practice is enshrined in the Old Testament and I like the idea that richer landowners sometimes deliberately left fruit behind in their vineyards and orchards and grain in their fields that the poor might gain. I am not competent to say anything more about Ruth than that I find her’s a very moving story. The other story behind grano arso is that it was not the stubble-cleansing fires that burnt the gleaned wheat grains but rather the heat from steam-powered threshing machines. Probably both. I don’t know whether any Pugliese who remembers the old stuff would agree that smoked or oven-burnt flour is in any way a substitute, but I like it. Here’s a recent entry point to my adventures with grano arso. I do feel rather ashamed about the garum thing. After my podcast Lauren Stacy Berdy was so kind to send me a bottle of her American garum and I still haven’t tried it. But I will, and soon, I promise. And perhaps I’ll report back here.
The Pamir Mountains of Central Asia hold a fascinating diversity of food crops. Exploring the area in the early years of the 20th century the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov became convinced that this was where “the original evolution of many cultivated plants took place.” Soft club wheat, with its short ears, rye, barley, oil plants, grain legumes like chick peas and lentils, melons and many fruits and vegetables; all showed the kind of diversity that Vavilov said pointed to the places where they were first domesticated. As he wrote, “it is still possible to observe the almost imperceptible transition from wild to cultivated forms within the area.”
Frederik van Oudenhoven first travelled to the Pamirs in 2007 to document what remained of that rich agricultural biodiversity. What he found was bewildering, until he began to talk to Pamiri people, and especially the older women, about their food and culture. The result is With Our Own Hands: a celebration of food and life in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, a new book by van Oudenhoven and his co-author Jamila Haider, that documents a culture that remains in danger of disappearing.
Notes
With Our Own Hands is published by LM Publishers, who say it will be available from tomorrow, 7 July. If you think you might want a copy, order without delay; until tomorrow the price is reduced to €34.50 from €54.50. You can get a taste here. There are also a couple of scholarly articles online. Imagining alternative futures through the lens of food in the Afghan and Tajik Pamir mountains and Food as a method in development practice. Photos by Frederik van Oudenhoven. The banner shows an Afghan settlement in Darvaz, along the Panj River, in autumn, with yellow mulberrry trees and red apricots. the other picture is Frederik and his co-author Jamila Haider.
People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you're looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal that you've thoroughly enjoyed, read what some of the people on some crowd-sourced websites have said about the place where you are eating. But I digress. Rather than wade through countless ninny-posts looking for a realistic recommendation, many visitors, and some residents, turn to one of the food writers based here. Among those, one person reigns supreme: Elizabeth Minchilli. Through social media, apps, books and tours, she tirelessly points people in the right direction. Her new book came out this spring. That’s a good enough reason for me to sit down for a drink with Elizabeth in her local neighbourhood.
Notes
The book is Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City. Her blog is here. Elsewhere, she’s @eminchilli. We met at Urbana 47 which is indeed a fun place to hang out. I captured the banner image, and the rigatoni a la gricia that grace the podcast cover on iTunes, at Perilli, immediately after Elizabeth and I met, and which, I swear, had been selected long before our conversation. The food is a lot more consistent than the typography.
Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as there has been for the Mediterranean fruit fly, the European corn borer, the giant African snail and many other pests. Most of the time, however, we remain blissfully unaware. And most of the time, pests either don’t get in or are detected fairly quickly and eradicated.
I was lucky enough to hitch a ride on a field trip in Puerto Rico, organised by the local survey teams to show plant health experts how they go about the business of keeping pests from establishing.
An aside: I can remember, back in the 1980s, sitting on a plane at Sydney airport ducking my head as the cabin staff wafted through spraying us with insecticide. These days, I learned, aircraft are mostly treated with persistent pesticides, eliminating the spray but not the need to keep insects out.
Notes
The opening and closing music is Che Che Cole, by Willie Colón with Héctor Lavoe. I had no idea when I chose it that like some species of giant African snail, it’s original home is apparently Ghana. Some incursions are better than others. The music in the middle is La Boriqueña, the national anthem of Puerto Rico, but the site where I found this version has apparently vanished in the interim. The banner photograph shows two male Mediterranean fruit flies facing off, and is by Derric Nimmo. The cover photograph of a giant African snail – no Photoshop – is by R. Anson Eaglin of USDA APHIS. And those pathetic dead snail shells? They’re the ones I found, all excited like, but they weren’t the pests I was looking for.
This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it.
Hunters routinely clean up the animals they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts but also, usually, the heart and lungs and any meat damaged by the bullet. The hunter takes home the meat and scavenger animals get to snack on the gut pile. It's been that way for a long time.
Unfortunately, recent research has shown that much of the gut pile, and some of the meat the hunters take home, is contaminated with microscopic pieces of lead. That could be damaging the people who eat the meat, and it has been accused of hampering the recovery of the Californian condor. I heard the story from Matt Podolsky, a wildlife biologist and film maker who worked with the condor recovery programme. That's him (in the hat) with one of the condors; even the size of that tag doesn't give a very good impression of the size of the bird.
Notes
Matt Podolsky’s film Scavenger Hunt tells the story of the efforts to persuade hunters in Arizona to adopt non-lead ammunition. Not everyone agrees that lead in deer carcasses is the main source of lead in condor blood. Start here. Banner photograph of the Vermillion Cliffs, site of the Arizona condor releases, by Jerry and Pat Donaho. Chef and hunter talk on Nordic Food Lab Radio. Beware, it auto-plays. It is a good thing I don’t have a loaded weapon any time I visit SoundCloud. And if you want to know more about my close encounters with Californian condors, you’ll have to find a copy of my book Zoo 2000 or persuade me to scan and share the relevant pages. I no longer have any copies of the TV shows on which it was based, although there is one on YouTube.
By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I'd prefer not to eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, that would make me ill. As a result, I am fascinated by people who have to forego certain foods to stay well. I used to follow someone on the web who swore that something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™-- which, I learn, apparently requires initial caps and a TM symbol -- was the only thing that kept her alive. I never really investigated further, because that was before I had a podcast to feed and she more or less stopped writing about it. So when the chance arose to talk to someone who is living with the disease and the diet, I leaped at it.
Victoria Young is a journalist who has been following the SCD™ for about seven years. She says that it has actually renewed her relationship with food, partly by making her think hard about what she eats. Far from being a dull diet that is all about avoiding things, it forces her to be inventive with the things she can eat. And she says she's never felt better. The medical establishment may not be too keen on the SCD™ but the proof of the pudding -- assuming you can in fact make a pudding that complies -- does seem to be in the eating.
Notes
Victoria Young's website links to her blog How to eat (when you can't eat anything at all). She tweets @tory21. The mother lode on the SCD™ is Elaine Gottschall's book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet. Once again, I'm plaintively asking you to rate and review the show on iTunes. I know that's pathetic, but it honestly does help. The banner photo of a stained section of inflamed bowel is from Wikimedia, and doesn't it take me back ...
What kind of business wants customers to buy less? The beef business, or at least, one tiny corner of the beef business.
Mark Shelley is an environmental film-maker turned cattleman who raises grass-fed beef near Carmel, California. The methods he and many others have adopted make beef far less environmentally damaging than industrial methods. Quite apart from anything else beef is, as Mark puts it, "the big elephant in the room" when it comes to climate change. Anything to address that ought to be welcomed, and grass-fed beef is far less damaging. It does, however, cost more, not least because we're all paying the external costs of industrial meat. That's fine, Mark says. We should all be eating better beef, just doing so less often. How to make that happen? Mark has no idea, he's just doing his bit, one piece of meat at a time.
Mark's recent visit to Italy offered the chance to find out more. I completely forgot to ask him about the drought.
Notes
Tassajara Natural Meats has a website. I reckon they're too busy taking care of the cattle to take much care of the website. Photo by Carrie Cizauskas, used with permission. You may remember that ages ago Eat This Podcast talked about the benefits of frozen beef.
This episode is a repeat of one first published in October 2014, and the reason is that it has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. I'm utterly thrilled by the news, and gratified that more people have downloaded episodes and subscribed to the show. Strangely (at least to me) the original did not see huge renewed interest, which is why I thought it worthwhile repeating. If you've heard it, and don't feel like listening again, you could go and listen to one of the other two nominees, in the notes below.
Being nominated is an immense honour. I won't know whether I have actually won until the award ceremony on 24 April.
The original show notes:Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built.
The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here.
Notes
More about Helena Attlee at her website The other award nominees are Gravy and The Feed. Intro music by Podington Bear.
Street food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the rich world too. Burrito trucks, Korean barbecue in a taco, ceviche, you name it; all are available on the streets of London and Los Angeles, Sydney and San Francisco. They have strange exotic takes on porchetta on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, and pizza ovens parked in English railway station forecourts. In many neighbourhods you can barely move for falafels.
One of the iconic street foods of Egypt – koshari – is now available in London, in a slightly upmarket hole in the wall place. I've always maintained that this podcast is not about happening restaurants or the latest groovy cocktails, but the chef who made Koshari Street happen happens to be a friend, so on a recent visit, I went to try for myself. And, of course, we talked about far more than the restaurant.
