Eat This Podcast

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The qualities that make durum wheat so attractive for pasta have nothing to do with the size of the semolina particles from which it is made.

"I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day."

Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can't deliver either.

Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.

Nathan Myhrvold is right: "The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”

Bakers who grind their own grain are all utterly in love with the flour they get. I'm jealous.

If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.

It needn't actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.

All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.

There's a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.

Perhaps there's more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.

A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!

St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.

A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.

Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.

Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.

How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called …

That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. The rest of us can call it what we like.

Synthetic wheat; it isn't natural, but it is a very good thing.

Credit where credit's due: The Father of the Green Revolution had an unacknowledged father himself.

Today's Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn't matter. People want Red Fife because it is Red …

"In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the 'building material' required ... And to use their most valuable qualities for …

In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.

Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".

Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.

How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?

Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?

It's a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don't need a heat-proof container to boil water.

Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn't all that difficult.

It's magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.

In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal there was to refine sugar rather than feeding it …

How do farmers' markets and concentrated food industries that depend on long food chains stack up when it comes to food-borne illness? Truth is, nobody really knows.

The number of firms that own the food brands you see is much smaller than you think. That's not good for consumers or suppliers.

Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves.

A hop crop flop in Europe made the fortunes of growers in the Pacific north west of America, none more so than in Oregon's Willamette valley. Ezra Meeker, the hop king, promoted the gemütlichkeit of hop-picking in the …

Eating is a political act, as Wendell Berry reminded us. Which is why I was very happy to sample the food on offer by Syrian refugees in Hummustown.

Even before the Romans, grain arrived in what was to become London by water, and it continues to do so today, although the mechanics of the trade have changed beyond recognition. One of the last people to move grain by …

The Imperial Food Products fire wasn't really an accident; circumstances conspired to make it extremely likely If it hadn't happened in Hamlet, it …

A second visit to Scariff in County Clare, Ireland, to hear from the people working hard to save Ireland's vegetable heritage and make seeds available to a new generation of gardeners.

Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a …

Tom Nealon on the plague-stopping power of lemonade.

Jaan Altosaar on his practical approach to food

Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread

Parke Wilde on SNAP and nutrition

First let's decide what kind of food supply system we want, then use that to bring about a renaissance in real farming.

A trip to the Sheep's Head peninsula in West Cork and one of the pioneer cheesemakers there, Jeffa Gill.

Many of the things you might believe about the history of agriculture in America just aren't true.

Apples picked to perfume a room. Undocumented apples and apples with false papers. Foundlings that could give a supermarket apple a run for its …

Antibiotic resistance is one consequence of feeding animals large amounts of antibiotics -- about three times the amount given to people in the US. …

How an empty kitchen in Boston triggered a breakfast obsession and a new book on noodle soup.

If you really want to do good by spending more on your coffee, you need to look beyond Fair Trade and other certification schemes.

John Speth on how food we may consider disgusting is essential for survival in the Arctic, with added disgusting goodness from Paul Rozin.

Wheat growers are making use of hugely diverse evolutionary populations to give them the seeds they need.

A breed of pigs, well known as far back as 1338, almost vanished in the 1960s. Now it's back, and it's delicious.

Signs of the Venetian occupation are everywhere, as are the imprints of French and British rule. But there are also unique aspects to food and …

A picture is worth way more than 1000 words when it reveals food trends over the past 50 years for more than 150 countries.

Australians devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. They could eat better for less money, but "affordable …

Alternative food facts tramp across the landscape the hordes of the undead. Tom Nealon's new book Food Fights & Culture Wars aims to lay some of …

Perhaps you’ve heard about IBM’s giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that …

You can eat a perfectly nutritious diet for a lot less money than the US government says you need. But would you want to?

Food has always been a marker of social status, only today no elite eater worth their pink Himalayan salt would be seen dead with a slice of fluffy …

Giving up on animals as a source of food is a luxury that many people cannot afford. For poor people in developing countries, a bit of animal source food can greatly improve their health and wellbeing.

I recommend a podcast and share some plans for Eat This Podcast in 2017.

Is the Carolina Runner No.4 peanut "the first peanut cultivated in North America" and does it matter anyway?

Continuing the short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes by getting to grips with the origin of "gherkin" and other names we give cucurbits.

Starting a short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes with a look at the Great Epping Sausage Scandal.

Bad diet is now the number one risk factor for disease. Is the world going to tackle the problem?

If you going to breed vegetables for flavour -- perish the thought -- you need someone to help you decide what's good. Enter the Culinary Breeding …

Foie gras offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a …

A new technique for asking how one taste affects another confirms a recent change of opinion. White wine is often a better choice than red to accompany cheese.

Who knows what evil lurks beneath the wrinkled skin of an "economy" English sausage? And what delights won for the Cumberland and the Newmarket their coveted status of Protected Geographical Indication? Jan Davison, …

Did you know that malt whisky owes its existence in the marketplace to the stock market crash of 1973-74? Neither did I, so when one of the people I interviewed for the craft distilling episode a few weeks back made …

Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible …

A story of exploration, aristocracy and promiscuity, all in the service of better food. What more could you want?

