It is impossible to avoid the past in Rome; indeed, the past is why so many people come to Rome. If you’re interested in the history of food, though, there’s been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut its doors, aside from a few restaurants resting on their laurels. A new museum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill and facing the chariot-racing stadium, has put food history back on the tourist map. I was very fortunate to get a guided tour from the director, Matteo Ghirighini, a few days bef...
May 02, 2022•23 min
Plants of the weedy wild relatives of the tomato all look pretty much like one another, but under the surface they’re a seething mass of genetic diversity. That diversity — along with the discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico — has allowed researchers to finally tell a story of tomato domestication that fits all the available evidence. In essence, people domesticated the tomato in the Amazonian areas of Ecuador and Peru, but from wild material originally from Mexico. Traditional varieties, ...
Apr 18, 2022•18 min
Aaron Vallance’s writing at his website 1dish4theroad has twice been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers, not bad for someone who admits to having great difficulty doing his English homework at school. Even more, Aaron Vallance manages to combine sharing great restaurants from the many diasporas present in London with being a doctor in the National Health Service. I first became aware of Aaron’s website through Curry and Kneidlach: A Tale of Two Immigrant Families , co-written with Shahnaz ...
Apr 04, 2022•26 min
Jessica Kehinde Ngo recently wrote an impassioned piece bemoaning the fact that “the plantain has long been eclipsed by its banana cousin”. That alarmed me a little, as did the question immediately afterwards: “Where can the curious go to learn about its fascinating transnational history?” My problems were, first, that I do not regard plantains and bananas as cousins. Botanically, they are one and the same. Secondly, despite having apparently done lots of research, Jessica Kehinde Ngo seems not ...
Mar 14, 2022•16 min
David Kaplan calls himself a taste realist. That means he really does think that there’s something there, in food or drink, that enables us to agree on what it tastes like, if only we have the vocabulary. Kaplan is professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, and aesthetics is only one of the areas of philosophy that he applies specifically to food in his book Food Philosophy: An Introduction . We talked about all of them in this episode. Notes Food Philosophy: An Introduction is pu...
Feb 21, 2022•31 min
Despite large investments in aid programmes, poverty and hunger remain persistent problems in many parts of the world. Most aid, though, gives people what the donors think they need. What if you give poor people cash, to spend as they see fit? The leader in this field is a charity called Give Directly, started by students at Harvard and MIT after their research showed that a lot of philanthopy was both very inefficient and not very effective. Unconditional cash has greater impact, at lower cost,...
Feb 07, 2022•18 min
June Hersh The story is that way back when, Neolithic people discovered that they could eat milk that had gone sour with impunity, even though ordinary milk upset their digestion. The sour milk allowed them to get the nutritional benefit of milk, and also favoured anyone who could actually tolerate a little lactose. And thus was the culture of yoghurt born, helping those Neolithic farmers to move into northern Europe. Fast forward 10,000 years or thereabouts, and the bacteria that soured milk we...
Jan 24, 2022•24 min
Bologna likes to think of itself as the pinnacle of food culture in Italy, so it is a bit of a wonder that it took until the 5th edition of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work to focus attention on food. All of the 11 exhibitions were really interesting and well curated, not least because they were often in glorious spaces that are not normally open to the public, resulting in some very fine cultural juxtapositions. But there was one that really caught my eye because it offered lite...
Dec 20, 2021•16 min
Farrell Monaco at one of the two passes to the huge oven Down the River Tiber from Rome is the huge archaeological site of Ostia Antica, which used to be the main port for the city. It’s all ruins now, of course, and open to the elements, but still incredibly suggestive. As you stroll around under the umbrella pines, it’s hard not to daydream about what things might have been like a couple of thousand years ago. In my case, with very little formal education in the matter, those daydreams are pre...
Dec 06, 2021•27 min
The story that’s often told of the potato in Europe is one of ignorant, superstitious peasants and wily aristocrats. The peasants shun the potato until the wily aristo plays a trick on them to open their eyes to the true value of the potato. The aristo might be someone like Antoine-Augustin Parmentier in France or Frederick the Great in Prussia, but whoever it was, the bones of the story remain the same. And — mea culpa — I believed the story and even retold it myself on occasion. So I naturally...