Notes
Koshari Street is at 56 St Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4EA. And online Anissa Helou is also online and her book Mediterranean Street Food is still available. We were interrupted by Lauren Bohn, and she too has an online presence, although there’s not much evidence there of her interest in food.
Drinking Italian wine anywhere -- even in Italy -- can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn't cover in an extensive conversation with Marco Lori, a sommelier who kindly agreed to be grilled. I'm somewhat in awe of people who seem really to know their wines, and so I took the opportunity to ask Marco to try and lift the veil. That he did, with great good humour. There is so much I don't understand. Like, what exactly do wine people mean when they talk about the smell of green peppers in a wine? Try as I might, I just don't get that. And the resurgence of natural wines. And I had no idea that careful winemakers go through the harvest bunch by bunch, selecting this one for their top-notch wine, that one for a slightly lesser version. So much to learn. So little time.
Notes
Jeremy Parzen touched on the latest labelling madness on his website. Absolutely sweet winemakers, quoting Bob Dylan: “to live outside the law, you must be honest”. Marco Lori's website is Off the Vine. Say I sent you; it might do us both some good. This is that wine I mentioned. I haven't managed to find it for sale locally. Yet. Intro music by Cerys Matthews. I hope she doesn't mind. I mean, I don't mind her website playing music to me unbidden.
Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-shift cold frames, greenhouses and what have you, where, in time-honoured tradition, old men in baggy corduroys and cardigans go to smoke a pipe and gaze out on serried ranks of cabbages, leeks and potatoes. But they are also places where young families are growing their own food, where immigrants are introducing new kinds of fruit and veg, and where people can find a respite from the city.
Just recently, they’ve become the backdrop to yet another reality TV “game show”. In that respect, perhaps, like cooking food, growing food may be more of a passive entertainment than an active pastime. Nevertheless, allotments remain in demand. They have a long history, born out of food riots and strife, and in many cases a threatened future as the land they occupy is much more valuable for building plots than for garden plots. Jane Perrone, gardening editor at The Guardian, spilled the beans.
Notes
Jane Perrone’s book The Allotment Keeper’s Handbook: A Down-to-Earth Guide to Growing Your Own Food is available from Amazon and elsewhere. She also has a blog. James Wong’s Homegrown Revolution is the book Jane Perrone credited with introducing people to new things to grow on their allotments. Banner photo of Stuart Road Allotments modified from one by sarflondondunc. The spade handle, likewise, modified from a picture by Paul Zappaterra-Murphy
A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very interesting meeting it was too. The topic was Food, Hunger and Conflict, a reminder that food and control of the food supply can be both a weapon in human conflicts and a natural source of conflict. Talks ranged widely, from the politics of starvation under the Nazis to hunger in colonial Indonesia to the part food riots in the past played in winning food security. Some of it was – and I’m avoiding obvious wordplay – very hard to listen to. All of it was enlightening.
There wasn’t as much time as I hoped during the packed but brief programme to record everything I wanted to, but I did get to talk to Ian Miller about force feeding and to Christianne Muusers about one Dutch wartime recipe that most people would rather forget.
I hope to have some of the other speakers on the show soon.
Notes
Details of the Symposium here Ian Miller has a website called Digesting the Medical Past. Christianne Muusers’ site is called Coquinaria and there’s some more information on tulip bulbs as food from Green Deane. The tulip in the photo is China Pink, and I took it. The banner photo shows Thomas Ashe's funeral.
One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fundamental facts of life. Too often, we hear all sorts of extravagant claims being made that a bit of more analytical thought would show were somewhat less than likely to work out. No names, no pack drill; let's just say that natural selection has had an awful long time to try things out, and if something hasn't arisen (yet) there may well be a good reason why it isn't that great an idea. There are some people, however, bucking that trend, and Ford Denison is one of them. His book, Darwinian Agriculture: How Understanding Evolution Can Improve Agriculture came out in 2012, and I devoured it.
Some recent publications reminded me that I have long meant to talk to Ford Denison about his ideas. He was kind enough to agree, and while that is no substitute for reading his work, it might just provoke people who haven't already done so to try. I hope so. No bones about it, the resulting episode is a personal pleasure for me. There is a danger, though, that in talking to someone about something I think I understand, at least partially, I forget to keep other listeners in mind. So I'd be interested to know what you thought of the show. And, more generally, would you be interested in more basic science of this kind, related, always, to food and drink?
Notes
Just to be transparent, the link to the book is an Amazon Affiliate link; if you buy it, I get some paltry percentage. But nobody has yet, to my knowledge, ever done that for any of my links. My somewhat gushing review is here. I stand by it all. Banner image by Arnaud Sobczyk and used under a Creative Commons licence.
Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of agriculture and what, if anything, it can learn from nature. Right now, he's worried.
Why is arrabbiata sauce always served on penne pasta? What's wrong with my spaghetti cacio e pepe? Maureen Fant, co-author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way first explained all back in February 2014 in one of the year's most popular episodes.
There's a thin line between protecting the authenticity of a fine traditional food and preventing the kinds of living changes that allowed it to survive long enough to become traditional. Zack Nowak, a food historian, looked at the rules governing the manufacture of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP cheese and the cheese's actual history. The rules say you can't, but could you make an equally good parmesan somewhere else?
Extracted from the original episode broadcast after the 2nd Perugia Food Conference.
Music by podington bear.
Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Don started and eventually sold. An early social marketing campaign and the perils of being driven by price made it worth listening to again. If you enjoyed this trailer, and hadn't heard the whole thing, you can listen to that here.
Music by podington bear.
One of my treats this year was sitting down with Helena Attlee to talk about her book The Land Where Lemons Grow. Part of that interview didn't make it into the final podcast, so here it is now. And if you missed the original podcast, it's here.
Music "Romanza" played by Clarence Simpson. Available at ccMixter.org under CC BY license.
The conservation of the wild turkey was triumph, but it left ornithologists scratching their heads. How many species were there? And where did they live?
For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is wonderful. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia?
As people in North America prepare to give thanks and devour unimaginable quantities of food, we go to the heart of the matter. Why are turkeys called turkeys?
In next week's show, more about the American contribution to poultry culture.
These days, every little town and village in Italy has its sagra or festa, a weekend, or longer, in celebration of a particular local food. Although they have a whiff of tradition about them, most of these are relatively recent inventions, designed to attract tourists as much as honour the food and cement community relationships. I was surprised to learn, then, that in 1930 Mussolini’s Minister of Agriculture, Arturo Marescalchi, proposed a national celebration of the grape – the festa dell’uva – throughout the peninsula. There were many reasons. A glut of table grapes was certainly one, as the government sought to persuade the public to eat Italian. There were also political motives, celebrating Italy as a young nation and strengthening support for the fascists. The result, for a few glorious years, was an annual spectacle of amazing proportions. In Rome, markets were set up for each region to sell its table grapes, there were processions of outlandish grape-themed floats, and a good time seems to have been had by all.
Ruth Lo, a PhD student at Brown University and scholar at the American Academy in Rome has been studying the period and generously agreed to talk to me about her work.
Notes
Ruth Lo recently presented a paper – Celebrating the festa dell’uva: Grapes and Urban Spectacle in Fascist Rome – at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Society in Atlanta, Georgia. L’istituto Luce, L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, was another arm for fascist propaganda. Some of the films Luce made are on YouTube. Two of my favourites, well worth the visit as historical documents, are the celebrations at the Basilica di Massenzio, these days the home of a literary festival, and one from Marino in the Castelli Romani, apparently Marescalchi’s inspiration and still going strong today.
In the 1930s the Italian fascists decided that floats laden with giant grapes would be the vehicle to drive forward Italian nationalism. Hear how in next week's Eat This Podcast.
Kazakhstan stretches across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea in the east to China in the west. The country is famous for many things – it is the largest landlocked country in the world, says Wikipedia – but among food and plant people it is most important as the home of the apple. The name of the former capital, Almaty, is often translated as Father of Apples, and it was to Almaty that Ben Reade, today’s guest, recently went with a botanist friend in search of good wild apples. He found them, and much else besides.
It is worth pointing out that the now common wisdom – that the domestic apple Malus domesticus was selected from a wild relative Malus sieversii, rather than being a hybrid – has only recently been accepted. Barrie Juniper, of Oxford University, brought all manner of evidence to bear on the question, including some of the first DNA studies of crops. His book, The Story of the Apple is a great read, and some of his knowledge has clearly found its way to his daughter Sarah, The Apple Factor.
I also spent a little time looking into Ben’s throwaway remark about “lightly fermented carrot salad”. The New York Times, no less, avers that “Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, … is a legacy of Stalin’s mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers.” I found a couple of recipes here and here, and although I haven’t tried either, I plan to do so soon. Neither seems to be “authentic,” not least because I’m not sure they would ferment at all. I’d be interested to know more.
