Eat This Podcast

Miriam Laker Oketta, left, and Esnatt Gondwe Matekesa I’m proud to revisit an episode from 2022, in which two country directors of the charity Give Directly told me how cash transfers in Rwanda and Malawi make a real difference to the lives of poor people there. The reason is Give Directly’s Pods Fight Poverty campaign, which aims to raise $1,000,000 for families in Rwanda. They’re more than 10% of the way there, and I hope this podcast can add to the total. The reason I made the episode in the first place was to ask whether cash enables people to improve their food security and nutrition. As I heard, it does, which is why I am happy to be part of the campaign. Notes Please consider making a donation. Miriam Laker Oketta and Esnatt Gondwe Matekesa both stressed how evidence guides Give Directly’s activities. The website’s section for research on cash transfers provides summaries. The specific study Miriam Laker-Oketta referred to is Benchmarking a WASH and Nutrition Program to Cash in Rwanda. Here is the transcript. There’s a lot of economics literature on the problems of gift giving. Tim Harford offered some guidance.    Huffduff it

Luisa WeissIt can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon became one of the most-read food bloggers. She was also part of a lively, supportive community, regularly reading and conversing with more than 40 other food bloggers. One thing led to another and she found herself first in cookbook publishing and then with a contract to write her first book, a memoir with food. Two cookbooks followed. We met in Berlin to talk about all that and more. Notes Here’s a link to Luisa Weiss’ website. She also, and this is both impressive and useful, managed to salvage all of the original The Wednesday Chef when it’s original host, Typepad, decided to close everyone down earlier this year. Here is the transcript. Banner image liberated from an archive copy of The Wednesday Chef.    Huffduff it

Robert Spengler IIISettled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought. That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III. Notes Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website. Here’s the transcript. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana    Huffduff it

The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935. Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns. Notes Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit. Here is the transcript. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.    Huffduff it

In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand. That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home. Notes I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled. Here is the transcript.    Huffduff it

After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is. Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock. Dough Take wheat flour, butter, rosewater, sugar and some eggs, of each as needed. To make an apple pie the Wallonian way Take peeled apples the cores removed cook them in Rhenish wine well done, add butter, ginger, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, all cooked well together, then stir in the yolks of two eggs put it in your dough and bake in the Oven as above [i.e. “with fire from below and above”]. After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result. Notes The published paper is Tasting the Past? Developing a Methodology for Researching Historical Tastes in Global Food History, which is behind a paywall, but … Here is the transcript. Banner photo courtesy Marieke Hendriksen. Cover photo detail from Still Life with Fruit Pie and various Objects, by Willem Claesz. Heda 1634, from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. This one has a lid, and may not be apple, but that’s OK.    Huffduff it

Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating. Her latest, The Miracle of Salt, is no exception. Recipes for everything from Acadian salted scallions to zucchini in golden sand sauce (for which you’ll first need to make some brined egg yolks) are seasoned with chapters on flavoured salts, salt harvesting techniques, the geography of salt and plenty more. About the only thing we deliberately didn’t talk about was lacto-fermentation, although there’s plenty of that too. Notes The Miracle of Salt is available at bookshop.org and elsewhere. Naomi Duguid’s website. A few years ago we talked about Exploring the World through Food. Here’s a transcript, thanks to supporters of the podcast Banner photograph by me, of the salt flats in Trapani, Sicily.    Huffduff it

The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explanation for the high nitrogen isotope ratios in Neanderthal remains. Normally, such high ratios are the result of eating lots of meat. John Speth thinks there’s a better interpretation. Speth is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert on how hunter-gatherer societies survive, now and in the recent past, and that makes him a valued colleague of archaeologists trying to interpret the remains of Neanderthal societies. At the start of the summer, he was a co-author on two papers that shed light on Neanderthal diets. One identified the site at Neumark Nord as a fat factory where people extracted valuable bone grease in quantity. The other offers a more convincing explanation for why Neanderthals seem to eat as much meat as lions and tigers. Notes The two papers we talked about are Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago and Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes. Science also had an interview with Melanie Beasley, who did the maggot work, on its podcast. And the previous episodes with John Speth are Neanderthal Diets, a very early episode about how Neanderthals might have boiled starches, and It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you, the paper that prompted Melanie Beasley to measure the nitrogen isotopes of maggots. Here’s the transcript. If you’re wondering why the banner is an old and extremely inaccurate reconstruction of a Neanderthal, the Field Museum, a worthy institution to be sure, makes its images available only from Getty Images, which charges through the nose. I hope they’re both happy with that arrangement.    Huffduff it

