Timely to a fault, this episode comes out a couple of days after “farmers and meat lobbyists accuse plant-based food producers of ‘cultural hijacking’”. That’s in the EU, where this week the European Parliament will vote whether to ban the phrases “veggie burger“ and “veggie sausage,“ among others. Of course the plant-based food producers will have none of it, saying that “claims of consumer confusion are ridiculous”. Are they, though? Maybe not for meat, but definitely for whole grain foods. A ...
Oct 19, 2020•23 min
Stuart McCookWhen I think of Ceylon — Sri Lanka — I think of tea, but that’s because I wasn’t alive 150 years ago. In the 1860s, coffee was the island’s most important crop. Coffee leaf rust, a fungus, put paid to the coffee, but only after a global downturn in coffee prices, and planters switched to tea. The rust, however, is not the reason the Brits drink tea rather than coffee, just one of the things I learned from Stuart McCook, who has studied the history of coffee leaf rust and what it mig...
Oct 05, 2020•28 min
I got an email from careme.co.nz and absolutely had to follow up. What was Carême, perhaps the first great French chef, doing in New Zealand? Turns out, he is Jo Crabb’s hero, so of course that’s what she named her cooking classes and her website. I wanted to find out more, and Jo was kind enough to agree to chat over, I must admit, a slightly dodgy connection. (I can’t believe I am complaining, but I am. When you can talk forever, for free, halfway around the world, that ought to be enough. But...
Sep 21, 2020•18 min
Brian Dott researching chillies in China Think of Szechuan food and you think of hot and spicy, chilli-laden dishes. At least, I do. Chilli pepper is firmly established as the most widely used spice around the world, and nowhere more so than in China. And yet, chillies were unknown in China before about 1570. They arrived by at least three different routes, almost certainly more than once in each area, and found favour with ordinary Chinese people extremely rapidly. The ruling classes were not n...
Sep 07, 2020•30 min
I’ll be honest, I thought I was pretty savvy about coffee taxonomy knowing that there were two kinds, arabica and robusta. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a research paper about “ Coffea stenophylla and C. affinis , the Forgotten Coffee Crop Species of West Africa” caught my attention. And of course, as I should have known, there are scores of different coffee species. What is particularly intriguing about C. stenophylla , however, is that in its day people considered it a very fine coffee indeed. A ...
Jun 29, 2020•21 min
Soyer in the Crimea with several of his army stoves, and Lord Rokeby and General Pelissier Alexis Soyer was perhaps the greatest chef of Victorian England. He designed the most modern kitchen of the 1840s and equipped it with many of his own inventions. He cooked unimaginably luxurious — and expensive — dinners for royalty and the aristocracy. He also built soup kitchens for the poor and his Famine Soup fed hundreds of thousands of destitute people in Ireland. His cookbooks sold in the hundreds ...
Jun 15, 2020•18 min
This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. First came Margot Finn discussing disputations about taste and then Chad Ludington explained how you are what you drink . Now they’re both back, along with a snippet from a long-ago episode with sommelier Marco Lori to round out the discussion. I can’t guarantee that I won’t return to the subject again in the future, not least because I find it endlessly fascinating. The challenge, I think, is disentangling aspects of gustatory taste that are c...
Jun 01, 2020•21 min
Taste has never really been purely subjective, good taste has always come with the baggage of social status and moral superiority. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where the extended meanings of taste — refinement, discernment, judgement — brought with them an assumption that these were also the qualities associated with the ability to govern well. If you could choose a superior wine, of course you could choose a superior policy for the nation. Chad Ludington, Professor of...
May 11, 2020•21 min
Taste is a very curious thing. We understand that how we taste something is almost entirely subjective, that while it depends to some extent on the physical and chemical properties of the things we’re tasting, the sensation is overlaid with all sorts of cultural and personal memories. Unless you have access to all of those, there’s nothing you can say about my taste. Except, we do that all the time. We slip easily from taste being indisputable to good taste and bad taste and from there to making...
Apr 27, 2020•16 min
Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work as a wheat breeder. The disease-resistant, dwarf wheats that he developed were the foundation of the Green Revolution, banishing global famine and turning India into a food-exporting nation. Many people have hailed Borlaug as a saint, a saviour of humanity. Others have blamed him for everything that is wrong with the modern global food system. The truth, naturally, lies somewhere in between, which is brought out in a new documentary a...