Notes
I Went to the Fatherland of All Modern Apples is Ben Reade’s own account of his trip. The first ever Eat this Podcast consisted of Ben talking about bog butter. The guy gets around. Photos on this page from Ben, and there are lots more in his article.
Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time, bears, and how they may have helped to domesticate those apples.
The whole show will be published next week.
It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and the resources it needs -- financial, genetic, human -- are just not something most people know about. No wonder, then, that many people don't quite grasp the urgency with which we need to get cracking now to breed crops adapted to predicted climate conditions.
Susan Dworkin's new book The Commons sidesteps that by hurling us 150 years into the future, to a world in which the failure to respond almost doomed our species to extinction. I thought it might be fun to talk to Susan and she agreed, but first I had to read the book. It turned out to be a rollicking good read, full of interesting characters and strange plot twists. All our old familiar friends are there. Large parts of the world have become very inhospitable, thanks to climate change. There's an all-knowing Corporation that owns just about everything, including 85% of all humans in its domain. And the humans are shareholders in the whole enterprise. It all seems rather wonderful, except that there's a problem: a new stem rust of wheat threatens a reprise of the famines and hardship of 100 years before. To say much more would be to give too much away. Let's just say that the search for a solution is what drives the story forward.
Of course, I'm not the intended audience, so I have absolutely no idea how The Commons will be received by anyone else. I'm not even sure what the author would like us to be doing now to avoid the future she depicts. That was just one of the topics we talked about in a discussion that could have gone on a lot longer.
Notes
The Commons is available from Amazon as an e-book and a paperback. If you are in the Washington DC area on 24 October, Susan Dworkin will be lecturing on "The Weather in the Supermarket: Climate Change, Seed Banks and Tomorrow's Food" at the US Botanic Garden. I "borrowed" the music -- Mavis Staples singing Hard Times Come Again No More -- from Beautiful Dreamer, a wonderful tribute album to Stephen Foster. Buy it if you don't already have it (and if you like that kind of thing). The banner photograph is my own.
Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built.
The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here.
Notes
More about Helena Attlee at her website
What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. And share the process. Stir-fries, curries, Ethiopian wats, loaves of bread: John Grosvenor, a software developer, posts delectable images of much of his cooking on the social net ADN. That’s where I got to know him, and as we exchanged messages it became pretty clear that we were on more or less the same culinary wavelength. Never one to miss an opportunity to have my biasses confirmed, I thought it would be fun to talk to John in a bit more depth about his approach to cooking.
John mentioned the pademelon, a small wallaby, which sent me scurrying first to Wikipedia and then out into the wilder reaches of the internet. I’m not sure whether John’s pademelons are the endemic Tasmanian species (Thylogale billardierii) or one of the other species of these little wallabies. Recipes weren’t that easy to find either: Pademelon wallaby and cashew stir-fry has a bit too many cans in it for my taste, but in general wallaby seems like it might be an excellent choice of meat, despite some confused stuff about wallabies and greenhouse gas emissions at one of the suppliers. A nicely prepared female pademelon does sound just the kind of thing to make a note of if I ever get to travel to Australia.
Notes
In between cooking, John Grosvenor makes excellent games for iOS. This week’s music is by Chad Crouch.
Garum is one of those ancient foods that everyone seems to have heard of. It is usually described as “fermented fish guts,” or something equally unappealing, and people often call it the Roman ketchup, because they used it so liberally on so many things. Fermented fish guts is indeed accurate, though calculated to distance ourselves from it. And garum is just one form of fermented fish; there’s also liquamen, muria. allec and haimation. All this I learned from Laura Kelley, author of The Silk Road Gourmet. Unlike most of the people who opine on garum, and who offer recipes for quick garum, she painstakingly created the real deal. She is also convinced that it isn’t really Roman in origin. We only think of it that way because history is written by the victors not the vanquished.
And then there's the whole question of the Asian fish sauces, Vietnamese nước mắm and the rest of them. Independent discovery, or copied from the Romans?
Notes
Laura gives a full blow-by-blow on her website. Copying her is probably the only way to produce something that approximates genuine garum. She also mentioned colatura, a fish sauce still made in Italy. I haven’t tried it, although it is available, at least in the US, by mail order. Photo of the garum vats in Baelo Claudia by Janet Mendel.
Randall’s Island is a small piece of land just east of 125th Street in New York’s East River. It is also around 2 degrees further south than the northern limit of rice growing on Hokkaido in Japan. What could be more natural, then, than for a community farm on Randall’s Island to have a go at growing rice, a staple that the kids who come to the farm enjoy, but one that they’ve never seen growing? The assistant horticulture manager scored some rice seeds and with advice from her grandmother in Korea set to. They built a miniature paddy, like a flooded raised bed, and managed to harvest about six kilograms of rice. And that’s when their trouble began. Rice is darn difficult to hull and clean.
A piece by Rachel Laudan tipped me off to the Randall’s Island rice, and I was excited to discover that the person who origially wrote the story for The New Yorker was Nicola Twilley, a writer whose Edible Geography (and other projects) I have long admired. Luckily for me, she was happy to talk.
What intrigued me about the story of hulling rice in the northeastern US, was how it resonated with the plight of subsistence farmers in India, Bolivia and elsewhere. The women in many communities spend hours a day of hard and often dangerous work to prepare the seeds they have grown and harvested. I can’t blame them if they would just as soon sell their back-breaking crop and buy prepared convenience foods, and hang the nutritional consequences. I’ve seen for myself how electrical mini-mills remove this drudgery for women in the Kolli Hills of India, and in so doing boost the consumption of nutritious millets. The same sort of approach, an inexpensive, locally-built machine, has made processing quinoa much easier for farmers on the Altiplano of Bolivia. There’s something fitting about New York rice being treated in a similar way.
Notes
Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley’s website, is endlessly interesting and entertaining. If you’re into podcasts, don’t miss the great show Roman Mars and 99pi did based on her research into cow tunnels. Rachel Laudan has made something of a specialty of pointing out that growing cereals is the easy part; preparing them for food is what takes hard work and ingenuity. Ecological Rice Farming in the Northeastern USA is not nearly as silly as it may first seem. And for all the details of Don Brill’s rice hullers, you need to head over to Brill Engineering, which sounds a lot grander than an inveterate tinkerer with a basement full of bits and pieces. Daniel Felder, head of research at Momofuku, takes research into fermentation and terroir very seriously. Nicola has written about that too. Photo of Don Brill and a volunteer rice peddler by Nicola Twilley, as are all the others. Thanks.
I’m fascinated by Japanese food, but from a position of profound ignorance. I’ve never been there and I’ve never having eaten anything I could definitely say was “genuine,” aside from a wasabi chocolate cake baked by a Japanese friend. So the opportunity to talk to a Westerner living in Japan was one I leaped at. Jason Irwin is a Canadian who has been helping people in Japan learn English for the past seven years. He’s not in a big city, and he is part of a Japanese family, so he probably has a better understanding than many. He’s also leaving Japan soon. Time, obviously, to talk.
As I mention in the podcast outro, I still find it rather remarkable that I can be online friends with a Canadian living in Japan and record us having a conversation. The recording bit is nothing special these days, I suppose, but the online friendship is the result of this thing called app dot net, aka ADN. It’s a special kind of social platform, one where the people who use it are the customers, as opposed to the others, where users are just a bulk commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. ADN celebrated its second birthday two days ago, and I've been there two years today. I've I get a lot out of ADN, not least my conversations with Jason, although I have never done anything to evangelize about it. Consider this a plug.
Notes
Cover photo is Ise-ebi: Crawfish or Spiny Lobster and Ebi: shrimp by Utagawa Hiroshige. Jason’s website is well worth a read. On food, I thought I would single out two posts about some of the Canadian foods he missed in Japan: Food I miss the most and I am not a chef ... but you'll have to ask him yourself for the details of how to prepare ham cooked in Canada Dry Ginger ale. Aside from everything else that people say it could be, I find ADN to be just a very fine micro-blogging platform. You might too. Banner photograph modified from an original by Linh Nguyen.
The history of pasta, ancient and modern, is littered with myths about the origins of manufacturing techniques, of cooking, of recipes, of names, of antecedents. Supporting most of these is a sort of truthiness whereby what matters most is not evidence or facts but – appropriately for us – gut feeling. Combine that with the echo chamber of the internet, and an idea can become true by virtue of repetition. So it is, by and large, for the idea that Arabs were responsible for inventing dried pasta and for introducing it to Sicily, from where it spread to the rest of the peninsula and beyond. You can find versions of this story almost everywhere you look for the history of dried pasta.
Anthony Buccini’s gut feeling, however, was that this story was not true. His expertise in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics tells him that the linguistic evidence for an Arab origin gets the whole story backwards; rather, one of the principal elements in the spread of dried pasta through Italy and beyond was the commercial expansion of Genoa. The stuff itself was being made in southern Italy, the Genoese took the word and the stuff to the north and to Catalonia, and it was the Catalonians who took them to the Maghreb and the Arabs.
