Eat This Podcast

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, that's who. She wrote the book on English sausages and is the guest in this latest episode.

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 that claim, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, if you just plug "scotch whisky economic history" into an online search engine, you don't find anything of real interest, at least not...

Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru? Seeking answers to basic questions.

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 from 5 to 50 in about three years. The USA now has more than 1000 registered small distilleries, almost a third of which are so-called "seed to sip" farm distillery operations. The British Isles too have seen a mushrooming of small distilleries. This...

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 a great deal of produce without too much difficulty. But what do you do when you are at an altitude of more than 2000 metres with a growing season that is usually less than three months long? You do what you can, which in the case of Elkstone Farm, ne...

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 boot. The disease is caused by a bacterium -- Xylella fastidiosa -- that clogs the xylem vessels that carry water up from the roots. No water means leaves shrivel and scorch and even...

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 biodiversity. Almost 100 years before, the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov became convinced that this was where “the original evolution of many cultivated plants took place.” Soft club wheat, with its short ears, rye, barley, oil plants, grain legumes...

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 correlation of air pollution and the epidemic of “diabesity” was stronger than the correlation with sugar. Or that among the indigenous people of Canada, those who still spoke their tribal language have far lower incidence of type 2 diabetes and obesity...

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 ... knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully unaware of the men and women who created the plant varieties that keep us fe...

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 in my book, that means just about everyone. (I refuse absolutely to say anything about the impact – if any – of butter on health, not least because there’s nothing certain one can sa...

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 didn't have time to put something together. Also, of course, I didn't win -- that honour went to Gravy, from the Southern Foodways Alliance -- and richly deserved it was too. If I had won, I'm sure I would have found time to record something, but it...

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 plains in Bolivia and Peru were no longer able to afford their staple food. Every mouthful we ate was taken direct from a hungry peasant. Some people even gave up eating the stuff. Othe...

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 insulated container, into which you put hot food, which then keeps cooking thanks to the retained heat. Jon made the point that hayboxes often see an upsurge during times of war and hardship, when they can be promoted as good for the country because they sa...

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, but it wasn’t always so, and even today the Bamana people of Mali have a rich food culture. Stephen Wooten – that’s him in the picture enjoying a meal with his friends and collaborators – is an anthropologist who has been working in Mali since the earl...

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 little reflection on the food of Indonesia, at least, the food I've eaten so far, halfway into the trip. I forgot to mention durian. I guess that tells you all you need to know abou...

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 quality and craftsmanship of Italian food together with a skyrocketing deification of it”. On the other, “in a vicious circle, the decline stimulated the explosion of the gastronom...

   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 full of fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed a talk on the hay box, the original slow cooker. The principle is simplicity itself. Bring a pot full of food to the boil and then insulate it really well so that it cools down very slowly. The food conti...

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 helping for a day or two before that news came through last Friday. My original reason for revisiting this episode was that her book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen...

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 koshari, the iconic street food of Egypt. And one trouble with these second helpings is that there's not much new to say about the topic or the episode, so I'll just point you to the fu...

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 had something to do with the role of spices in global trade and the birth of capitalism in the 17th century. And who should they call on as their expert guide but Christianne Muusers....

Irish music and its influence on the taste of Irish beer

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