For a while, archaeologists treated the origins of agriculture – where it began, how it spread – as a minor element in the grand sweep of human history. That started to change with new techniques that could identify preserved plant remains, especially cereal seeds, in the detritus of archaeological digs. Then came the ability to tell what people had been eating by looking at the chemicals in their bones. And every day new discoveries in genetics add yet more details. Martin Jones, Pitt Rivers pr...
Mar 18, 2019•21 min
Francesco Buscemi Meat is once again a central topic in nutrition, sustainability, health and capitalism. Points pro and con fly back and forth with no resolution in sight, not surprising given the doctrinaire nature of the discussion. I know where I personally stand, but I also want to try and understand why it is that people feel so much more strongly about meat than about any other element of the diet. That’s why I was very glad to meet Francesco Buscemi last year, and to persuade him to talk...
Mar 04, 2019•27 min
Linda Civitello is a food historian whose latest book is Baking Powder Wars: the cutthroat food fight that revolutionized cooking . My kind of book, it uses an ingredient we all today take completely for granted to look at everything from fake news and dodgy sales demonstrations to changes to the US constitution. Our chat barely scratched the surface. We didn’t, for example, talk about the connection between baking powder and the Indianapolis Speedway. Nor did we talk about how the rise of bakin...
Feb 18, 2019•27 min
Andy Clark left Massachusetts in 1994 and wormed his way into one of the iconic bakeries of Boulder, Colorado. After that, he spent 15 years running bakeries for Whole Foods Market. All the while, he was squirreling away ideas and thinking of his own place, where he could focus on 30 great loaves a day, instead of 30,000 for The Man. The result is Moxie Bread Co in Louisville, Colorado, as warm and welcoming a place as I have ever had the pleasure to visit. We talked about bread, and grain, and ...
Feb 04, 2019•28 min
Today’s guest, Michael Victor, has spent the past 16 years living in Laos and getting to know its farming systems and its food. To some extent, that’s become a personal interest. But it is also a professional interest that grew out of his work with farmers and development agencies in Laos. Most recently, he’s been working with The Agro-biodiversity Initiative, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The idea is to make use of agricultural biodiversity in a sustainable way to ...
Jan 21, 2019•20 min
Mme Pommery’s establishment, outside Reims This is the second of two episodes in which Dr Graham Harding traces the rise and rise of Champagne. In Part One , how the secondary fermentation that gives champagne its sparkle went from being a bad fault to a sought-after feature, as the drink itself became drier and drier to accompany food. A Punch cartoon from 1862, as the elite was chasing champagne drier. Generically, champagne signalled status, and the market grew, but the Champagne houses did n...
Dec 31, 2018•17 min
Graham Harding studied history at university and then built the biggest independent branding and marketing consultancy in the UK. Having cashed out, he went back to school, to research a doctoral thesis on the rise of champagne in Victorian England. Very appropriately, because that rise seems to have been driven almost exclusively by branding and marketing. What was originally a fault – re-fermentation that exploded barrels and was a liability in the cellar – became a feature that encapsulated g...
Dec 24, 2018•28 min
Nürnberg, or Nuremberg if you want to avoid umlauts, means different things to different people. Indeed it means different things to a single person: me. There’s all the nasty stuff, and then there are the artists, the composers and, first and foremost – the cookies. Lots of things call themselves lebkuchen, but the ones from Nuremberg are the only ones with a protected geographical indication. They are one of the high spots of German festive baking, but one that I have never attempted myself. F...
Dec 10, 2018•21 min
To me, a pedant and a purist, a pickle by rights ought to have gone through a proper fermentation. It might have been pasteurised afterwards and bottled, but at some stage it needs to have supported microbial activity. And yet, I don’t think of kombucha as pickled tea or yoghurt as pickled milk. Maybe that’s because they aren’t salted. Just being boiled in vinegar or soaked in brine doesn’t qualify either, for me. Luckily Jan Davison, author of Pickles: A Global History, has a much more open min...