So what did the Arabs do? They wrote it down in their cookbooks. And a bit more besides.
Notes
The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. World Pasta Day falls on 25th October. Enough time to prepare something special? Banner photograph taken by Su-Lin in Vancouver. Used with permission.
What do artisanal cheese and maple syrup have in common? In North America, and elsewhere too, they’re likely to bring to mind the state of Vermont, which produces more of both than anywhere else. They’re also the research focus of Amy Trubek at the University of Vermont, a trained chef and cultural anthropologist. Trubek gave one of the keynote speeches at the recent Perugia Food Conference, saying that terroir – which she translates as the taste of place – combines two elements. There is the taste itself, which when people talk about it with one another becomes a social experience that, she said, lends meaning to eating and drinking. And it is “a story we tell to assure that our food and drink emerges from natural environments and conditions.” Vermont cheese, at least the lovingly crafted artisanal kind, as much as maple syrup, reflects those concerns with natural environments and conditions.
In our interview, we didn’t dwell too much on the scientific research underpinning Amy Trubek’s ideas. I found the idea that simply knowing the personal story of a cheese – who makes it, where, why – can influence how you respond to it fascinating. Taste, surely, is physiological. How would the story affect that? But it does. In one study of four different cheeses, people heard either a generic story about that cheese category, taken “from dairy science manuals,” or “socially and contextually relevant production information”. No matter how much they actually liked the cheese, or their “foodiness” on an established scale, people who had been told personal stories about the cheesemakers liked the cheese more than those told about the cheese alone. (See Note 3 below.) What’s more, according to Rachel DiStefano, who did a Master’s thesis with Amy Trubek, cheesemongers are vital allies in telling the stories and thus helping consumers to value artisanal cheeses.
By contrast, terroir for maple syrup does seem to be less about personal stories and more about the soils the trees are in and the details of turning sap into syrup. Trubek has worked with a large, multidisciplinary team to create new standards and vocabulary that take discussions well beyond “sweet”. And yes, there is some evidence that soil does affect taste:
[S]yrup produced from trees on limestone bedrock had the highest quantities of copper, magnesium, calcium and silica, which scientists hypothesized had a role in the taste. Shale syrups came in second in all of these substances, followed by schist.
A final thought: Amy Trubek’s throwaway remark about fake maple flavour sent me down an internet rabbit hole that in the end proved surprisingly productive.
Notes
The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. Sign photograph by Katherine Martinelli. Consumer sensory perception of cheese depends on context: A study using comment analysis and linear mixed models. Rachel DiStefano has written about her field work, behind the counter of a specialist cheese shop in Cambridge, Ma. If you’re entertaining thoughts of maple syrup expertise, you’ll need to study the new sensory maps and be able to talk knowledgeably about the history of sugaring. Other images by Rachel DiStefano.
Great wheels of parmesan cheese, stamped all about with codes and official-looking markings, loudly shout that they are the real thing: Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. They’re backed by a long list of rules and regulations that the producers must obey in order to qualify for the seal of approval, rules that were drawn up by the producers themselves to protect their product from cheaper interlopers. For parmesan, the rules specify how the milk is turned into cheese and how the cheese is matured. They specify geographic boundaries that enclose not only where the cows must live but also where most of their feed must originate. But they say nothing about the breed of cow, which you might think could affect the final product, one of many anomalies that Zachary Nowak, a food historian, raised during his presentation at the recent Perugia Food Conference on Terroir, which he helped to organise.
In the end the whole question of certification is about marketing, prompted originally by increasingly lengthy supply chains that distanced consumers from producers. One problem, as Zach pointed out, is that in coming up with the rules to protect their product, the producers necessarily take a snapshot of the product as it is then, ignoring both its history and future evolution. They seek to give the impression that this is how it has always been done, since time immemorial, while at the same time conveniently forgetting aspects of the past, like the black wax or soot that once enclosed parmesan cheese, or the saffron that coloured it, or the diverse diet that sustained the local breed of cattle. One aspect of those forgettings that brought me up short was the mezzadria, a system of sharecropping that survived well into the 1960s. Zach has written about it on his website; some of the memories of a celebrated Perugian greengrocer offer a good starting point.
Will some enterprising cheesemaker take up the challenge of producing a cheese as good as Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP somewhere else? No idea, but if anyone does, it’ll probably be a cheesemaker in Vermont, subject of the next show.
Notes
The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. Wikipedia has masses of information about Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union and, of course, Parmigiano-Reggiano which may, or may not, be parmesan. Official site of the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano. Thanks to Zachary Nowak for his map of the soils of the Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. 2019-05-05 Updated with link to Internet Archive.
The growing popularity of “Mongolian” restaurants owes less to Mongolian food and more to, er, how shall we say, marketing. To whit:
"It’s actually not a cuisine, but an INTERACTIVE style of exhibition cooking modeled after a centuries-old legend. According to this legend, 12th century Mongol warriors, led by the mighty warrior, GENGHIS KHAN heated their shields over open fires to grill food in the fields of battle!"
The question of what the Mongols under Genghis Khan actually ate, however, is really rather interesting. In particular, did conquering that vast empire change their diet in any way? Jack Fenner and his Mongolian colleagues Dashtseveg Tumen and Dorjpurev Khatanbaatar analysed bones from three different cemeteries, representing Mongol elites, Mongol commoners and Bronze-age people from the same area, looking for differences in what they ate. They found some, but interpretation remains difficult.
I didn’t think to ask Jack about using a shield as a wok.
Notes
Read Food fit for a Khan: stable isotope analysis of the elite Mongol Empire cemetery at Tavan Tolgoi, Mongolia if you have access to the Journal of Archaeological Science. There is also an accessible write-up at the Bones don’t lie website. I don’t plan to visit the Genghis Grill, although I’m happy enough to plunder their advertising copy. And to point out that the mighty warrior didn't become Genghis Khan until the 13th century. Images from Michael Chu, Dave Gray and Wikimedia. Music by Chad Crouch, aka Podington Bear. This show is a week late; apologies. There's a sort of explanation at my other website, which also provides hints of shows to come. Plus, an explanation of what Flattr is all about, and why I think you should flattr me and other content creators.
A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to work the sugar plantations of Surinam? Or is it Jewish, brought to Suriname by Dutch Jews?
So began Karin Vaneker’s immersion in the world of edible aroids. Aroids are a large and cosmopolitan plant family, more commonly known as the arum family, and they include some of the most familiar houseplants. Many of them have starchy roots or tubers, and although these often contain harmful substances, people have learned how to process them as famine foods. A few species, however, are widely cultivated. The best-known of these is probably taro, Colocasia esculenta, which originated in southeast Asia and spread through the Pacific and beyond. That, however, proved not to be the elusive pomtajer that Karin and the Surinamese inhabitants of Amsterdam were looking for, which turned out to be a species of Xanthosoma.
My conversation with Karin ranged far and wide, and to tell the truth I never did ask whether pom was Jewish or Creole. Most sources say it is indeed Jewish.
Notes
The whole question of Jews in Suriname sent me scurrying to the search engines, to discover that starting in the 17th century there was indeed an attempt to establish an autonomous Jewish territory there, on the Jewish savanna. This I gotta read more about. And having found that, I rushed to Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, only to be massively disappointed that neither pom nor Suriname feature in the index. The big photo is of purple-stemmed Colocasia, which I took at Longwood Gardens. As promised, a recipe for pom. You’ll have to find your own pomtajer. Karin has written on Cooking Pom and other edible aroids.
It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. Well, not entirely, and not like some Romans. I spoke to Francesca Flore, who offers both tours and cooking classes, and she reserved some choice words for those quintessential Roman dishes based on the famous quinto quarto, the fifth quarter of the carcass. Or, less obtusely, offal.
Francesca told me that she's always been interested in food, and that while working in London she decided to take herself off to Australia to study Cooking and Patisserie at the Cordon Bleu School in Sydney. Back in Rome, she put all that knowledge to use catering private parties and branching out into food tours and cooking classes.
We talked about what people want, what they get, and how she views the past and future of Italian food.
Notes
Francesca Flore’s flash website gives a taste of the food tours and cooking classes she offers. The Mercato Central in Florence has a website that is way too groovy for its own good. And, wonderfully Italian, an undated entry at a site called Florence Online, tells us both that the upstairs is closed and that “the vendors appear to want to stay where they are” in a tent below. Cover photograph, of Francesca supervising the sprinkling of icing sugar on cannoli, by Chris Warde-Jones for the New York Times.
This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself. So I hooked myself up to the audio recorder and went about some of my customary weekend cooking, muttering out loud about what I was doing and offering some reflections on my attitude to food and cooking. I hope the result sheds some light on where I’m coming from. Normal service will be resumed next episode.
I started this exercise determined not to apologise either for having indulged myself so or for the audio quality. And I almost made it. But not quite. So, please accept my apologies, mostly for the quality of the audio at time. This stuff is not easy single handed.
