The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is supposed to give poor people in America enough help to buy a nutritious diet, and it has been under fire over the past year. Not only do people want to cut back on the benefits, some even want to make SNAP recipients undergo mandatory drug testing. Back in February, I spoke to Parke Wilde, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, about SNAP and what it can deliver in terms of nutrition. Her...
Dec 18, 2017•6 min
“Plenty of plants, not much meat and maximum variety.” The best advice for a good diet I’ve ever heard. It’s a maxim devised by Colin Tudge, long before anything similar you may have heard from more recent writers. Tudge, more than anyone else I know, has consistently championed the idea that meat ought to be seen in a supporting role, rather than as the main attraction, a garnish, if you will. Tudge has been thinking and writing about agriculture and food systems for a long time, and we’ve been...
Dec 04, 2017•32 min
Durrus is a village at the head of Dunmanus bay, south of the Sheep’s Head peninsula in the southwest of Ireland. Durrus is also the name of an award-winning, semi-soft cheese, while Dunmanus is a harder cheese, aged a lot longer. Both were created by Jeffa Gill and are hand made by Jeffa and her small team up above the village and the bay. Jeffa is one of the pioneers who turned West Cork into a heaven and a haven for cheese-lovers. One of the special characteristics of Durrus and many West Cor...
Nov 20, 2017•23 min
Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re ...
Nov 06, 2017•28 min
Nobody knows when the first apples were specifically selected in Ireland. The earliest written record dates to 1598, “when a writer discusses the fruitful nature of Irish orchards and the merits of the fine old Irish varieties contained in them”. ( A brief history | Cider Ireland ) The next couple of centuries saw a blossoming of native Irish apples, as farmers and landowners selected varieties that suited their conditions. In the middle of the 20th century, however, those myriad varieties began...
Oct 23, 2017•24 min
In the past year or so there has been a slew of high-level meetings pointing to antibiotic resistance as a growing threat to human well-being. But then, resistance was always an inevitable, Darwinian consequence of antibiotic use. Well before penicillin was widely available, Ernst Chain, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, noted that some bacteria were capable of neutralising the antibiotic. What is new about the recent pronouncements and decisions is that the use of ant...
Oct 09, 2017•22 min
In 2014, food historian and professor Ken Albala found himself stuck in a kitchen with no utensils. He headed for an Asian grocery store and bought a little saucepan and some noodles, to make something for breakfast. Thus started almost three years of home-made noodle soup for breakfast, practically every day. Out of that came some spectacular successes, some abysmal failures and a book. Of course, I had to put pulled noodles to the test. Ken says to use a high-gluten flour. I checked scads of s...
Sep 11, 2017•25 min
Walking down the supermarket aisle in search of coffee, I have this warm inner glow. If I choose a pack that boasts the Fair Trade logo, or that of any other third-party certifying agency, I’ll be doing good just by paying a little more for something that I am going to buy anyway. The extra I pay will find its way to the poor farmers who grow the coffee, and together enlightened coffee drinkers can make their lives better. But it seems I’m at least somewhat mistaken. Certified coffee is certainl...
Aug 30, 2017•29 min
As our ancestors moved north out of Africa, and especially as they found themselves in climates that supported less gathering and more hunting, they were faced with an acute nutritional problem: scurvy. Humans are one of the few mammals that cannot manufacture this vital little chemical compound (others being the guinea pig and fruit bats). If there are no fruit and veg around, where will that vitamin C come from? That’s a question that puzzled John Speth, an archaeologist and Emeritus Professor...
Aug 14, 2017•26 min
The plant breeding behind the green revolution has delivered amazing results, way more than two ears of corn where one would grow before. Those gains, however, depend on tailoring the environment in which the seeds are planted to suit those modern varieties. If a farmer can’t afford to do that, or isn’t willing to use the herbicides and fertilisers modern varieties require, they’re kind of stuck. The market isn’t really interested in providing the kinds of varieties you need. Before the explosio...