Nov 26, 2018•24 min
I successfully ignored the Great American Blowout last year, and I have nothing new this year. But I was stung by being left out of a round-up of stuff to listen to before and after your turkey , so I am thawing out some old favourites here. As an antipasto, in Talking turkey , Greg Laden explained how explorers heading west thought they were in the east and gave the bird its name. The main course went further, with A partial history of the turkey , with Greg Laden again and Nancy Sorrells, a lo...
Nov 21, 2018•4 min
What is there to say about dessert? Utterly pointless, because by then I’ve usually eaten quite enough, thank you. And yet, utterly irresistible too, because I do have a bit of a sweet tooth. So I am usually quite happy eating out when someone suggests Let’s get just one and four spoons. And yet, the ability to create some of those magnificent concoctions fills me with admiration, especially lately as dessert seems to have become more and more creative. So I was really glad that I persuaded one ...
Nov 12, 2018•22 min
In 2010 and then again in 2011, Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island, suffered two huge earthquakes. The first destroyed buildings, but few people were hurt. The second brought more buildings crashing down and, because it happened around midday when the buildings were full of people, killed 185. Simon Gray is an artist, living on the North Island at the time of the disasters. He had come to regard his regular bread-baking as therapy sessions of a sort, and decided to move to Christchurch ...
Oct 29, 2018•16 min
Once you get over the idea that there is no good food in Ireland, and a single trip ought to be enough to do that, you might become aware of a paradox. Go into a pub, and if they serve food, rather than just sandwiches, it is likely to be rather acceptable. Go into a restaurant, and you’re more likely to be disappointed. At least, that’s my experience. I have had some fine meals in restaurants, to be sure, but I have also had some stinkers. Pubs are more predictable. Why should that be? Diarmuid...
Oct 15, 2018•21 min
Peter Hertzmann tells a great story of a chef telling a bunch of students to go and double the recipe for a batch of cookies. Minutes later, one returned and said he couldn’t do it because the oven wouldn’t go up to 700 degrees. Ho, ho, ho. But there’s a serious issue here for people who are trying to follow a recipe without a clear understanding of the process and methods beneath it. Come to think of it, Peter says, even for professionals, there can be big problems trying to follow some modern ...
Oct 01, 2018•23 min
It is hard to imagine a punishment worse than to have almost no choice of either what you eat or when you eat it, but that’s how life is for most prisoners. Their food choices are made for them, every single day. At the same time, meals are one punctuation mark in what could be a very long sentence. It’s no wonder that food riots are a staple of prison on TV and in the movies, or that food – access to it and control over it – is a crucial aspect of prison life. Clair-Woods Brown has embarked on ...
Sep 17, 2018•18 min
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. I say that as if there will be another, but all I’m really doing is leaving the door slightly ajar. I’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot. I hope you have too. For a final thought, I cannot do better than Elizabeth David, from her meticulous chapter on The Cost of Baking Your Own Bread in English Bread and Yeast Cookery . After going through nutrition, prices and all that ...
Aug 31, 2018•4 min
Wheat is an annual plant; it dies after setting seed. Each year, the farmer has to prepare the land, sow seed, fertilise and protect the plants. When the ground is bare, between crops, wind and water can erode the soil. The shallow root systems of annual plants fail to exploit the resources of the soil and do little to improve it. So although wheat feeds us, it does so at considerable cost to the environment. It isn’t sustainable. What if wheat were perennial? Wes Jackson: “If your life’s work c...
Aug 30, 2018•8 min
Durum wheat is only about 5% of the total wheat harvest around the world. For those of us who like our pasta, that’s a very important 5%. Different gluten proteins make a durum dough stretchy rather than elastic — perfect for pasta. The kernels are very hard and need dedicated milling machinery, which produces small granules — semolina — rather than flour. That, however, may be about to change. Photo of Soft Svevo from USDA, Pullman, WA ....
Aug 29, 2018•7 min
Obed Hussey’s reaper The one process in the whole business of turning wheat into bread when time is of the essence is the harvest. It’s back-breaking work, and the slightest delay can ruin the quality of the grain. In Europe, a ready supply of peasants got the job done. In America, labour, especially in the newly settled midwest, was extremely scarce. Inventors had to come up with machines.