Also, no instructions from me on how to make your own yoghurt. If you want to learn the secrets of yoghurt as made by Turkish grannies, try The Food Programme.
Notes
The first recipe for my version of a light rye bread is here, though it doesn’t look very pretty. Pictures here. I need to transfer that recipe to the baking site, or better yet update it, because the current version is much better. A couple of earlier podcasts dealt with integrity vs “authenticity” and good industrialisation.
“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of his: “a graph that essentially tells you the whole story in one simple, self-explanatory picture.” Yes indeed, social unrest is caused by higher food prices. ((Yes, caused; this is no mere correlation.)) I could leave it at that, along with a link to the paper from which I lifted the picture. But this is a podcast. I have to talk to people, and that includes Marc Bellemare.
Bellemare’s paper is a global investigation that doesn’t even attempt to ask whether the relationship between food prices and social unrest holds for countries or smaller areas. My sense, though, is that the relationship is strongest in more authoritarian regimes. At least, that’s where we’ve seen most food riots of late. In this, however, it seems I am mistaken. Marc pointed me to Cullen Hendrix, who has studied the links between social unrest and political regimes. Placating the urban masses who eat food at the expense of rural people who produce it has always been a fraught proposition, perhaps even more so for democracies.
All of which raises the question that, I hope, keeps food policy wallahs and agricultural development experts awake at night. What’s so wrong with high prices anyway?
Notes
Marc Bellemare’s blog post on his paper Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. He also examined some of the reactions to the paper. “Even when presenting to the smartest people in the world, a picture is really worth a thousand words.” Find this and Marc’s other tips for conference and seminar presentations here. Cullen Hendrix’s website contains a copy of his paper International Food Prices, Regime Type, and Protest in the Developing World The sound montage at the beginning draws on various reports on Haiti, Egypt and Tunisia, all glued together by a splendid recording of a protest march. The banner photograph is adapted from an original by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.
We’ll have what they’re having has taken on a whole new meaning
In a world in which you can get pizza in Tokyo and sushi in Rome, diets have become truly global in reach. You could argue that this has made them more, not less, diverse. Where once rice dominated Asia, wheat, potatoes and corn have made huge inroads: increased diversity. On the other hand, places that used to enjoy their own, local staples – tef in Ethiopia, buckwheat in eastern Europe – have also come under the sway of the global behemoths, and so have lost diversity. Those are two conclusions of a massive data-mining exercise that has rightfully been getting a lot of coverage: Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security. I spoke to Colin Khoury, the study’s first author, about the increasing dominance of the big crops, the marginalisation of regionally important alternatives, and the sudden rise of a whole set of previously insignificant species.
As we discussed, this new piece of research arose from a desire to provide updated and more accurate answers to the perennial question How many crops feed the world?, originally posed by Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen in 1990. It’s kind of gratifying to note that Colin Khoury first returned to that question in a guest post on one of my other platforms. And we’re still gnawing away at it over there, one way and another.
So, how many crops feed the world anyway?
[I]f you must know, it’s about 94 plant species that largely feed the world. To be more precise, according to the analysis of Colin and his colleagues, we can now say that 50 crops, or 94 species, contribute to 90% of food supplies at national level.
Sure, you've seen Trading Places. But do you know about the history of futures contracts, or why some things are traded on commodities markets and others aren't? I didn't, not really. So I spoke to Kara Newman, food writer and author of The Secret Financial Life of Food. One of the things Kara is keen to stress is that where money is involved, there's always a temptation to cut corners, and her book is full of delicious food-based scandals. One of her favourites is The Great Salad Oil Swindle. If you've never heard of it, there's an interesting reason why.
The story of The Great Salad Oil Swindle has been told in a book by Norman C. Miller, based on his Pulitzer-winning articles. Some of Miller's original articles are online, and there's a nice account originally published in Accountancy. Bottom line seems to be that while everyone was making money, no-one was inclined to investigate too closely. And an interesting coda to the story, from those articles. The bankruptcy of De Angelis brought American Express almost to its knees. While it's share price was depressed, Howard Buffett bought a sizeable stake, believing the company fundamentally sound. It was a pretty shrewd investment.
Notes
Kara Newman's book is the Secret Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. She also has a website. Trading Places turned 30 last year. NPR's Planet Money did a bang up job of asking how accurate it was, with added Roman Mars.
Photo of bacon and eggs by Phil Lees
Engage
About a month ago I got wind of a conference called Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe, 1800-present, at the University of Texas at Austin. In some dream world, I would have booked a flight there and then, packed my audio gear, and plunged in. Next best thing, thanks to the kind offices of Rachel Laudan, was to talk to Mary C. Neuburger, the conference organiser.
It isn’t clear whether the symposium will give rise to a publication. I hope so. And if, by chance, any of the authors have made versions of their talks available, I would be delighted to link to them here. Just let me know. Other sources include The Austin Chronicle, which took the opportunity to visit and review a local Russian restaurant. And Mary Neuburger also mentioned Anya von Bremzen’s memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. That, I hope, is another story for another time, preferably not in a dream world.
Looking through the conference programme, I had singled out a few papers that I thought might be of interest, and Mary was kind enough to deal with almost all of them, and more besides. Specifics:
Bella Bychkova-Jordan, University of Texas “Traveling Foods: Diffusion of Native Food Complexes from the New World to Different Parts of Eurasia.” Michael Pesenson, University of Texas “Feasting and Fasting in Muscovite Rus.” Irina Glouchshenko, Moscow School of Higher Economics “Industrialization of Taste: Anastas Mikoyan and the Making of Soviet Cuisine in the 1930s.” Brian Davies and Kolleen Guy, University of Texas San Antonio “Why Don’t We Drink Russian Malbec: The Crimean Origins of a ‘French’ Varietal?” Nikolai Burlakoff, Independent Scholar "Borsch (Borscht, Bortsch, Borschch): From Hogweed Soup to Outer Space, the Improbable Odyssey of the World’s Best Known Soup Dish.” Mary Neuburger, University of Texas “Cooking for Bai Tosho: A Bulgarian Celebrity Chef Serves up the Past.”
Engage
There’s supposed to be this whole mystique surrounding “proper” pasta: how to cook it, which shape with what sauce, how to eat it, all that. And if you’re not born to it, you’ll never really understand it. Well, maybe not, but with a little effort you can get a whole lot closer to authenticity. Maureen Fant, a writer and scholar who has lived in Rome since 1979, has a new book out with her collaborator Oretta Zanini de Vita, making their Encyclopedia of Pasta a tad more kitchen-friendly. Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is a curious blend of the constrained and the relaxed … just like Italy. One of the things they’re relaxed about is shapes for sauces, which came as a bit of a surprise. One of the things they’re not relaxed about is overcooked pasta, which did not.
There was so much else we could have talked about, and the book is a one of those cookbooks that is as much a good read as a manual of instruction. As for my beloved cacio e pepe, fashionable or not, I am greatly encouraged by the the news that “[t]his is not a dish to make for a crowd … The smaller the quantity, the better the result.” That’s all the encouragement I need.
Notes
Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is available from Amazon and elsewhere. I’m not too sure what to make of the whole mathematical pasta trope. It smacks to me of an answer in search of a question. Maureen Fant recently gave a great little interview on spaghetti carbonara that tries to set the record straight on this canonical dish. Cover photo by Stijn Nieuwendijk.
Special treat
If you listened to the podcast and made it this far, you know I promised you a special treat. Here it is. Little Richard sings On Top of Spaghetti.
’Nuff said?
Engage
A bombie cluster munition on a farm in Khammouane Province, Laos.©2010/Jerry Redfern
Karen Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes about food – among other things. She emailed to ask if I would be interested in talking to her about a book that she and her husband, photographer Jerry Redfern, have produced. It’s called Eternal Harvest, but it isn’t about food, at least not directly. Its subtitle is the legacy of American bombs in Laos. Some of those bombs are 500-pounders. Lots of them are little tennis-ball sized bomblets, which are as attractive to farm kids as a tennis ball might be, with horrific consequences. The story of unexploded ordnance in Laos was an eye opener, for me. But I also wanted to know about food in Laos, and so that’s where we began our conversation.
Over the course of nine years and a bombing mission every eight minutes, round the clock, more than 270 million cluster bombs – or bombies – were dropped on Laos. The cluster bombs were a small part of the 2 million tonnes dropped on Laos, almost half a tonne of ordnance for every man, woman and child in the country. Some was aimed at breaking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The rest was jettisoned by pilots who had been told not to return to base with any bombs left in their planes. The failure rate, as Karen said, was around 30 percent. Unexploded ordnance remains an ever-present threat, and not only during the business of farming. About half the people killed, according a a 2009 report, were going after scrap metal. A scrap metal collector can make $5 a day, compared to the average wage of about $1 a day. And that’s not the only way the bombs are “beneficial”. Many farming families use craters – created by bombs that did explode – as fish ponds, improving both their income and their nutritional status.
Casualties have dropped, from about 1450 a year in 1975 to about 350 a year in 2009, but less than one per cent of the land has been cleared.