Jul 31, 2017•21 min
In the town hall of Siena is a series of glorious frescoes that depict The Allegory of Good and Bad Government . In one of them is a pig, long snouted and thin legged, black with a white band around its back and down its front legs, being quietly chivied along by a swineherd. It is absolutely recognisable as a cinta senese , a Belted Sienese pig, today one the most favoured heritage breeds in Italy. But it wasn’t always so. Numbers dropped precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that ...
Jul 17, 2017•19 min
The island of Corfu was part of the Venetian republic for hundreds of years. So when I went there on holiday I expected to see some Italian influences, and there were plenty; Venetian lions, eroded by time; elegant buildings; Italian restaurants everywhere; and dishes with Italian-sounding names, like sofrito and pastitsada . Also, a curiously neon version of limoncello , made in this case from kumquats rather than lemons. I was fortunate to have an introduction to Cali Doxiadis, an expert cook ...
Jul 03, 2017•21 min
Foodwise, what unites Cameroon, Nigeria and Grenada? How about Cape Verde, Colombia and Peru? As of today, you can visit a website to find out. The site is the brainchild of Colin Khoury and his colleagues, and is intended to make it easier to see the trends hidden within 50 years of annual food data from more than 150 countries. If that rings a bell, it may be because you heard the episode around three years ago, in which Khoury and I talked about the massive paper he and his colleagues had pub...
Apr 24, 2017•18 min
No country has solved the problem of how to ensure that all of its people have enough safe, nutritious food to eat year round, and the variety of approaches is both bewildering and informative. Australia, for example, has a welfare system that doesn’t make any specific provision for food. But it does exempt certain healthier foods – such as fruit and veg, bread, fresh meat, milk and eggs – from the Good and Services Tax. That makes them cheaper than they might otherwise be, a sort of thin subsid...
Apr 10, 2017•23 min
Who invented mayonnaise? Could boiling down tonnes of cattle concentrate beef’s nutritious qualities? Did lemonade put a halt to the plague in Paris? Tom Nealon writes about these and (many) other topics in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars , a title that does the contents no favours at all. The obvious temptation is to talk about the book as a feast of food history, a smörgåsbord of tasty treats, some old, some new, all interesting. It is all that and more, not least because it is lavishly ...
Mar 27, 2017•24 min
Recommendation engines are everywhere. They let Netflix suggest shows you might want to watch. They let Spotify build you a personalised playlist of music you will probably like. They turn your smartphone into a source of endless hilarity and mirth. And, of course, there’s IBM’s Watson, recommending all sorts of “interesting” new recipes. As part of his PhD project on machine learning, Jaan Altosaar decided to use a new mathematical technique to build his own recipe recommendation engine. The te...
Mar 13, 2017•14 min
Recently I’ve been involved in a couple of online discussions about the cost of a nutritious diet. The crucial issue is why poor people in rich countries seem to have such unhealthy diets. One argument is about the cost of food. Another is about everything other than cost: knowledge, equipment, time, conditions. My own opinion is that given all those other things, the externalities, a nutritious diet is actually not that expensive. But that’s just an opinion, so I went looking for information, a...
Feb 27, 2017•24 min
Food has probably been a marker of social status since the first woman gathered more berries than her sister. It still is. Some foods are authentically posh, others undeniably lower class, and there’s no way I’m going to go out on a limb and say which is which. Because foods serve as social markers, the history of cuisine is also a history of the democratisation – some would say vulgarisation – of elite dishes, and perhaps noone has chronicled that more effectively than Rachel Laudan. Her book C...
Feb 13, 2017•20 min
Excluding animal products from your diet as a vegetarian or vegan is a choice some people have the luxury to make, and if they know what they’re doing, and take care, they can be perfectly healthy. But there are probably far more people who have no choice in the matter. They would eat meat if they could, but they simply can’t afford it. For those people, a little bit of animal source food – milk, meat, eggs – can make a great difference to their health and wellbeing. It can be easy to forget tha...
Feb 01, 2017•25 min
This is the last of the short episodes of the holiday season. It is also something of a meta-episode because it is mostly about this podcast and another podcast. I’ve hinted before that I’d like to do more constructed shows here, where I speak to a few different people about a topic to try and get a broader sense of the subject. They’re harder to do, but more rewarding, and they consistently get more listeners. The problem is that as a one-man band, I don’t have the time I need to do that kind o...
