The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize, and a lot of work to understand the genetic changes from teosinte to maize. The big pro...
Dec 04, 2023•26 min
Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is defrauding customers, and yet there is very little public outrage, except in the immediate wake of yet another revelation of wrong-doing. Honey adulteration is nothing new, as I heard from historian Matt Phillpott, who has been studying the practice ancient and m...
Nov 13, 2023•23 min
Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop Type 2 Diabetes. But while nutritionists were happy to recommend (low-fat) yoghurt, which seemed to offer similar protection, nowhere was ice-cream mentioned. David Johns wrote that article, and had previously looked into guidelines on cutting salt and the Big S...
Oct 30, 2023•27 min
Today is the 80th anniversary of the roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of the Jews of Rome. That much I knew as I was planning this episode. More recent events took me and everyone else completely by surprise. I am sticking to my plan. Rome’s former ghetto has become a tourist attraction, with an interesting museum under the Great Synagogue and plenty of other sites to see. And where there are tourists, there is food. The foodification of the ghetto, however, goes well beyond overpriced snack...
Oct 16, 2023•29 min
Every aspect of large, industrial food creates a niche for people who want a less standardised alternative, and if the stars align you may have producers nearby who are willing to fill that niche. So it is with Big Milk. There are small dairies who offer fresh milk produced to the same exacting standards of hygeine without being further processed. Not raw milk (which also has its adherents and suppliers), but whole milk that has been pasteurised and nothing more. Almost as soon as I had publishe...
Oct 02, 2023•22 min
In her latest book English Food: A People’s History , Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due recognition that “‘the English’ are not a single entity” and that the past necessarily illuminates the present. Impossible to cover all that in a single episode, or even several, we set out to explore what happens when the vast bulk of the English do not have enough to eat. Food riots are a recurring feature of rural life in England, often the resul...
Sep 18, 2023•31 min
Anne Mendelson’s new book Spoiled is subtitled The Myth of Milk as Superfood , and at its core argues that while there’s nothing wrong with fresh milk, at least for those who can digest it as adults, the belief that you cannot have enough of a good thing has created a monstrous industry. Dairy farmers have always had the short end of the stick, because fresh milk is inevitably a buyers’ market. Cows have been manipulated to divorce them from any kind of natural life. And milk drinkers are being ...
Sep 04, 2023•38 min
Saghar Setareh left Iran in 2007 at 22 years old. She came to Rome to study graphic design and photography. The way she tells it, when she arrived she “certainly didn’t have a particular passion for food”. Slowly, though, that passion developed, first for Italian food and then by extension for the food of her homeland. Her book, which emerged from her passion, shares stories and recipes from Iran, from Italy, and from all the countries in between, and it is simply gorgeous, showcasing her multip...
Jun 05, 2023•32 min
Koen Van Mechelen (left) and Olivier Hanotte (right) sandwich a large marble bust of a crowing cosmopolitan rooster.In 1999, Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist, decided to cross a Belgian rooster with a French hen. The union of the Mechelse Koekoek and the Poulet de Bresse gave rise to a clutch of chicks that thrilled Vanmechelen with their diversity, and launched him on a path to create the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. One breed at a time, the CCP accumulated a huge amount of genetic diversity...
May 22, 2023•28 min
Coupons and ration books during war was a way for the British government to try and ensure that restricted items were distributed as fairly as possible, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well most of the time. At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with centrally cooked meals that people took home to eat, but soon blossomed into a far-reaching network of government-run restaurants. A new book — Feeding th...
May 08, 2023•25 min
About two billion people around the world do not get enough micronutrients in their diet. This lack of vitamins and minerals — often called hidden hunger — has severe and lasting effects on individuals and their societies. One very popular approach to tackling hidden hunger is known as biofortification, engineering or selecting varieties of staple crops so that they produce higher levels of one micronutrient or another. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Hidden hunger is strongly correlat...
Apr 24, 2023•24 min
Miranda Brown successfully stretches Mr Song’s string cheeseI’ve long believed that the reason there is no milk or cheese in Chinese food culture today is because ethnic Chinese people are likely to be lactose intolerant. But that may well be an oversimplification. In looking at old texts, Professor Miranda Brown of Michigan University discovered recipes and advice on butter, milk and cheeses. So she set about trying to make the cheeses, with some success. As for intolerance, yes, a study in 198...
Apr 10, 2023•26 min
Wally Thurman Time was when chicken wings were barely a thing, appendages that nobody much wanted to eat. Chickens were bred to deliver big breasts and wings were an afterthought until the advent of Buffalo wings in the 1960s. Now, and especially in the run-up to the Superbowl and March Madness, wings are in much greater demand than breasts, which is reflected in much higher prices for wings. I wanted to understand how the market copes with changing demand for the different parts of the whole bi...
Mar 27, 2023•22 min
Ten years ago, the first episode of Eat This Podcast featured Ben Reade talking about some butter that he had buried in a Swedish bog, the better to understand the bog butter occasionally unearthed in Ireland (and elsewhere). The butter for that experiment was made by Patrik Johansson, using methods taught him by his grandmother, lightly churned with some modern food science. The result is a product that can be found only at a few fine restaurants. That is unlikely ever to change, as Patrik says...
Mar 13, 2023•23 min
Jessica BarnesEgypt spends about 3% of its budget subsidising bread for about three-quarters of its population. Threats to that subsidy provoke massive civil unrest, helping to topple the regime in 2011. As a result, bread and wheat are fundamental to the government’s security and that of the people of Egypt. Wheat yields in Egypt are among the highest in Africa, but they are no match for the population, which is why Egypt is the biggest buyer of wheat on the global market. Even when government ...