Apr 13, 2020•30 min
Darra Goldstein combines a scholar’s knowledge of history and literature with a cook’s interest in recipes and ingredients. She had already written extensively on food across the vast Soviet empire, but more recently turned her attention to a search for what she calls “the true heart of Russian food“. She found it on the Kola Peninsula, a wild and forbidding part of Russia right at the top of Scandinavia. Our conversation, prompted by her new book, went further afield to include glimpses of food...
Mar 30, 2020•28 min
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food – Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище – was published in 1939 as a complete guide for Soviet citizens. It was both practical, with recipes and tips on etiquette, hygiene and nutrition, and propaganda, with pictures of lavish spreads that no ordinary citizen would ever enjoy. It was, effectively, the only cookbook most Russians knew, and for a few writers has acted as a springboard to produce a food-based memoir. Latest of these is Anna Kharzeeva, a young Russian wo...
Mar 16, 2020•20 min
There is more to good nutrition than calories and protein. The realisation that you can be perfectly well fed, maybe even too well fed, and yet still malnourished, is relatively recent. It often goes by the name hidden hunger, and reflects a lack of essential micronutrients in the diet. Tackling the lack of micronutrients is tricky because people do not really feel their hidden hunger. “No-one wakes up saying ‘I crave vitamin A today’,” as a recent paper put it. That paper looks back over the 25...
Mar 02, 2020•28 min
Last episode, Jonathan Morris told me about the rise of coffee culture in Italy and how that changed as it made the move to London. Even long after the first proper espresso machines appeared in Soho, the UK was not a huge coffee drinker. Not so the United States, where coffee became an essential drug for the Union during the Civil War. In this episode, Jonathan Morris tells me how the habit lingered and grew into the bottomless cup of diner coffee. Along the way, we talked about Starbucks and a...
Feb 17, 2020•16 min
The original espresso coffee, at least as a widely available beverage, goes back only to the earliest years of the 20th century. That’s when Luigi Bezzera, a Milanese inventor, got his first patent on the machine that became the Pavoni Ideale in 1905. But while it was touted as an espresso machine, making coffee expressly for you at express train speed, we would not recognise the cup it offered as a modern espresso. Jonathan Morris, professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire in the ...
Feb 03, 2020•29 min
Here, for the New Year, is a confession and apology. I was completely wrong about porridge-stirring implements and I am here to make things right. In the episode about Porridge , I mocked the idea that the traditional Scottish spurtle, which to all intents and purposes is just a stick, might be better for stirring than a spoon. My (faulty) reasoning was that a spoon offered a greater surface area to break up lumps. In fact, as I now know, the stirrer does not break up the lumps directly. I noted...
Jan 20, 2020•10 min
Well-connected urbanites have become very familiar with aspects of the sharing economy. Why own a car, when you can share someone else’s, complete with driver? In the right places, you can even share power tools that would otherwise spend most of their lives asleep in someone’s tool chest. True sharing is not quite the same as the gig economy, where in essence you are buying a tiny slice of someone’s time to deliver your pizza, walk your dog or assemble your flat-pack furniture, although the two...
Dec 23, 2019•19 min
Vicky Bennison It’s a kind of family fantasy. Each week, a kindly, twinkling grannie creates pasta by hand, making it look as easy as falling off a log. Her hands work unsupervised; kneading, stretching, pinching, rolling, the myriad shapes emerging, perfect. There’s cheesy music, and just enough information to give the impression that you too could do it. Welcome to the world of Pasta Grannies, a YouTube Channel that provides almost half a million subscribers with a regular dose of nostalgia an...
Dec 09, 2019•25 min
In the wake of the previous episode on how capuchin monkeys find their food , I learned that many people were unaware just how difficult and dangerous it is to get cashew nuts. Not for us, of course; you just buy a little bag of them. For the people who process the nuts to fill those bags, however, it is a very different story. Permanently damaged fingers, burned by the acid that protects the cashew, are an occupational hazard for the hundreds of thousands of women who extract the kernels. Mozam...
Nov 25, 2019•18 min
When chimpanzees were first seen stripping the leaves off slender branches and inserting them into termite nests to fish for the insects, people marvelled. Our nearest relatives, using tools to get nutritious food. Imagine, then, the surprise among primatologists when capuchin monkeys, not nearly as closely related to us, proved equally adept at tool use. Capuchins select stones that can be half as heavy as they are and carry them long distances to use as nutcrackers. Elisabetta Visalberghi is a...
