Eat This Podcast

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 yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over the past 60 years, the productivity of the three major cereals – wheat, rice and...

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 that of the Renaissance had not yet burst into flame. And it was supposed to be a time when the culture and economy of Europe slumped. Peasants in scattered rural settlements scrat...

“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 food miles. We talked about the complexities of the food system.

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 Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, features the sink on its front cover. That probably makes it one of the most famous sinks in Rome. So naturally when Rachel and I got...

It’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused consumers unable to read a label? All of the above? In a nutshell, on 12 August 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, informing him that two of Hampton Creek’s products: are in violation...

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 City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food tells the whole story. It's odd that two books that have at their core the prevalence of processed food came out within a month of one anot...

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 exist? What was the logic that drove the development of the cheese-flavoured powder that coats so many snacks? Even instant coffee; why was that needed? The answer to all these questions, and many more, can be traced back to the US Army’s Natick Center, ou...

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 Manitoba, where summers are short and the land infertile. Having adapted to some extent to their new circumstances, large dams, built to supply energy to the rest of the province and b...

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 noises. Ignoring the disaster foretold, I defrosted the darn thing, which not only solved the problem (temporarily) but also provided inspiration for this episode of Eat This Podcast. A...

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 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 like chick peas and lentils, melons and ma...

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 those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you're looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal that you've thoroughly enjoyed, read what some of the people on some crowd-sourced websites...

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 the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as there has been for the Mediterranean fruit fly, the European corn borer, the giant African snail and...

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 they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts but also, usually, the heart and lungs and any meat damaged by the bullet. The hunter takes hom...

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, that would make me ill. As a result, I am fascinated by people who have to forego certain foods to stay well. I used to follow someone on the web who swore that something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™-- which, I learn, apparently requires initia...

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 Carmel, California. The methods he and many others have adopted make beef far less environmentally damaging than industrial methods. Quite apart from anything else beef is, as Mark puts i...

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 downloaded episodes and subscribed to the show. Strangely (at least to me) the original did not see huge renewed interest, which is why I thought it worthwhile repeating. If you've hea...

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, you name it; all are available on the streets of London and Los Angeles, Sydney and San Francisco. They have strange exotic takes on porchetta on the streets of Raleigh, North Carol...

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 so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn't cover in an extensive conversation with Marco Lori, a sommelier who kindly agreed to be grilled. I'm somewhat in awe...

Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-shift cold frames, greenhouses and what have you, where, in time-honoured tradition, old men in baggy corduroys and cardigans go to smoke a pipe and gaze out on serried ranks of cabbages, leeks and potatoes. But they are also places where young famili...

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 Food, Hunger and Conflict, a reminder that food and control of the food supply can be both a weapon in human conflicts and a natural source of conflict. Talks ranged widely, from the politics of starvation under the Nazis to hunger in colonial Indonesia...

One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fundamental facts of life. Too often, we hear all sorts of extravagant claims being made that a bit of more analytical thought would show were somewhat less than likely to work out. No names, no pack drill; let's just say that natural selection has had a...

Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of agriculture and what, if anything, it can learn from nature. Right now, he's worried.

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 of the year's most popular episodes.

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, looked at the rules governing the manufacture of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP cheese and the cheese's actual history. The rules say you can't, but could you make an equally good p...

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 marketing campaign and the perils of being driven by price made it worth listening to again. If you enjoyed this trailer, and hadn't heard the whole thing, you can listen to that here. Music by podington bear.