A technician with a UXO Lao bomb disposal team scans for bombs in a woman’s yard as she continues weeding. They work along a new road built atop the old Ho Chi Minh Trail.©2006/Jerry Redfern
Notes
Eternal Harvest: the legacy of American bombs in Laos has a website and is available from Amazon. I started reading up about bomb crater fish ponds at Nicola Twilley’s Edible Geography. Fascinating accounts of individual farmers bring an otherwise dry FAO field manual on common aquaculture practices in Lao PDR to life. The maps in this online post by Xiaoxuan Lu about her thesis give some idea of the scale of the problem. Karen writes online at The Rambling Spoon and elsewhere. There’s plenty there about restaurants, Lao cookbooks and that nine-day field trip we talked about. The music is a Lao folk tune called Dokmai (Flower) by a group called “Thiphakon (roughly, resonance of angels)”. I found it online.
Engage
Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions.
“They” say that turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a business is a recipe for disaster, and while I’m flattered that people will pay for an additional loaf of bread I’ve baked, there’s no way I’m going to be getting up at 3 in the morning every day to sell enough loaves to make a living. But there are people who have done just that, and one of them happens to be a friend. Suzanne Dunaway and her husband Don turned her simple, delicious foccacia into Buona Forchetta bakery, a multi-million dollar business that won plaudits for the quality of its bread – and then sold it and walked away.
Suzanne was also one of the first popularisers of the “no-knead” method of making bread, with her 1999 book No need to knead. Using a wetter dough, and letting time take the place of kneading, has been around among professional bakers and some, often forgetful, amateurs for a long time, but it was Mark Bittman’s article in the New York Times that opened the floodgates on this method. Since then, as any search engine will reveal, interest in the technique has exploded, both because no-knead is perceived as easier and because the long, slow rise that no-knead usually calls for results in a deeper, more complex flavour. I've had my troubles with it, and had more or less given up on the real deal. But I’m looking forward to seeing how a quick no-knead bread turns out, especially now that I know that in Suzanne's case it was the result of a delicious accident.
Notes
If you created the graphic riff on Breaking Bad, or you know who did it, please let me know. I would really like to give proper credit.
Engage
The first episode of 2014 is a look back to some of the topics I covered in 2013, and for what I hope is a good reason. With a podcast, unlike a piece of writing or an image, it is very hard to decide quickly whether this is something I want to pursue further. Of course some things are an instant turn-off: really bad audio quality will usually send me packing, as will a pile of unedited ramblings no matter how good the audio quality. Aside from that, though, it takes time to listen to a podcast and decide whether I want to hear more. With that in mind, I put together this tasting menu from 2013, to give new listeners an idea of what Eat This Podcast is about.
So, what is it about? I'm not exactly sure. Looking at the world through a food lens, I sometimes say. As I was putting this selection together, though, some other themes emerged. I'm not really ready to share those in detail, but they might colour my selection of topics in the future. I should add, too, that I welcome any and all suggestions.
If you've been listening since episode 1, you have my permission to ignore this one. Or you could share it with someone who isn't yet a listener. That would be good. And here's to 2014.
Apologies for the delay in publishing this podcast. One of the joys of not being tied to "proper" radio is the freedom to give a story the length it deserves. The downside is that nobody is cracking the whip to whip things into shape on time, so that sometimes, even with the best will in the world, the schedule slips. Maybe if this were my day job ...
Bread, yoghurt, pickles: I do love my domestic microbiology. So does Ken Albala, of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. His enthusiasm outstrips mine, though, not least because he probably has more space for his experiments. One manifestation of that enthusiasm is a Facebook group dedicated to The Cult of Pre-Pasteurian Preservation and Food Preparation. For Ken, sterilising fermented food is a no-no. Who better, then, to explain how it is that “pickled” has come to mean “boiled in vinegar” rather than “naturally fermented”.
Of course, the whole business of home fermentation has reached fever pitch, manifested by the pickle trend being the number one sketch on a trendy comedy series. Let us not, however, throw the baby out with the brinewater. It really is remarkably easy, and if you want to start, there are endless reams of advice on the internet. Just ignore anything that suggests you boil the proceeds. Emboldened by Ken, I do plan to try sausages some time in the New Year.
Notes
If you’re on Facebook, do check out Ken Albala’s Cult. The current main man on fermentation is Sandor Katz; here’s what he has to say on facultative anaerobes (i.e. Lactobacillus species) versus obligate anaerobes such as Clostridium botulinum, and why you really have nothing to fear. Katz also did a great interview with NPR’s Fresh Air.
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One week jam, the next global hunger and malnutrition. That’s the joy of Eat This Podcast; I get to present what interests me, in the hope that it interests you too. It also means I sometimes get to talk to my friends about how they see the big picture around food. Dr Jessica Fanzo, Assistant Professor of Nutrition at Columbia University’s Insitute of Human Nutrition, Special Advisor on Nutrition Policy at the Earth Institute’s Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development, also at Columbia, and much else besides, is one such friend. She was in Rome recently for a preparatory meeting for a big UN conference on nutrition next year, so I took the opportunity to catch up, and to ask some very basic questions about global hunger.
I confess, I have very little time for the global talk shops that meet so that, somehow, magically, the poor can eat. And having attended a few, there does seem to be a dearth of people who have studied malnutrition and hunger first hand, and made a difference. Jess Fanzo has been promoting the idea of nutrition-sensitive agriculture as a way to make a difference locally, while recognizing that there can be no simple, global solutions. You have to see what works in one place, and then adapt it to your own circumstances. There are no simple global solutions. The primary point – that governments have some responsibility for ensuring that their citizens at least have the opportunity to be well-nourished – seems often to be lost in the din of governments talking about other things. And interfering busybodies declaring war on hunger don’t seem to have much luck either. I don’t have any solutions.
Notes
Check out Dr Fanzo’s credentials at the Institute of Human Nutrition and the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development. She was also the first winner of the Premio Daniel Carasso; there’s a video about that too. She’s written about her fieldwork and how it informs her global view. (And, as an aside, how come big-shot bloggers don’t care about spam? Come on, people. Your negligence makes life worse for everybody.) The Integration of Nutrition into Extension and Advisory Services: A Synthesis of Experiences, Lessons, and Recommendations reports on ways to promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture. And the research extends to social media. The paper I mentioned, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is Comparative impact of climatic and nonclimatic factors on global terrestrial carbon and water cycles. Photo of Jess Fanzo in Timor Leste by Nick Appleby.
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Vivien Lloyd about to add warm sugar to her simmered fruit.
What is jam? “A preserve made from whole fruit boiled to a pulp with sugar.” Lots of opportunities to quibble with that, most especially, if you’re planning to sell the stuff in the UK and label it “jam,” the precise amount of sugar. More than 60% and you’re fine calling it jam. Less than 50% and you need to call it reduced-sugar jam. Lower still, and it becomes a fruit spread. All that is about to change though, thanks to a UK Goverment regulation that will allow products with less than 60% sugar to be labelled jam.
There’s nothing like a threat to the traditional British way of life to motivate the masses, although as an expat, I had no idea of the kerfuffle this had raised until I read about it on the website of the Campaign for Real Farming.
Changing the rules for what is labelled jam may seem like a tempest on a teacake, but it is symptomatic of the growing distance between what were once simple methods of food processing – in this case to preserve it – and the industrial version of a similar product. And making jam at home isn’t that hard.
There is, though, the problem of getting it to set properly. I had a little read to remind myself of what Vivien Lloyd called the magic of pectin, and it isn’t simple. Pectin is a long string of a molecule, present in the glue that cements cell walls together. Some fruits have loads of it, others less. The long strings bind together and form a mesh that traps any liquid inside the spaces between the pectin molecules, but they bind together only under specialised conditions. Acid reduces the tendency for pectin molecules to repel one another, while sugar attracts water, and so allows the pectin molecules to come together. And fruits supply acid and and sugar. “Sounds like a cinch,” says Harold McGee …
“But as anyone who has tried knows, it’s anything but a cinch. Making preserves is a tricky business because the necessary balance between pectin, acid, and sugar is a very delicate one. Food scientists have found that a pH between 2.8 and 3.4, a pectin concentration of 0.5 to 1.0%, and a sugar concentration of 60 to 65% are generally optimal, but you would have to be cooking in a well-equipped laboratory to measure the first two condition (sugar content is easily measure by boiling point).”
That’s one reason I asked Vivien Lloyd to share her recipe for raspberry jam, which she kindly did. Download the recipe for Raspberry and Vanilla Jam.
Notes
More science of pectin. Photo of Vivien Lloyd by Robert Walster. Music – in and out – was, of course, Strawberry Jam, by Michelle Shocked. And no, I don’t understand what she’s been saying lately; this is not an endoresement of any kind, it is just good music. I make good jam.
