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 w...
Jul 06, 2015•27 min
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 n...
Jun 22, 2015•21 min
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, pes...
Jun 08, 2015•17 min
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. U...
May 18, 2015•18 min
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,...
May 04, 2015•16 min
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...
Apr 20, 2015•18 min
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 nominee...
Apr 06, 2015•27 min
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 bar...
Mar 23, 2015•18 min
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 ...
Mar 09, 2015•19 min
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 wher...
Feb 23, 2015•17 min
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 avoidi...
Feb 09, 2015•12 min
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 r...
Jan 26, 2015•25 min
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.
Jan 20, 2015•4 min
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....
Jan 12, 2015•5 min
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 Con...
Jan 05, 2015•6 min
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 .
Dec 29, 2014•5 min
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 ....
Dec 22, 2014•5 min
The domestication of the turkey probably first took place around 2000 years ago in south central Mexico, possibly for their feathers and ritual value rather than their meat. Their rise to the top of the American festive table came much later, not with the Pilgrims but with Charles Wampler, whose efforts to promote turkey raising started Rockingham County, Virginia, on its path to Turkey Capital of the World. That much we heard in the previous episode of Eat This Podcast . In between domesticatio...
Dec 15, 2014•12 min
As Thanksgiving ebbs into memory and Christmas looms on the horizon, Eat This Podcast concerns itself with the turkey. For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is a wonderful bird. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia? The Latin name offers a clue; the American turkey is Meleagris gallopavo , while the African guineafowl is Numida meleagris . But why did the first settlers adopt a name they were already familiar with, rather than adopt a local indigenous name suc...
Dec 01, 2014•15 min
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.
Nov 27, 2014•3 min
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...
Nov 17, 2014•18 min
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 .
Nov 10, 2014•1 min
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, a...
Nov 04, 2014•17 min
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.
Oct 27, 2014•1 min
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, ...
Oct 20, 2014•20 min
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 c...
Oct 06, 2014•26 min
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 t...
Sep 22, 2014•23 min
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 Ro...
Sep 08, 2014•20 min
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 Ko...
Aug 25, 2014•19 min
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 ...
Aug 11, 2014•23 min