Aug 28, 2018•7 min
An enormous amount of wheat, roughly one fifth of the total harvest, is traded internationally between countries and, as might be expected, if the supply falls, prices rise. Given the strategic importance of wheat, countries try to ensure that they have an adequate supply, even when doing so actually makes things worse, at least in the short term. Wheat links a drought in China to the fall of Egypt’s government in the Arab Spring of 2011. Photo by Daniel Duvivier ....
Aug 27, 2018•7 min
The very first English law about food regulated the size of a standard loaf of bread. The Assize of Bread and Ale kept the price constant, but that price bought more or less bread depending on the price of wheat. It never was a very useful system, for bakers or bread buyers, but it survived from at least 1266 until 1836 and provides an opportunity to consider a pound of silver versus a pound of bread.
Aug 26, 2018•5 min
The one thing to be thankful for in the rise of fast factory bread is that it prompted the resurgence of small, artisan bakers. They have been goaded to produce breads that are better in every way than even the best breads of years gone by. It may seem at times if their focus is on traditions from time immemorial. It isn’t. Because aside from taking time, what they are doing isn’t all that traditional.
Aug 25, 2018•8 min
Without a doubt, the most important trend in the resurgence of baking with care is the increasing use of small mills by keen home bakers and professionals alike. Better nutrition and stunning flavour are the obvious benefits. Less visible, a renewal of local grain growing and closer links between farmers and bakers, all in search of better wheats. Photo by kind permission of Andrew Heyn at New American Stone Mills .
Aug 24, 2018•6 min
The fight between brown and white, good for you versus good for us, has been going on for a long time. Brown flour certainly ought to be more nutritious, and these days, even the elites are choosing brown bread over white. Maybe that’s why sales of “whole grain bread” have more than tripled in the US over the past few years. The weevil in the loaf: whole grain need be only 51%, and whole grain flour is just white flour with some added bran and germ. Photo from DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodis...
Aug 23, 2018•7 min
Sourdough — whatever you call it — is the original leavening agent for breads around the world. At its simplest it is just a piece of the last batch of dough, set aside to ferment the current batch. But it can be so much more than that, a stable little ecosystem of species that support one another while keeping out intruders. It also makes the best bread, although I admit to being biassed. Photo is one of mine, in both senses.
Aug 22, 2018•6 min
If you bake bread only occasionally, you’re probably just grateful to little packets of dried yeast. This episode is not about that. There’s just not that much to say. When it comes to Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, however, the role of yeast in human affairs bubbles away below the surface of our cultures. Photo from Why Unleavened Bread?
Aug 21, 2018•8 min
Flour, water, salt and yeast; the basic ingredients of a loaf of bread. What happens when you mix them up and then heat them is a complex casade of chemistry, biology and physics. Most of the more subtle changes take time and can’t really be rushed. That’s why slow bread is better than fast bread in so many ways.
Aug 20, 2018•6 min
Small bakers couldn’t compete with the giants created by Allied Bakeries, so they turned to science. That produced the Chorleywood bread process, which gave them a quicker, cheaper loaf. Unfortunately, the giant bakeries gobbled up the new method too. More and more small bakeries went out of business as a loaf of bread became cheaper and cheaper. Was it worth it? You tell me. Photo of Beaumont House, former HQ of the British Baking Industries Research Association, where the Chorleywood Bread Pro...
Aug 19, 2018•7 min
Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but many of the ingredients that make megabakeries possible.
Aug 18, 2018•6 min
Stone mills served us well in the business of turning grain into flour for thousands of years, but they couldn’t keep up with either population growth or new and better wheat. The roller mill came about through a succession of small inventions and the deep pockets of a few visionary entrepreneurs. They turned Minneapolis into the flour capital of the world. In case you think my account was oversimplified … Diagram from Wheat Foods Council . Like it? You can support the show directly or via Patre...
Aug 17, 2018•8 min