Dr Joseph GoldbergerPellagra — a terrible disease characterised by the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death — was first noticed in northern Spain in 1735 and in Italy soon afterwards. Physicians had no idea what to do about it. They established that it was a new disease, and quickly worked out that it was something to do with maize and that it seemed to afflict only very poor people. In Italy, sharecroppers grew and ate maize at the expense of any vegetables. And in the southern US, workers in mill towns subsisted on ground maize imported from the midwest because all the local land was down to cotton. The struggle to understand the causes of pellagra and how to cure and prevent it played out first in Italy and then in the United States, where 1906 saw a large outbreak in Alabama. Competing explanations were driven by large egos and expediency rather than evidence. That was true even after Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service proved that the disease was not contagious and that the deficiency could be quickly reversed with a proper daily diet or a tablespoon of dried yeast. Notes Pellagra and Pellagrous Insanity During the Long Nineteenth Century, by David Gentilcore and Egidio Priani is available under open access Dana Landress recently published Famished for Freedom: Pellagra and Medical Clemency at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. I consulted loads of other publications; let me know if you want a source for anything. Photograph of Joseph Goldberger from the Library of Congress. Here is the transcript.    Huffduff it

Alessandro Biavati, chef. Quite by chance, I booked a brief cycling holiday at an agriturismo based on a farm that is home to Quin Italia, an enterprise that aims to be the first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. The food at the agriturismo was excellent, as it usually is, but there were only two items on the menu that featured quinoa: a beer and a plate of deep fried croquettes that owed more to chickpeas than to quinoa. That was just one of the points I raised with Alessandro Biavati, chef and part-owner of Agrilocanda val Campotto. Notes Both the agriturismo and Quin Italia offer a lot more information on their websites. Just in case anyone in Italy wants to support cycling, here’s the website for FIAB. There’s a transcript, of course, with thanks to supporters of the podcast.    Huffduff it

Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian and lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet. We talked about fad diets, and how they are inevitably unsustainable. About weight-loss drugs and whether they are being oversold. About the frustration she feels faced with bad advice, and how the Mayo Clinic’s caution may make it slow, but also makes it sure. About her dismay faced with questions about singular foods and singular nutrients. I learned a lot. Notes Tara Schmidt hosts the podcast On Nutrition from the Mayo Clinic Press. I was fascinated to discover how many official dietary guidelines exist, though I should have pursued my question further. I’m interested in why people don’t meet them, not whether they could if they wanted to. Here is the transcript, with thanks to all supporters. Here is my episode on Fad diets. There may be some others in the section of related links below, although the thingie that does that has been playing up. You can always search for “diets”.    Huffduff it

Flavia Giordano and Carla the Italian greyhound Puglia is massive. I mean that quite literally, not as youthspeak, though that too. Its northernmost point is actually north of my home in Rome, though admittedly not by very much, which is strange when you consider that for most people, Puglia is only the high heel itself. That’s true for me and for several past episodes here. A new book that explores the whole province, and more particularly its food and ingredients, flashed through my feeds a few weeks ago. After just a quick look at the contents it seemed obvious that my next move ought to be to hop on a train to Polignano a Mare to talk to the author, Flavia Giordano. So that’s exactly what I did. It was a long day, and entirely worthwhile. Notes Flavia Giordano’s book is Puglia: A cooking journey through a land and its unique ingredients, and the simplest way to get hold of a copy is to join Flavia for a tour or a class, easily booked from her website. Of course, you should also follow her on Instagram. Here is the transcript. The banner image is from an early 16th century Turkish Book on Navigation and shows the town of Bari and part of the surroundings, from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Cover artwork, Puglia’s colourful carrots, by me.    Huffduff it

For much of the world, food has never been as abundant or as inexpensive as it is now, but at what cost? The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the cost of diet-related ill health is somewhere around $7 trillion, which is far more than the “profits” of food and agriculture. Those profits, like the cheaper, more plentiful food they stem from, take no account of the external costs of climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and, ultimately, human health. Professor Tim Benton has spent his career working at the interface between agricultural and food politics and environment. “If we don’t get to grips with these challenges,” he told me “then ultimately the only thing to happen is some big calamity at some point in the future, where the planet bites back and says, I’ve had enough.” Notes Tim Benton’s paper with Rob Bailey — The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency — is a very readable summary. Here is the transcript. This is not the first time the podcast has looked at prices and externalities – search for prices – and it will not be the last.    Huffduff it

Jennifer ClappThe top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machinery, fertilisers, seeds, and pesticides. That kind of concentration, coupled with their size, gives these companies unprecedented power to set prices, often in collusion with their “competitors,” to block real competition, to stifle innovation, and to manipulate governments and policies. And while that may seem a problem of modern times, it’s actually a story that goes back to the beginning of industrial agriculture. Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario undertook a deep investigation of the history and behaviour of these companies for her new book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters. Notes Jennifer Clapp’s book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters is published by The MIT Press. This recent article by Jennifer Clapp sets out some of her views on how to address global hunger, including ideas on reining in corporate concentration. Here is the transcript.    Huffduff it

Emma McDonnellFor most of the 2000s, farmers in Peru earned a little more than one sol per kilogram of unprocessed quinoa they sold. Starting around 2007, the price began to climb as quinoa exports became a thing, averaging 9 soles per kg in 2014. The following year, the price halved, and it dropped again in 2016. It’s still around 4 soles per kg, so a lot better than it was, and quinoa production is double what it was. Nevertheless, the early promise of a sustained quinoa boom proved to be an illusion. Emma McDonnell was in Peru for the early years of the boom and for the subsequent bust, a story she recounts in her book The Quinoa Bust. Notes Emma McDonnell has a website. Her book The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop is published by California University Press. A previous episode — It is OK to eat quinoa — looked at the impact of the boom in purely economic terms. An issue of the USDA’s Choices magazine looked at several so-called functional foods, including quinoa, asking whether they were a Fad or Path to Prosperity?. Both, maybe. Here is the transcript The banner photo uses a picture of quinoa growing in Ollantaytambo, Peru by Hector Montero. The quinoa close up on the cover is by Flickered!    Huffduff it