Jan 16, 2017•9 min
Maybe you’ve seen the stories about a peanut, prosaically named Carolina Runner No. 4? In 2017 it will be ready to be grown in commercial quantities, having faded gently away from being the primary peanut before the 1840s to a reasonable contender into the 1910s to presumed extinct by the 1950s. Professor David Shields, an historian at the University of South Carolina, found it in a genebank as part of a project by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which he chairs, to restore the crucial variet...
Jan 09, 2017•7 min
One of the most fascinating things about pumpkins and squashes is what people call them. The whole summer squash, squash, pumpkin thing is confusing enough, and that’s to say nothing of courgettes and zucchini, which I explored in a podcast a few weeks ago . One of the people I talked to for that was Harry Paris, an Israeli researcher who has done more than anyone to disentangle the rampant thickets of cucurbit history. While not strictly anything to do with zucchini, while I had him on the line...
Dec 31, 2016•4 min
James William Greenwood (that’s him on the left) was a pioneering investigative journalist of the high Victorian period. He broke some sensational stories, most notably by spending a night in the workhouse to document the appallingly squalid conditions of the poor in Victorian London. Greenwood, however, wasn’t above a bit of sensationalism and, perhaps, even a touch of fake news. For example, he was unable to supply any authentication for one of his most horrific pieces, about a fight between a...
Dec 26, 2016•10 min
Truth be told, I’m not really big on huge international conferences. I’ve been to enough of them to know the score; lots of talk, lots of platitudes, lots of good intentions, lots of inertia. Despite all my prejudices, however, I dragged myself down to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently to witness for myself the International Symposium on Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition. I did so because the week before, the journal Nature had p...
Dec 13, 2016•18 min
Many vegetables don’t taste of anything much these days, but whose fault is that, really? Plant breeders produce what growers want, and growers want what people will buy. So why aren’t people buying flavour? Mostly because they aren’t being offered a real choice. Lane Selman, who works on organic projects at Oregon State University, discovered that although organic growers say they want disease resistance, for example, they don’t actually grow existing disease-resistant varieties “because they t...
Nov 28, 2016•19 min
Any way you slice it, foie gras — the fatty liver of a duck or goose — is a fighting matter. To animal rights activists it is quite obviously cruel and depraved. To many chefs and eaters, it is a delicious extravagance. To many other chefs and eaters, it is something they would rather not countenance. To the vast majority of French people, it is a symbol of their nation and an essential part of their identity, the rare product of smiling rustic grandmothers, making a bit of pin money on the side...
Nov 14, 2016•23 min
Traditionally, the wine to drink with a bit of cheese was always a red wine. But tastes have changed, and nowadays you can find lots of recommendations for white wines to drink with cheeses. Those recommendations — all of them — are based on personal opinion, what one person likes or finds enjoyable. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Most recommendations are just that. But I was somewhat surprised to learn that although there have been lots of studies of how expert tasters describe not...
Oct 31, 2016•17 min
English sausages have a definite dual personality. One of those is a sumptuous, succulent blend of good meat, a bit of cereal, herbs and spices and maybe even a touch of the vegetable, like leeks. The other is a staple of the poor. Who knows what unspeakable things lurk inside its wrinkled exterior? But if, like me, you thought that the suspect sausage was purely a product of the industrial revolution, prepare for a revelation. Jan Davison was the second ever guest on the show, talking about the...
Oct 17, 2016•23 min
If you heard the episode on microshiners you’ll know that there is something of a boom in small-scale distilling. And you might be worried that every boom seems to be followed by a bust. One distiller, however, told me that it was an economic bust that kickstarted the malt whisky boom. For most of its history, the only malt whisky most people ever drank was as a component in blended whisky. The stockmarket crash of 1973 and subsequent oil crises meant that people had no cash for whisky, which wa...
Oct 03, 2016•21 min
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? No, yes, no – at least if you care more about evidence than emotions and opinions. How do we know? Thanks to the work of agricultural economists like my guest in this episode, Marc Bellemare, director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. I confess, I’m a little...
Sep 19, 2016•28 min