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they're spreading, at least where they're allowed. British Columbia has gone …

It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is relatively benign all year round and you can grow …

Climate change and global trade combine to make it ever more likely that new pests and diseases will threaten food supplies. A classic example is playing out now in Puglia, the region that includes the heel of Italy's …

You can thank the Irish Wine Geese for many of the Grand Crus of France.

In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what remained of the region’s rich agricultural …

Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does not make sense I had no idea that the statistical …

Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown. It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History ... …

The Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums but not others. It ought to be on all of them. This is a seriously interesting museum for anyone who likes butter, and …

By rights, there should have been an episode last week, but there wasn't because I was just back from New York and the James Beard Awards, and I just …

Quinoa -- that darling of the health-conscious western consumer -- came in for a lot of flack a few years ago. Skyrocketing prices caused some food activists to claim that the poor quinoa farmers of the high Andean …

At this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food I talked to Jon Verriet, who’s been researching the history of the haybox. That’s an …

When it comes to cradles of agriculture, West Africa does not often get a look in. The Sahel is better known as a place of famine than of feasting, …

I'm on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I've bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than admit defeat and just leave well enough alone, I decide to record a …

Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been here almost 25 years she developed something of an obsession. On the one hand, she watched “a bewildering decline in the …

   Huffduff it This year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food was dedicated to The material culture of cooking tools and techniques and was …

Rachel Roddy, after about 10 years of hard slog, is an overnight sensation. She's just scooped the André Simon award for best food book in 2015, a very big deal indeed for a first book. I'd been warming up this second …

As promised, another second helping from one of 2015's episodes, before we get to the new stuff. This time, I'm remembering my trip to the little place in St Martin's Lane in London that serves a couture version of …

As ever, I’m taking a little break and bringing you some repeats from 2015. This one is prompted by an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that I’ve just listened to. They decided to cook a peacock for reasons that I think …

Irish music and its influence on the taste of Irish beer

Following the ancient aqueducts to trace the history of the waters of Rome

How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been …

The Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centuries. It was dark because the light of Rome had been extinguished, while …

“Forget organic. Eat local.” Nice, simple advice, from the cover of Time magazine. But more or less pointless. There’s so much more to food systems than just the distance the food travels. Tim Lang coined the phrase …

That sink is where Rachel Roddy, an English woman in Rome, prepares meals to share with her partner Vincenzo, their young son Luca, and a horde of appreciative readers of her website and, now, her first book. Five …

It’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused …

Megan Kimble -- that's her on the left -- is a young journalist in Tucson, Arizona. Back in 2012, she set out to stick it to the processed food man, by eating only unprocessed food for a year. Her book Unprocessed: My …

Have you ever stopped to wonder what drives the incessant innovation in processed food? Who thought that an energy bar would be a good thing to …

The O-Pipin-Na-Piwin Cree Nation have suffered generations of maltreatment at the hands of various official entities. Moved from their homelands further south, they now occupy small scattered settlements in northern …

The heat here in Rome has been something the past couple of weeks. Not up to 2003 of blessed memory, but hot nevertheless. The last thing I needed was for the fridge to start playing up, but it did, making horrible …

The Pamir Mountains of Central Asia hold a fascinating diversity of food crops. Exploring the area in the early years of the 20th century the great …

People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of …

Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for …

This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it. Hunters routinely clean up the animals …

By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I'd prefer not to eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, …

What kind of business wants customers to buy less? The beef business, or at least, one tiny corner of the beef business. Mark Shelley is an environmental film-maker turned cattleman who raises grass-fed beef near …

This episode is a repeat of one first published in October 2014, and the reason is that it has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. I'm utterly thrilled by the news, and gratified that more people have …

Street food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the rich world too. Burrito trucks, Korean barbecue in a taco, ceviche, …

Drinking Italian wine anywhere -- even in Italy -- can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do …

Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and …

A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very interesting meeting it was too. The topic was …

One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the …

Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of …

Why is arrabbiata sauce always served on penne pasta? What's wrong with my spaghetti cacio e pepe? Maureen Fant, co-author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way first explained all back in February 2014 in one …

There's a thin line between protecting the authenticity of a fine traditional food and preventing the kinds of living changes that allowed it to survive long enough to become traditional. Zack Nowak, a food historian, …

Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Don started and eventually sold. An early social …

One of my treats this year was sitting down with Helena Attlee to talk about her book The Land Where Lemons Grow. Part of that interview didn't make it into the final podcast, so here it is now. And if you missed the …

The conservation of the wild turkey was triumph, but it left ornithologists scratching their heads. How many species were there? And where did they …

For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is wonderful. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia?