Jordan RosenblumPerhaps the only thing most people know about Jewish dietary laws is that pork is forbidden. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity. Author Jordan Rosenblum points out that at the time of the Roman occupation, the pig was “simply the most commonly encountered nonkosher quadruped.” The imagined qualities of the pig and those of the Jews aligned, a link that still survives in anti-semitic propaganda. I didn’t want to rehash the history of anti-semitism but I did want to know more about the relationship between pork and Jewish identity. I hope you will too. Notes Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig is published by New York University Press. Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cover art is a reproduction from a 19th century book about customs of the Middle Ages. The banner image is from a campaign by the Debby Agency for Burger King. I am told (by ChatGPT) that the Hebrew says “And may the house be filled with the smell of turkey bacon”. Here is the transcript.    Huffduff it

Charlotte BiltekoffA new book takes a close look at people’s concerns about processed foods and how the processed food industry has failed to respond to them. The author, Charlotte Biltekoff, says she wanted to try and understand what was happening around her, as people in her milieu came more and more to demand real food rather than processed foods, while the makers of processed foods failed to understand the deeper reasons underpinning those demands. Industry wants consumers who, reassured on questions of safety and risk, will buy and eat its products. People want answers to questions beyond safety and risk. And never the twain shall meet. Notes Real Food, Real Facts: processed food and the politics of knowledge is available from the University of California Press. Other effects notwithstanding, a primary reason to avoid UPFs is that they encourage you to eat more. Here is the transcript. Thanks ChatGPT for sharing your stereotypical vision of a Mom and a Female Scientist.    Huffduff it

St Brigid of Kildare is one of the three patron saints of Ireland and has a strong connection with food and farming. St Brigid’s day falls on 1 February and traditionally marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year. In 2023, the Republic of Ireland designated the day a public holiday if it falls on a Friday, and failing that the first Monday of February, but the day has long been celebrated in a variety of ways. People make St Brigid’s crosses to a variety of traditional designs, using them to protect farm animals and ensure a good harvest. There are special foods too, and other ritual celebrations, some of which delve in the pagan past. Caitríona Nic Philibin has studied the folklore surrounding St Brigid and shared some of the stories with me. Notes I am indebted to Caitríona Nic Philibin and Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire for their work on food and folklore in Ireland, and especially An exploratory study of food traditions associated with Imbolg (St. Brigid’s Day) from The Irish Schools’ Folklore Collection. They offered a summary of their work: What food is associated with St Brigid’s Day?. And Pishogues, Brídeogs And Butter Witches at The Common Table gives a great deal more detail on food and folklore in Ireland. The music at the start is from St. Brigid’s Jig by Louise Mulcahy. Another fine tune from the same set is St. Brigid’s Day by Caitlín Nic Gabhann. Images of St Brigid’s crosses from the National Museum of Ireland. The icon of St Brigid I lifted from The Brigidine Sisters. Here is the transcript.    Huffduff it

No apologies for once again casting my net in the fruitful waters of Basque cuisine and history. There is a pintxo — those tasty bites of stuff on a toothpick — that consists of a plump Cantabrian anchovy, a pickled guindilla pepper and an olive. Some people reckon it is the original pintxo, invented by one of the regulars at a bar in San Sebastián. Others are not so sure. Everyone agrees, however, that it owes its name — the Gilda — to Rita Hayworth, who starred in the movie of that name. Last time I spoke to Marcela Garcés, we didn’t have time to talk about the Gilda. This episode fixes that omission. I also had to contact Chris Beckman again, to see if he could enlighten me on what he calls the Swedish Anchovy Conundrum. Notes Here, again, is Marcela Garcés’ paper: In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context. Christopher Beckman’s book is A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine. What’s in a name? Mislabeling fish since the 16th century offers more information of the history of Swedish “anchovies”. Here is the transcript. Still Life with Anchovies by Antonio Sicurezza. Piparra for Gilda by Javier Aramburu, and thanks to Marcela for the photo. I’d love to credit the photographer of the cover and banner image, but none of the places where I might have stolen it saw fit to give credit. If it is yours, let me know.    Huffduff it

A thorough trawl in 2020 brought to light more than 40 different kinds of policies around the world designed to improve diets to deliver better nutrition and health. And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help. That’s the gist of a new paper from a group of researchers in the UK. They argue that “a fresh approach is needed, one that considers the full picture of people’s realities”. Corinna Hawkes, lead author on the paper, took me through some of those realities. Notes The published paper is The full picture of people’s realities must be considered to deliver better diets for all. The earlier podcast, with Corinna Hawkes, Patrick Webb and Eileen Kennedy is We need to talk about diets. Here is the transcript, thanks to generous supporters.    Huffduff it