Nov 11, 2019•31 min
A rainbow handful of carrots graces the cover of Peter Hertzmann’s new book. But, as I discovered when I spoke to Peter, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Or even, apparently, by its title: 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot . Because although all the methods (not recipes!) feature carrots in one form or another, they’re intended to offer techniques that, Peter insists, you can apply to many other vegetables, fruits, and even meat and fish. There is, indeed, much to be learned from the book, even for a...
Oct 21, 2019•20 min
Porridge, for me, is made of oats, water, a bit of milk and a pinch of salt. Accompaniments are butter and brown sugar or, better yet, treacle, though I have nothing against people who add milk or even cream. So, while I’ve been aware of the inexorable rise of porridge in all its forms, I’ve been blissfully ignorant of the details. When I make, or eat, a risotto or a dal, I certainly don’t think of it as a porridge. Maybe now I will, and all because Laura Valli took the trouble to send me a copy...
Oct 07, 2019•21 min
Earlier this summer, I learned about a talk at the annual conference of the American Society for Horticultural Science. The press release said it “holds all the intrigue of a murder mystery and all the painstaking, arduous pursuit of an archeological dig, along with a touch of serendipity”. And it concerned the rediscovery of a kind of radish that in its day was extremely famous. My kind of mystery. Naturally I had to talk to the sleuth cum Indiana Jones, Dr Gary Bachmann. Before I did so, thoug...
Sep 23, 2019•17 min
According to Virgil, Rome owes its existence to a food-based prophesy that persuaded Aeneas that this was indeed the place for the weary Trojans to make a new home. And according to the proprietors of both of the restaurants that claim to serve the original, authentic fettucine Alfredo, Alfredo himself invented the dish in the 1920s. In her new book, Karima Moyer-Nocchi examines The Eternal Table from Aeneas to Alfredo, and about all one can conclude is that from the very beginning Rome, like ev...
Sep 09, 2019•25 min
I went to Kilfinane, in Ireland, for the Hearsay Audio Festival. I stayed because Maurice Gilbert offered to show me round his apple empire at Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park. I was sitting in O’Seachnasaíth’s public house, having just finished an excellent take-out that I’d brought in from Tasty Bites, because that’s how things work there, and enjoying a final Guinness. A chap I recognised, because I’d seen him grilling hamburgers at the Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park, introduced himself, and I lear...
Aug 26, 2019•16 min
The most recent extension of the containment zone now covers the whole of the Salento peninsulaIn 2013, a few olive trees near Gallipoli, in Lecce province in the heel of Italy’s boot, seemed to be dying of drought even though there was water. Turned out they had a disease caused by a nasty bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa , and it was the first time this particular disease had been identified in Europe. In California, where Xylella causes Pierce’s Disease in grapevines, it costs about a million do...
Aug 12, 2019•24 min
I’m going to be taking a little break. This episode explains that, and rounds up some of the responses to the show about Eating Alone. Special thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. Notes There are no notes. I mean, c’mon. Huffduff it
May 13, 2019•3 min
At the beginning of April, during the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, a little marquee in the main square of Kilfinane, a small mountain village, saw a steady stream of visitors enter. They would put on a pair of headphones, listen for a few minutes, and come out beaming a big smile. They had just heard one of the stories in a specially curated installation called Table for One. After listening to one of the stories myself, I was inspired to reflect on my own thoughts about eating alo...
Apr 29, 2019•18 min
Whether the last supper was a Passover Seder I do not know. I do know that the rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, although always open to evolution. And yet, there don’t seem to be any universal elements about Easter celebratory foods. The episode looks at these two contrasting aspects of ritual food. First, Susan Weingarten talks about an essential item on the Passover table that is not mentioned in God’s original instructions for the last supper of the Is...
Apr 15, 2019•35 min
In matters of personal taste there are no absolutes. I like this, you like that. But does that also mean that there is no good, no bad? That is a surprisingly complex question, especially when it comes to as fundamental a food as bread. William Rubel is a freelance historian of food who seems to take a delight in pricking the pretensions of people like me, who think that some kinds of bread are better than others. “Why can’t we like what we like?” he asked in a defence of supermarket packaged br...
Apr 01, 2019•26 min