Nov 15, 2021•24 min
Rachel Roddy is a marvellous conduit between the many cultures and kitchens of her adopted homeland and a world that simply cannot get enough of Italy. Her latest book is all about pasta, although she wisely recognised that there was little point in trying to be encyclopaedic. Instead, she chose 50 shapes on which to hang history, culture, personal stories and, of course, recipes and suggestions. We met just in time for me to get this episode ready for World Pasta Day, today. We talked about the...
Oct 25, 2021•24 min
After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a chef brought the tandoor oven and his tandoori chicken from Peshawar to a new restaurant he opened in Delhi, the Moti Mahal. There, he created makkhani murghi , butter chicken; tandoori chicken in a sauce that combines tomatoes, butter and cream. Seventy years later, the internet was overrun by a recipe for an “easy, authentic, creamy, spicy, and delicious” version of the “traditional Indian restaurant dish”. Urvashi Pitre, who created that re...
Oct 11, 2021•21 min
Eric RathThe California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination. Back in the mid 1980s, when I made a documentary for BBC TV about disgust and learned food habits, we chose sushi as our exemplar of the Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods. Raw fish. Cold rice. Seaweed. What’s to like? If I had known then of the rich history of sushi, I’m sure we could have made even more of its strange 1980s incarnation. Eric Rath’s history of sushi traces the word ba...
Sep 27, 2021•25 min
Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa is a lasting reminder of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. When I visited, almost 10 years ago, a somewhat ancient machine was producing terrific cups of espresso for a huge crowd, and they were doing a roaring trade in beans too. Tomoca is in some ways a symbol not just of Ethiopian coffee, but also of the Italian connection and, at one remove, of the way that coffee ties Italy and Ethiopia to Brazil. Diana Garvin, an historian, recently published a paper th...
Sep 13, 2021•22 min
India, like most places on Earth, suffered its fair share of famines over the centuries. From the horrendous Bengal famine of 1769, when a third of the population perished under the gaze of the East India Company, to the awful famine of 1943, this time under British imperial rule. Indian politicians gained independence in 1947, promising that they would do better for their citizens. Although they coped well with the refugees after partition, they were ill-prepared for crop failures across much o...
Jun 21, 2021•31 min
The idea of planetary boundaries, within which human life can “develop and thrive for generations to come”, was launched in 2009. Even then, we had crossed three boundaries, all intimately tied up with food production. But the process of “using up” resources, rather than simply making use of them, to supply our food is a much older pattern. In his book Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter, professor of history at Ohio State University, makes a powerful case that it was the British Empire that se...
Jun 07, 2021•28 min
Food systems have been in the news lately, not least because the United Nations will be convening a food systems summit some time in September or October. The lead-up to the summit has drawn a lot of attention to the notion of food systems, which roughly means everything about food, from how it is produced to how we eat it. If you’re looking for a guide through the tangled thickets of global food systems, you can do no better than Jess Fanzo’s book Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? Jess Fanzo st...
May 24, 2021•29 min
Midleton, in County Cork in Ireland, is not the kind of place where you would expect to find the headquarters of a growing global spice merchant. The farmers market in nearby Cork is where Arun Kapil and his wife Olive first started selling spices. Since then the company Green Saffron has grown steadily, drawing on Arun’s love of spices and family connections in India. It is still selling at farmers markets. But it is also shipping containers of carefully sourced spices to a European hub in Holl...
May 10, 2021•26 min
A little less than a year ago I talked to Professor Jeremy Haggar about his search for a forgotten coffee of Sierra Leone. It was a species called Coffea stenophylla , named for its narrower than usual leaves, which had an extremely good reputation a hundred years ago. Unfortunately it was not very productive and so, despite its excellent flavour, it was shoved out by much more productive robusta coffee. After quite a search, Haggar and his colleagues found a few plants, probably not more than 1...
Apr 26, 2021•19 min
Colin Tudge has been writing about food and farming for a long time in a series of thought-provoking books. His latest is The Great Re-Think, which examines the current state of the world and sets out the steps needed to get to where he (and many other people) think we ought to be. They include skill and craft over automation, complexity over simplicity, and diversity over monoculture. The start, though, is to really think about what it is that we want our food system to provide. A word about th...