When you’re on holiday, or just away from home, do you seek out the “authentic” local food, or look for a reassuringly familar logo? Backpackers, keen to distinguish themselves from the vulgar hordes who are merely on holiday, seek out the authentic, at least to begin with. Dr Emily Falconer has been studying women backpackers. That’s her in the photo, doing a little field research over a bowl of something exotic in Thailand. And she says that while they start out seeking the grottiest places to eat, after they’ve been on the road for a while, their thoughts stray guiltily to familiar, comforting foods. I know the feeling
Emily Falconer didn’t set out to study backpackers and food, but soon discovered that no matter what the subject, the people she was talking to sooner or later brought up food. I’m no exception, and although I’ve never been a great backpacker myself, I do prefer to seek out reasonably local eating places where I can, and I’ve had some memorable meals as a result. The most memorable of those was in Kunming, China, where I detached myself from the group I was with and went in search of something to eat. I didn't find it at the food fair that was on at the same time, but in the end I fetched up in a place so authentic it didn’t even have photographs of the food. I indicated to the waiter that I was hungry and he brought me food. I had no idea what any of it was, and aside from one soupy dish that was almost too hot even for me, it was all delicious. Next time I might take with me a book, this book.
Notes
Emily Falconer is a senior research assistant at the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London South Bank University. Her paper is Transformations of the backpacking food tourist: Emotions and conflicts. She also mentioned Food in tourism: Attraction and Impediment, by Erik Cohen and Nir Avieli. Intro music, as ever, by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. While Jimmy Buffet – and how appropriate is that? – provided the outro music.
The Guadalupe River that flows through Texas used to be known as The River of Nuts, a fact that Wikipedia does not confirm. The nut in question is the pecan, Carya illinoinensis, and the pecan tree is the state tree of Texas. The groves of wild pecans that lined the rivers of Texas are, however, threatened by the very popularity of the nuts they bear, and in particular by the fickle global nut market. The Chinese, you see, have gone nuts for pecans, increasing their purchase of American pecans from 3–4% in 2006 to 30–40% today. And if they abandon the pecan as quickly as they took it up, the wild pecan groves might be abandoned too. All this, and much more, I learned from James McWilliams, professor of history at Texas State University. His new book is one of those delights that looks at the global sweep of human endeavour through a little lens, in this case the pecan.
Why it was the Chinese, rather than the French, the English or some other country, that chose to absorb the pecan surplus, I guess we’ll never know. McWilliams told me that Chinese people he spoke to believe the nuts prolong life; irrational as that may seem, no American grower is going to say they don’t. And while the high prices are good news for growers, they’re not so good for people who want pecan-containing industrial food.
Notes
James McWilliams’ book is The Pecan: a history of America’s native nut. There’s an extract in Texas Monthly online. iTunes artwork photo by Melanie McDermott Outro music Pecan Pie by Golden Smog.
What, really, is the point of conserving agricultural biodiversity? The formal sector, genebanks and the like, will say it is about genetic resources and having on hand the traits to breed varieties that will solve the challenges tomorrow might throw up. Thousands of seed savers around the world might well agree with that, at least partially. I suspect, though, that for most seed savers the primary reason is surely more about food, about having the varieties they want to eat. David Cavagnaro has always championed that view. David’s is a fascinating personal history, which currently sees him working on the Pepperfield Project, “A Non-Profit Organization Located in Decorah, IA Promoting and Teaching Hands-On Cooking, Gardening and Agrarian Life Skills”. I first met David 15 or 20 years ago at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah. This year, I was lucky enough to be invited there again, and I lost no time in finding time for a chat.
David pointed out that immigrants are often keen gardeners and, perforce, seed savers as they struggle to maintain their distinctive food culture in a new land. That’s true for the Hmong in Minneapolis, Asian communities in England and, I’m sure, many others elsewhere. What happens as those communities assimilate? The children and grandchildren of the immigrant gardeners are unlikely to feel the same connection to their original food culture, and may well look down on growing food as an unsuitable occupation. Is immigrant agricultural biodiversity liable to be lost too? Efforts to preserve it don’t seem to be flourishing.
Seed saving for its own sake, rather than purely as a route to sustenance, does seem to be both a bit of a luxury and to require a rather special kind of personality. John Withee, whose bean collection brought David Cavagnaro to Seed Savers Exchange and people like Russ Crow, another of his spritual heirs, collect and create stories as much as they do agricultural biodiversity. And that’s something formal genebanks never seem to document.
Notes
John Withee’s bean cookbook looks like it would be very interesting. Indeed, the whole Yankee bean-hole thing would be fun to explore. Are you aware of people adopting “immigrant” foods not just to eat, but to conserve? My mother-in-law had red shiso (Perilla frustescens) volunteers all over the place, although I’m pretty sure she never used it as a herb. The lemongrass on my balcony hardly counts. Can you point me to a public or private bean-hole party that might welcome a nosy reporter? Would you consider reviewing Eat This Podcast on iTunes? Or nominating it for a podcasting award? Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could go online and search the internets for a recipe. And you would come up with a few. Just reading them over, they didn’t seem all that appetising. One, for example, warned that you had to serve the bread toasted. What’s the point of that? Anyway, that didn’t deter Ken Albala, a professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, but rather than search the internet, he turned to ancient Egypt for inspiration. In thinking about ways in which the material culture of food might change in the future, for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, he came up with not only the plate that keeps crispy things crunchy, but also a way to bake bread in a microwave. Not great bread, but acceptable bread.
Why? Well, partly because it is hot where Ken lives, and he doesn’t like putting the oven on just to bake bread. And partly because he foresees a future in which space is at a premium, cooking, maybe, is deskilled, and ovens, where they exist, are used for storing stuff, not baking.
Turns out, though, that there’s method to Ken’s madness. I’d always thought that microwaves heat water molecules and that’s that. Apparently not, as I learned from Len Fisher at Bristol University. Apparently some ceramics absorb microwaves and others don’t, and if you have a ceramic that absorbs microwaves, watch out. It can get very hot. Hot enough to turn bread dough to toast in less than 7 minutes.
Len admitted that he didn’t fully understand the physics of different ceramics in the microwave, which means there’s no chance for me and you. But he did think he’d invented something along the lines of Ken’s bread mould. Turns out someone had already patented it, although as far as I can tell the patent has lapsed and nobody ever did anything with it. Or did they? If you’re aware of a container designed to bake bread in the microwave, please leave a comment.
Notes
Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page. Len Fisher also has a website, and it is well worth exploring. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is identical to that of a crispy one. But the experience falls far short of enjoyable. A crisp needs to be, well, crisp. If it isn’t, it actually tastes bad. That’s not quite so true of things like fried or oven-roasted potato chips; they still taste pretty good when they’re not quite so crispy, but they’re even better when they are crispy, and that goes for a whole lot of other cooked crispy things too. Which is why it is such a shame that by the time you get to the bottom of a plateful of fries or nachos, they’re soggy. Not to mention thin-crust pizza in a box. Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California, happens to be an accomplished ceramicist, so he invented a plate that helps keep foods crispy. And that prompted an episode on crispy crunchiness.
The argument that the appeal of crispiness is innate – that is was selected for by evolution – is not that far-fetched. John S. Allen, a research scientist at the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, writes that “[c]rispy foods are certainly not the only type of food that humans find appealing, and of course some people do not even like them. But the pervasive appeal of crispy is clearly something that emerges out of our multiple, interacting histories”.
There’s more to it than just the texture or the sound of the food breaking in our heads, but there does seem to be something to Allen’s ideas. What, though, is the difference between crisp and crispy? My sister says that, for her, carrots are crisp, while fried noodles are crispy, and that’s an importance distinction, for her. I’m not so sure. I think one could possibly separate out the texture from the flavour, at least experimentally, and see whether there really is a difference. Of course all sorts of sensations affect the experience of eating something, but whatever the truth of the matter, I’d just as soon not have to eat soggy crisps.
Notes
Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page. Why Humans Are Crazy for Crispy is an essay by John S. Allen, adapted from his book The Omnivorous Mind. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as you could hope for. I found out about that because I was checking out her new book, The Resilient Gardener, which offers all kinds of advice for making the most of home-grown food. In that, Carol talks about having bred a delicata squash with a taste like a medjool date. That sounded intriguing, but in a way not all that surprising. If anyone could breed a squash – or pumpkin – that tasted like a date, it would be Carol Deppe. Her earlier book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, is a wonderful, informative and accessible book about the science of plant genetics. It is, in fact, better than all the text books I’ve ever read on the subject. Which is not surprising, as that’s what Deppe set out to write.
The whole business of squashes seems fraught with difficulty. First off, what do you call them: zucchini, pumpkins, courgettes, summer squash, winter squash? Is there any difference (in England) between a baby marrow and a courgette, or between an overgrown zucchini and a marrow? ((Questions to which I returned in 2016: When is a zucchini not a zucchini?)) And calling them by their Latin names doesn’t really help, because the same species can be used in different ways, and it is the usage that tends to determine what they’re called.
