Culinary Dodo

There is a quiet honesty to cooking at home. For you, your friends, your family. You open the fridge and cook what’s there or, if you’re having people over, you’ll have planned to cook what you love.... Most likely they're dishes you’ve done plenty of times before   If you’re adventurous, you’ll try something new... it’s the challenge you like to bring to what you love doing.. and that’s to co...

Being responsible for 50 MILLION litres a year, the CEO of Robertson Co-Op winery, Rianco van Rooyen and I chatted about wine, and how everyone in the value cycle has to adapt to survive. Wine, like classical music, needs a conductor - someone who is as good as reading the soil as he is at reading the crowd!

On Culinary Dodo , I explore Food & Beverage through the lens of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection.   External forces shape evolution — whether you’re a species… or a restaurant. In hospitality, natural selection isn’t poetic — it’s real: Diners change, trends fade, sustainability demands action.   Adapt or die. Simple. Cruel. True. Most of us in F&B have been there.   But some evolutio...

If we're masters - bending food to our biology, and bending our biology to the food we are able to adapt - what happens to US as a species when we meet a foe - a system that has taken OUR spot at the top of the food chain? In a world where the industry of food is literally KILLING us - diabetes, heart disease, obesity - can we adapt...certainly BIG PHARMA is in an evil relationship with BIG FOOD....

We've been masters of preserving our food. We preserved for flavour and safety. We used smoke, salt, fermentation - all proving how ingenious we were. Today, we've lost that art - yes, artisans hold onto our history but corporations have turned craft into profit. We've sterilized everything, removing microbes. Science, backed by the pharmacutical industry, took the life from our food...and sold it...

From humble beginnings as milk stored in a sheep's stomach, cheese has endured for thousands of years. For an industry that generates a trillion dollars a year, while 70% of the world's adults are actually lactose intolerant, dairy has adapted - to be delicious, and also a global leader in Dollar Darwinism - that twist in evolution where a fat bottom line will NEVER let ingredients go extinct!

More than any other dishes, these two achieved Gold and Silver in Darwin's Culinary Survivors awards. Spanning thousands of years, bread and noodles (in all of their forms) have adapted. The fed us, and filled us with joy, but they had to work for it!

As a self-styled Culinary Anthropologist, I explore food through the lens of Natural Selection.....how dishes and ingredients have either adapted, or died. Join me as we go beyond what we taste - from way back when to how it got to our plate. Episodes launch 1st October.