Apr 12, 2021•28 min
Açai, goji, chia. Pepino, mangosteen, rambutan. Quinoa, teff, fonio. Names to conjure with, especially if you’re in the business of selling food dreams. All of them have been touted at one time or another as being the next big thing. Superfoods that can cure all the ills that ail you. Many more mundane foods — chocolate, coffee, red wine — have mutated into functional foods, imbued with power to promote good health and fight disease. “[B]etween 2011 and 2015 there was a phenomenal 202% increase ...
Mar 29, 2021•25 min
Photographer, writer, traveller, cook, geographer, culinary anthropologist: Naomi Duguid is all this, and more. True, her books contain approachable recipes that have won awards and accolades from food-first organisations, like the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. But they also offer sensitive insights into the lives of people far from her native Canada. Why do they prepare, cook and eat the foods they do? How does the way they live influence th...
Mar 15, 2021•33 min
Anna Herforth is the lead author of Cost and affordability of healthy diets across and within countries , a background paper prepared for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. In the paper, Herforth and her colleagues calculate the cost of getting enough energy, getting adequate nutrition, and getting a diet that meets healthy eating guidelines. The results are sobering. All this is possible because the World Bank collects a massive amount of data in its International Compa...
Mar 01, 2021•21 min
As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. You didn’t need to be a mathematical whizz to understand the force of Thomas Malthus’ argument in An Essay on the Principle of Population, even if you didn’t agree with the methods he proposed for dealing with it. Firebrands like Paul Ehrlich whipped us up, and Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome provided food for thought as we contemplated future famines. And then, just like that, population vanis...
Feb 15, 2021•23 min
Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That efficiency, however, comes at a cost: the food needed to support such a metabolism. Much of that food could be eaten directly by people, and certainly the lush pastures that support modern dairy cows, for example, might be put to better use growing food for people. But then, where will our meat, milk and eggs come from? Lawrence Alderson founded the Ra...
Feb 01, 2021•26 min
Another year, another International Year. Several, probably. The one that concerns me is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, as designated by the United Nations and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. I’m deeply skeptical about these things, and always wonder how else the money could have been spent to better effect. But the money is never available to be spent on anything else. So I’ll just take the opportunity to rail against people who can’...
Jan 18, 2021•15 min
Professor Donald WorsterIt’s time to face an uncomfortable fact. After more than 200 episodes devoted in their various ways to what we eat and drink, I’ve never looked at the direct consequences of all that ingestion: excretion. Time to remedy that, by talking to Professor Donald Worster. The ostensible reason is his essay The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China. While we do discuss the origins and details of what he calls “the faeces economy,” there’s a lot more to it than that. E...
Dec 14, 2020•24 min
Erika RappaportErika Rappaport’s study of tea meticulously documents the many ways in which tea, as it became one of the first global commodities, was responsible for so many aspects of modern life. In the course of our conversation, it became obvious that there is no single reason why the Brits turned to tea. They were drinking roughly equal amounts of tea and coffee to begin with, long before coffee leaf rust arrived in Ceylon, but it was mostly Chinese tea. When the British East India Company...
Nov 30, 2020•29 min
Not so long ago, the only clues we had to animal domestication came from archaeological digs. If you were lucky, you could get a reasonably accurate date for bones that were definitely not from wild animals, although the origin stories they told were vague and unsatisfying. More recently, molecular biology has come to the rescue in the form of DNA sequences, which can even — again with a bit of luck — be extracted from very old bones. Better yet, it has become routine to sequence DNA from all ma...
Nov 16, 2020•23 min
Teresa Lust teaches Italian at the Rassias Center for World Languages of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and is an acclaimed translator. In some ways, that is the fault of a trip to her mother’s ancestral village in Rocco Canavese, outside Turin. There, she met her family and their foods, which started her on a quest to learn the language properly so that she could learn about the food. In her latest book she brings to life her journeys through Italy and shares the recipes, suitably enhanced ...
Nov 01, 2020•22 min