The idea of drying a summer squash for use through the winter is very appealing, and Carol says that costata romanesco, and old Italian heritage variety, is one of the few varieties suitable for treating in this way. Looking at pictures, it does seem to be very similar to the variety I see on the market here, so I’m determined now to see whether I can persuade my local vegetable seller to bring me an overgrown zucchini – a zuchone, or just a zucca? He’ll probably think I’m mad, when everybody else wants them as tiny as possible.
Notes
The Resilient Gardener is published by Chelsea Green Publishing. A keen amateur breeder called Rebsie Fairholm was doing wonderful things breeding a purple-podded mange-tout pea, inspired and informed by Carol Deppe’s work. Alas, she seems to have stopped for now, although you can still read about her efforts on her website. Banner photo by McBeth. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. Outro music, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn, is Tonight, tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins. Sometimes obvious is good.
Bling, the Urban Dictionary tells me, is an onomatopoeic representation of light bouncing off a diamond. Or a Bob Kramer original hand-made chef’s knife, which goes for $2000 and up. Of course some people might be able to justify spending that kind of cash on what is, after all, one of the key tools of the trade … if your trade happens to be cooking. But my guest today, Peter Hertzmann, says he sees lots of knives, maybe not quite that expensive, hanging on the wall in people’s kitchens, unused. “Kitchen knives”, he told this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, are “the new bling”.
Peter teaches knife skills, has written extensively on the topic, and one of the things he is adamant about is that you never chop, you slice. Even if you’re pretty handy with a blade, you can probably learn a thing or two from his video Three Aspects of Knife Skills. I know I did.
Notes
You can actually get a set of four Bob Kramer knives, plus a steel to ruin them with, for less than $2000. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. Outro music by Martin Simpson. And if I ever knew, I’d forgotten that the song was written by Cat Stevens.
Not all progress is bad. Rachel Laudan makes a powerful case that modern methods of making sugar and salt are far superior.
I did not know that that the famous Monty Python spam sketch was recorded on 6 June 1970. At least, that's the claim of a Tumblr obsessed with Minnesota in the 1970s. (Wikipedia says only that "[i]t premiered on 15 December 1970".) However, I need no encouragement to share a programme on Spam that I made for BBC Farming Today back in 1997, a programme that was both very well received and a blast to make. the people at Hormel couldn't have been nicer, and the butterfly spam balls weren't bad either.
The big question is, why do amateur growers and those who choose not to care even need the protection of EU seed legislation?
The world of fine chocolate has seen some major change in the past few years, much of it focused on the rise of so-called “bean to bar” chocolate made by smallish producers with an eye on the distinctive qualities of different cacao beans. One company that’s been making a name for itself is Original Beans, which markets a package that tells “The story of cacao in four bars” that recently won a silver medal for packaging at the Academy of Chocolate awards in London. Last summer, I was lucky enough to sit down with Sudi Pigott, a consultant to Original Beans, and taste a couple of them.
I came away from the interview with half a bar of one we didn’t taste, the Piura Porcelana. Typing the ID code into the Original Beans website took me lickety split to a page all about that chocolate. It’s an intriguing story, the Porcelana variety being characterised by beans that are a lot lighter in colour than most cacao. Porcelana, of which there are said to be 33 genetically different types, was apparently rediscovered by Original Beans in 2007, since when the company has been working with local farmers and NGOs to boost production. But there are some niggles too. It’s strange, for example, to be told: The Piura Porcelana’s origin is located on the foothills of a mountain range reaching above 2000 meters, called the Sierra Piura. The area is part of the xxx biodiversity hotspot, with bears etc. . Much of the original forest has been cut down over the past decades, resulting in changing weather and water supply. Now it is being replanted and restored. xxx biodiversity hotspot? Bears etc? Is somebody still doing fact-checking and research for the copy?
Original Beans is good chocolate, no doubt about that, although there’s also been a bit of a to-do in the rarefied world of chocosnobs about who exactly makes Original Beans’ chocolate. The packaging says Made in Switzerland, although the company is headquartered in Amsterdam. CEO and founder Phillip Kauffmann is quite open about it being made by Felchlin, at least when asked, but that information is not widely available. Is that a problem? Not to me. There are people who make chocolate, and people who make things from chocolate, and they’re often not the same people. Apparently at the fine end of the “beans to bar” world that matters. Original Beans does everything except make the bars; I think that’s acceptable.
Is the price equally acceptable? I don’t know; what should good chocolate cost? Fair prices for farmers, men and women alike, no child labour, environmental sustainability, conservation, all that … what’s it worth?
I’m not the first to ask the question What Is The True Cost of Chocolate? of Original Beans, and the answers given then, in 2009, certainly have a lot of feelgood about them. In truth, though, I don’t think we’re any nearer an answer, and we won’t be until we have independent audits and much more transparency than most businesses could survive. There’s a real dilemma here. Original Beans and many other topnotch chocolate makers can charge what they do in large part because they are making smaller batches. They’re competing with one another, not with the industrial giants. Industrial chocolate really is a rather ghastly business in all sorts of ways, and yet I don’t see the vast majority of its customers switching to more ethical products, and if they did, I don’t see the ethics surviving the onslaught. Notes
Original Beans’ local partner in Peru made a video about Piura Porcelana. Here’s another video, of Original Beans’ Phillip Kauffmann talking about Cru Virunga. Most of the world’s chocolate is now grown in Africa, away from the pests and diseases of its home in Latin America. Here’s a long article about its first home in Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe. Oxfam has been running a campaign to persuade industrial chocolate to do better; it may be starting to bite. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. Final music by Cécile Kayirebwa.
Among the more miraculous edible transformations is the one that turns raw meat, salt and a few basic spices into some of the most delicious foods around.
Time was when curing meat, especially stuffed into a casing to make a sausage, was the only way both to use every part of an animal and to help make it last longer than raw meat. Done right, a sausage would stay good to the next slaughtering season and beyond.
The process relied on the skill of the sausage-maker, the help of beneficial bacteria and moulds, the right conditions, a great deal of patience, and sometimes luck. Luck is less of a factor now, because to keep up with demand the vast majority of cured meats are produced in artificial conditions of controlled precision. Here and there, though, the old ways survive. Jan Davison spent months touring the sausage high-spots of Europe looking for the genuine article, and shared some of her favourites at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking last year.
The Sausages
Mortadella di Camaiore, from the Triglia family in Camaiore, Italy.
Corallina di Norcia, from I Fratelli Ansuini (The Pig Brothers? Surely not.) in Norcia, Italy.
Finocchiona di Suino Grigio, from Sergio Falaschi in San Miniato, Italy. I think the Suino Grigio is a cross between the Large White and the fabled Cinta Senese, which almost did for the latter.
Salchichón de Vic from Casa Riera Ordeix, in Vic, Spain.
The chorizo Jan mentioned in the interview we did not taste. She sent her notes: Lomo iberico bellota – Señorio de Montana, Spain. Along with ham, lomo, cured loin of pork is the highest expression of the curer’s art; especially when it is made from Spain’s indigenous black pig, the Iberico, fattened on bellota – acorns. The loin, left as a single roll of meat almost a metre in length, is seasoned almost imperceptibly with pimentón, (a spicy type of paprika), sea salt, fresh garlic and oregano, before being stuffed into a gut and left to cure slowly over several months. Lomo Ibérico bellota is a cured sausage is to be savoured … slowly; the lomo melts in the mouth releasing complex, nutty flavours. Ahle Wurscht, from Thomas Koch in Calden, Germany. There's a video of Ahle Wurscht being made, which I had subtitled, but WordPress does not yet permit embedding videos from Universal Subtitles, so you'll have to just click the link. That video is not from Thomas Koch, although he does have some videos on his site.
Notes
Jan Davison is writing a book on English Sausages for The English Kitchen series at Prospect Books. All being well it will be published in 2014. Food safety agencies have been very wary about meat cured in restaurants and at home, sometimes with justification. But there really is nothing to be scared of if you take reasonable precautions. A great place to start is at Michael Ruhlman’s blog, and one of his excellent books. I haven’t done so myself, but everyone says Ruhlman is the boss. I am completely indebted to Ellen Pilsworth for translating the German video. Thanks Ellie. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com. Final music by The Bavarian Oompah Boys.
Peat diggers in Ireland and elsewhere have occasionally unearthed objects, usually made of wood, that contained some kind of greasy, fatty material with a "distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell".
Butter. Centuries-old butter.
Who buried it, and why, remain mysteries that motivated Ben Reade, an experimental chef at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, to make some himself. He brought some of his modern-day bog butter, still nestled in moss and wrapped in its birch-bark barrel, to share with the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery last year.
Notes
Ben mentioned two plants that have been found around bog butter, hypnum moss (Hypnum cupressiforme) and bog cotton (Eriophorum angustifolium).
The Nordic Food Lab research blog details all of their astonishing edible experiments.
I found Seamus Heaney reading his poem Bogland at The Internet Poetry Archive.
Caroline Earwood (1997) Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History, The Journal of Irish Archaeology, 8: 25-42 is available at JStor, which has a new scheme allowing you to read up to three items at a time online for free.
Music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
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