As people in North America prepare to give thanks and devour unimaginable quantities of food, we go to the heart of the matter. Why are turkeys called turkeys? In next week's show, more about the American contribution …

These days, every little town and village in Italy has its sagra or festa, a weekend, or longer, in celebration of a particular local food. Although …

In the 1930s the Italian fascists decided that floats laden with giant grapes would be the vehicle to drive forward Italian nationalism. Hear how in …

Kazakhstan stretches across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea in the east to China in the west. The country is famous for many things – it is the largest landlocked country in the world, says Wikipedia – but among food …

Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time, bears, and how they may have helped to domesticate those apples. …

It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and the resources it needs -- financial, genetic, human -- are just not …

Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions …

What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. And share the process. Stir-fries, curries, Ethiopian wats, loaves of bread: John Grosvenor, a software developer, posts delectable images of …

Garum is one of those ancient foods that everyone seems to have heard of. It is usually described as “fermented fish guts,” or something equally unappealing, and people often call it the Roman ketchup, because they used …

Randall’s Island is a small piece of land just east of 125th Street in New York’s East River. It is also around 2 degrees further south than the …

I’m fascinated by Japanese food, but from a position of profound ignorance. I’ve never been there and I’ve never having eaten anything I could …

The history of pasta, ancient and modern, is littered with myths about the origins of manufacturing techniques, of cooking, of recipes, of names, of antecedents. Supporting most of these is a sort of truthiness whereby …

What do artisanal cheese and maple syrup have in common? In North America, and elsewhere too, they’re likely to bring to mind the state of Vermont, which produces more of both than anywhere else. They’re also the …

Great wheels of parmesan cheese, stamped all about with codes and official-looking markings, loudly shout that they are the real thing: …

The growing popularity of “Mongolian” restaurants owes less to Mongolian food and more to, er, how shall we say, marketing. To whit: "It’s actually …

A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to …

It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. …

This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself. So I hooked myself up to the audio recorder and went about some of …

“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of …

We’ll have what they’re having has taken on a whole new meaning In a world in which you can get pizza in Tokyo and sushi in Rome, diets have become …

Sure, you've seen Trading Places. But do you know about the history of futures contracts, or why some things are traded on commodities markets and others aren't? I didn't, not really. So I spoke to Kara Newman, food …

About a month ago I got wind of a conference called Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe, 1800-present, at the …

There’s supposed to be this whole mystique surrounding “proper” pasta: how to cook it, which shape with what sauce, how to eat it, all that. And if …

Karen Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes about food – among other things. She emailed to ask if I would be interested in talking to …

Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions. “They” say that turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a business …

The first episode of 2014 is a look back to some of the topics I covered in 2013, and for what I hope is a good reason. With a podcast, unlike a piece of writing or an image, it is very hard to decide quickly whether …

Apologies for the delay in publishing this podcast. One of the joys of not being tied to "proper" radio is the freedom to give a story the length it …

One week jam, the next global hunger and malnutrition. That’s the joy of Eat This Podcast; I get to present what interests me, in the hope that it interests you too. It also means I sometimes get to talk to my friends …

What is jam? “A preserve made from whole fruit boiled to a pulp with sugar.” Lots of opportunities to quibble with that, most especially, if you’re …

When you’re on holiday, or just away from home, do you seek out the “authentic” local food, or look for a reassuringly familar logo? Backpackers, …

The Guadalupe River that flows through Texas used to be known as The River of Nuts, a fact that Wikipedia does not confirm. The nut in question is the pecan, Carya illinoinensis, and the pecan tree is the state tree of …

What, really, is the point of conserving agricultural biodiversity? The formal sector, genebanks and the like, will say it is about genetic resources …

Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could go online and search the internets for a recipe. And you …

I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is identical to that of a crispy one. But the experience falls far short of enjoyable. A crisp needs to be, well, crisp. If it …

Carol Deppe was a guest here a few months ago, talking about how most people misunderstand the potato, which is about as nutritious a vegetable as …

What matters is not how little beer you make, but how carefully you make your beer.

Bling, the Urban Dictionary tells me, is an onomatopoeic representation of light bouncing off a diamond. Or a Bob Kramer original hand-made chef’s knife, which goes for $2000 and up. Of course some people might be able …

Good beef frozen is better than bad beef fresh.

This history of domestication and agriculture encompasses North America too.

Not all progress is bad. Rachel Laudan makes a powerful case that modern methods of making sugar and salt are far superior.

I did not know that that the famous Monty Python spam sketch was recorded on 6 June 1970. At least, that's the claim of a Tumblr obsessed with Minnesota in the 1970s. (Wikipedia says only that "[i]t premiered on 15 …

The big question is, why do amateur growers and those who choose not to care even need the protection of EU seed legislation?

Most of what you think you know about potatoes and nutrition is wrong.

From a wilderness survival trick to a new theory on Neanderthal cooking.

A bit of history about a new, old hop.

The world of fine chocolate has seen some major change in the past few years, much of it focused on the rise of so-called “bean to bar” chocolate …

Among the more miraculous edible transformations is the one that turns raw meat, salt and a few basic spices into some of the most delicious foods …

Peat diggers in Ireland and elsewhere have occasionally unearthed objects, usually made of wood, that contained some kind of greasy, fatty material with a "distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell". Butter. …