Eat This Podcast
288 episodes - English - Latest episode: 25 days ago - ★★★★★ - 52 ratingsUsing food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. Eat This Podcast tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion — you get the picture. We don’t do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics.
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Episodes
Where’s the latest episode?
May 09, 2016 10:53 - 3 minutes - 2.79 MBBy 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...
It is OK to eat quinoa
April 18, 2016 13:19 - 26 minutes - 21.2 MBQuinoa -- 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 p...
Welcome to the Wonderbag
April 04, 2016 12:30 - 14 minutes - 10.6 MBAt 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 thei...
The evolution of food culture in Mali
March 21, 2016 13:30 - 21 minutes - 15.4 MBWhen 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 ...
Crackers about Indonesian food
March 07, 2016 16:19 - 15 minutes - 11.2 MBI'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 w...
Chewing the fat about chewing the fat
February 22, 2016 13:02 - 20 minutes - 14.2 MBKarima 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 n...
The haybox through history
February 08, 2016 11:33 - 12 minutes - 9.2 MBHuffduff it 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 late...
An English woman’s take on Italian cooking
February 01, 2016 17:11 - 8 minutes - 6.13 MBRachel 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 titl...
Egyptian street food in London
January 25, 2016 12:57 - 7 minutes - 5.45 MBAs 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...
Tulip bulb soup
January 05, 2016 09:54 - 5 minutes - 4.37 MBAs 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 2...
An experiment in sound and taste
December 21, 2015 17:56 - 23 minutes - 19.4 MBIrish music and its influence on the taste of Irish beer
Aquae Urbis Romae
December 07, 2015 17:38 - 23 minutes - 17 MBFollowing the ancient aqueducts to trace the history of the waters of Rome
How to measure what farms produce
November 23, 2015 13:21 - 12 minutes - 8.72 MBHow 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. A...
The Dark Ages were a time of prosperity
November 10, 2015 16:29 - 22 minutes - 15.7 MBThe 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 ch...
Going further than food miles
October 26, 2015 11:45 - 24 minutes - 17.4 MB“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.
Fifth quarter: Rachel Roddy’s Rome
October 12, 2015 11:06 - 24 minutes - 17.2 MBThat 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 ...
Just Mayo and justice
September 28, 2015 11:08 - 20 minutes - 14.4 MBIt’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 ...
A year of cooking almost everything from scratch
September 14, 2015 11:24 - 20 minutes - 14.1 MBMegan 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...
The military-culinary complex
August 31, 2015 11:24 - 21 minutes - 15.2 MBHave 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 th...
100% food insecure: poor people in a rich country
August 17, 2015 11:19 - 17 minutes - 12.8 MBThe 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 f...
Larder inessentials
July 20, 2015 11:45 - 20 minutes - 14.7 MBThe 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 aroun...
Culture and agriculture in the Pamirs
July 06, 2015 11:58 - 26 minutes - 18.6 MBThe 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 place...
How to eat well in Italy
June 22, 2015 12:00 - 20 minutes - 14.8 MBPeople 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 countles...
These aren’t the pests you’re looking for
June 08, 2015 18:36 - 17 minutes - 11.8 MBDay 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, ...
Lead poisoning of hunters and game
May 18, 2015 10:00 - 18 minutes - 13 MBThis 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 ti...
Enjoying life on a rather restricted regimen
May 04, 2015 15:02 - 15 minutes - 11.3 MBBy 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 fur...
Grass-fed beef
April 20, 2015 12:00 - 17 minutes - 12.7 MBWhat 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 ough...
A second helping of citrus in Italy
April 06, 2015 10:33 - 27 minutes - 19.1 MBThis 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 nomin...
A visit to Koshari Street
March 23, 2015 11:00 - 17 minutes - 16.7 MBStreet 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 ...
An Italian wine education
March 09, 2015 11:55 - 19 minutes - 26.5 MBDrinking 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...
A little about allotments
February 23, 2015 21:15 - 16 minutes - 23.9 MBAllotments 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 w...
Food, hunger and conflict
February 09, 2015 17:01 - 12 minutes - 17.1 MBA 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 avo...
Agricultural foundations
January 26, 2015 18:35 - 24 minutes - 34.2 MBOne 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 goo...
Future of agriculture
January 20, 2015 07:51 - 4 minutes - 6.06 MBWill 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.
Pasta laid bare
January 12, 2015 12:15 - 5 minutes - 7.25 MBWhy 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.
Cheese in aspic
January 05, 2015 09:02 - 5 minutes - 7.86 MBThere'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 Foo...
Bread remembered
December 29, 2014 12:27 - 5 minutes - 7.39 MBBack 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.
Garibaldi and citrus in Italy
December 22, 2014 12:30 - 4 minutes - 7.04 MBOne 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.
Another helping of turkey
December 15, 2014 12:09 - 11 minutes - 16.8 MBThe conservation of the wild turkey was triumph, but it left ornithologists scratching their heads. How many species were there? And where did they live?
A partial history of the turkey
December 01, 2014 19:43 - 15 minutes - 21.1 MBFor a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is wonderful. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia?
Talking turkey
November 27, 2014 05:51 - 3 minutes - 4.47 MBAs 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.
The festa dell’uva of the 1930s
November 17, 2014 13:49 - 17 minutes - 21.1 MBThese 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’u...
Looking forward to the festa dell’uva
November 10, 2014 07:16 - 1 minute - 2.11 MBIn 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.
Exploring Kazakhstan’s apple forests
November 04, 2014 12:35 - 16 minutes - 23.9 MBKazakhstan 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...
Bears and apples
October 27, 2014 11:12 - 1 minute - 1.92 MBBen 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.
A novel approach to food security
October 20, 2014 11:08 - 19 minutes - 27.2 MBIt 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 f...
Citrus in Italy
October 06, 2014 11:06 - 25 minutes - 35.9 MBCitrus, 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...
What’s cooking in Tasmania?
September 22, 2014 11:38 - 22 minutes - 31.5 MBWhat 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...
Garum brought up to date
September 08, 2014 17:32 - 19 minutes - 28.1 MBGarum 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...
Rice from Randall’s Island, New York
August 25, 2014 11:44 - 18 minutes - 26.3 MBRandall’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...