Feb 06, 2023•29 min
Sean Wittenberg, Safe Catch CEOThere is an awful lot of disagreement on the subject of mercury in fish and shellfish and how harmful it might be to people. That’s especially true for tuna, which are top predators that accumulate mercury from all the fish they eat over their long lives. Many countries, including the USA, offer guidelines about how much tuna it is “safe” to eat, but there are problems with that. First, not all tuna is tested for mercury. And second, some individual fish contain wa...
Jan 23, 2023•20 min
Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively identical. This has never suited organic farmers or any other smaller scale growers, including home gardeners. Finally, after a few false starts, a new regulation permitted the marketing of “organic heterogeneous material” from January 2022. One of the org...
Jan 09, 2023•25 min
At the end of the previous episode on mothers’ milk Professor Amy Brown mentioned an important source of anxiety for new mothers: they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten, and that pushes them to use a see-through bottle and switch from breast to formula. It may surprise you to learn that the Italian Fascist regime came up with a solution 90 years ago. In this episode, Professor Diana Garvin provides some insights into Fascist breastfeeding, and a friend of mine explains how it linge...
Dec 24, 2022•16 min
It has been a difficult year for food supplies, and even more so for food markets. Prices everywhere seem to be higher than they have been for a long time, and that’s just in retail shops. On international commodity markets, things have been wild. Wheat shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but had started rising well before that, in mid 2021. Prices began to drift down in mid-May, while fighting was still intense and no wheat had yet left the Black Sea. As became clear, there was no...
Dec 12, 2022•24 min
Perhaps unsurprisingly, barbecue restaurants have featured in two really important decisions of the US Supreme Court. Katzenbach v. McClung held that Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, despite being a minuscule mom and pop operation, was nevertheless subject to the Civil Rights Act and could not deny table service on the basis of race. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, in addition to denying the owner’s racist justification that “his religious beliefs compel him to oppose any integration ...
Nov 28, 2022•35 min
Megan Dean (left) and Matthew Smith (right) World Philosophy Day happens later this week, which makes it a good time to be asking what constitutes good behaviour in a host and, equally, in a guest. I’m prompted by a recent article that took the rise in food allergies and intolerances as a starting point to ask how a host should act when faced with a guest whose professed allergies seem a tad suspect. Is it OK to ignore guest requests as snowflake signifiers? What should guests do when faced with...
Nov 14, 2022•24 min
People, not least parents, have becomes concerned about the increasing proportion of obese and overweight children in wealthier countries. It has even been called an epidemic. Can biology and anthropology deepen our understanding of childhood feeding and suggest possible solutions? Tina Moffat certainly thinks so. She has studied how children are nourished in Japan, Nepal, France and her native Canada. Her book – Small Bites – rounds up the evidence and shares several important observations. Neo...
Oct 31, 2022•25 min
Since the 1960s, European seed law could best be summarised as “everything not forbidden is compulsory”. There is a common catalogue of registered seed varieties, and only varieties on the list are on sale. With a flat fee for registration, only the most lucrative varieties are registered, which suits big seed companies and tomato growers, but meant that lots of varieties with more niche appeal — for home gardeners or small growers — vanished. The law is now being relaxed a little, allowing trad...
Oct 17, 2022•20 min
A wet nurse (for that is what Hera was in all tellings of the story) created the Milky Way when her divine milk sprayed across the heavens. Today’s nursing mothers are not so blessed. Although women have a legal right to breastfeed in public across the United States and the UK (and many other countries), there are plenty of individuals who seem to think that they have the right to tell them to stop, and plenty of new mothers who are intimidated enough not to try. Why? How can this most essential...
Oct 03, 2022•33 min
Atkins. South Beach. Whole30. Zone. Keto. Banting? Yes, Banting. Not the Frederick Banting of Banting & Best, discoverers of insulin, but his distant relative William Banting, author, in 1863, of the self-published Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public . Not the first fad diet by any means — Banting, a prominent London undertaker, had tried a bunch — it is the model, acknowledged and otherwise, for all the high-fat, low carbohydrate diets now so familiar and one of the first to seize...
Sep 20, 2022•27 min
In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain , we move on to empire. The earliest city states in Mesopotamia built their fortunes on their position astride grain transport routes. Still today, the ability to tax grain as it moves and to control that movement is a source of political and commercial power around the world. Nations also need to remember the need to feed the forces that exercise their power, which is often more important than materiel. A...
Jul 04, 2022•32 min
Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange, invented in Venice and Genoa, created a piece of paper that increased in value as the time for delivery of the wheat drew near, but it was the need to avoid rank profiteering in times of war that created the futures market. Standard amounts of standard quality grain made buying and selling the crop even more efficient – and saved the Union army duri...
Jun 27, 2022•29 min
Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage of the storability of seeds to move the food from where it grew to where it might be eaten. Wheat, the pre-eminent cereal, moved along routes that were ancient before the Greek empire, carried, probably, by ox-drawn carts and guided along these black paths by pe...
Jun 20, 2022•30 min
Many people take the myth of Demeter — Ceres in Latin — and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. It is, but there may be more to it than that. Why else would it be worth scaring participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries into saying absolutely nothing about what went on during these initiation rites into the cult of Demeter and Persephone? Maybe the story hides a secret so valuable that it was worth protecting. Elucidating the Eleusinian My...
Jun 13, 2022•8 min
Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, was an ideal base for the transatlantic slave trade, although the European powers that established themselves in the region found other goods to trade too. One of the most important was the peanut, brought by Portuguese explorers to Africa, where it grew well, tended mostly by enslaved African labourers. Peanuts were exported in large quantities, mostly to France, to lubricate the industrial revolution and to provide a key raw material for soap, especially...
May 16, 2022•19 min
