Eat This Podcast: Avocado Anxiety

September 2, 2024

Hello It's great to be back with a new episode and a new season. Avocado Anxiety is a new book about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the...

ETN-250: WooHoo 🎂

August 26, 2024

Hello That thing about the longest journey starting with a single step? It is so true. Here I am sitting down to write the 250th Eat This Newsletter all...

Eat This Newsletter 249: Selected

August 19, 2024

Hello If farmers can select for specific traits in their livestock and crops, who’s to say that plants and animals aren’t selecting for traits in their...

Eat This Newsletter-248: Slow

August 12, 2024

Hello Not a great haul this week. I expect everything is just slowing down during our northern summer. As a result, I’m quite looking forward to starting up...

Eat This Newsletter 247: Legal-ease

August 5, 2024

Hello Three of today’s stories have the law behind them, and one probably should have. Enjoy! Still crying Marion Nestle has now weighed in on the raw milk...

Eat This Newsletter 246: Raw Truth

July 29, 2024

Hello After last week’s recall of contaminated plant-based beverages, something else to cry over: serious illness caused by unpasteurised milk. If people...

Eat This Newsletter 245: Fruity

July 22, 2024

Hello Food-borne illness, expensive fruit, and plant-based pet food. The really scary part of the CDC’s Outbreaks pages is just how many of them there are....

Eat This Newsletter 244: Tuna

July 15, 2024

Hello Only one story this week, and an optimistic one at that. Tuna Bounce Back Bluefin tuna in the Pacific passed a significant milestone on their road to...

Eat This Newsletter 243: Follow-up

July 8, 2024

Hello The weekly schedule does sometimes mean that there is less to share, and two of today’s items hark back to previous weeks. I hope that’s OK. PTOV beats...

Eat This Newsletter 242: Ontological uncertainty

July 1, 2024

Hello It is a mystery why sub-editors continue to ask questions in headlines, when the answer is almost invariably “No”. But they do, which gives me the...

Eat This Newsletter 241: Periodic

June 24, 2024

Hello I’m very grateful to a reader who pointed out that something wasn’t working properly on the website and that made several past episodes invisible. Or...

Eat This Podcast: Palatable is not Potable

June 17, 2024

Hello Water is tricky stuff. It can be limpid and clear but dangerous, home to harmful bacteria and parasites. It can be murky, but perfectly safe to drink....

Eat This Newsletter 240: Enriched evidence

June 10, 2024

Hello In this roundup, some truths about potash, qualified health claims for yogurt, gastronationalism now and then, and the hoops some UK plant breeders...

Eat This Podcast: Women Butchers

June 3, 2024

Hello Wherever you look, cheap supermarket meat has made life hard for butchers. At the same time, a few younger people are taking much more of an interest...

ETN 239: Denials

May 27, 2024

Hello Yes, this ought to be an episode not a newsletter, but sometimes life gets in the way. Also, a kind of housekeeping note prompted by the first article....

ETN 238: History & Nutrition

May 20, 2024

Hello Things do seem to cluster, or perhaps my attention makes that happen. So here is a little history and a lot of nutrition Unravelled by Climate The...

Eat This Podcast: Leftovers

May 13, 2024

Hello We all know we’re supposed to reduce our food waste, but what exactly is the difference between waste and leftovers? For me, leftovers become waste...

Eat This Newsletter 237: Shredded

May 6, 2024

Hello Why is this newsletter half a day late? Because I’ve been away riding my bicycle on an exciting three-day adventure, which included eating my first...

Eat This Podcast: What is Chametz

April 29, 2024

Hello One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that...

Eat This Newsletter 236: Leavened

April 22, 2024

Hello A further celebration of Passover, fish diversity, citrus salads and livestock emissions. Passover as Identity Many Jews will be celebrating Passover...

Eat This Podcast: Passover and Easter Revisited

April 15, 2024

Hello Easter was two weeks ago. Passover is next week. But in 2019, they were effectively on the same day. I'm taking the opportunity to resurrect an older...

Eat This Podcast: Malta Besieged

April 9, 2024

Hello Malta, just off the coast of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean, has always been of enormous strategic importance. As a result it has been...

Eat This Newsletter 235: Feel Good

April 8, 2024

Hello A selection of somewhat positive stories, culled from around the web. EU protects distant forests, AP says A new EU regulation that comes into force at...

Eat This Newsletter: Happy Rapa Nui

March 25, 2024

Hello I’m quite pleased with myself for running down better sources for two items this week, doing the work so you don’t have to. Chile: falling obesity is...

Eat This Podcast: The case for folic acid fortification

March 18, 2024

Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world., and the main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the...

Eat This Newsletter 233: Leavened

March 11, 2024

Hello Another serving of bits and bobs from around the internet, from the very serious to the very silly. A balanced diet, I hope. —— Lead The other shoe has...

Eat This Newsletter: Anthony Mongiello, Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza

March 4, 2024

Hello Pizza Hut says it invented the stuffed crust pizza. A judge agreed. But Anthony Mongiello has US patent 4,661,361, no matter what the law says. A...

Eat This Newsletter 232: Shokuiku

February 26, 2024

Hello My thanks to a subscriber who used the piece in the previous issue about pricey and perfect Japanese fruit to send me links to two videos, one about...

Eat This Podcast: Prehistoric Cooking Pots

February 19, 2024

Mesolithic hunter-gatherer woman and child wearing cloaks adorned with fish teeth. Drawing by Mauro Cutrona Six thousand years ago in northern Europe, the...

Eat This Newsletter 231: Apologies

February 12, 2024

Oh, the perils of being a one-person-show. I have nobody to blame for the gobbledygook that marred my most recent email except myself. This is how it should...

Eat This Newsletter 231; Globalised

February 12, 2024

Hello A circumnavigation for you all this issue — from the US via India, Japan, Australia and Mexico back to the US — with a few ingredients holding the...

Eat This Podcast: The Invention of Baby Food

February 5, 2024

Solid food at one month of age? Unthinkable today, but not in 1950s America. Amy Bentley, a professor at New York University, has charted the rise and...

Eat This Newsletter 230: Chicken and tomatoes

January 29, 2024

Hello Another spat in the world of recipe invention, a pointless campaign against cultured meat and a cruel dilemma for tomato breeders. All this and more...

Eat This Newsletter 229: Milk and Memory

January 22, 2024

Hello Today's delivery is later than usual because this is one of those issues in which I report Brand New Science, which I am not allowed to do until...

Eat This Newsletter 228: Brave New Year

January 15, 2024

Hello This first substantive issue for 2024 offers a couple of articles that I found thought-provoking because, of course, I had already thought along...

Eat This Newsletter 227: Winner!

January 8, 2024

Hello, and Happy Newish Year Eat This Newsletter 226 announced my Xmas Quiz. Today, we have a winner. Maarten van Ginkel in Amsterdam had the best score...

Eat This Newsletter 226: Xmas Quiz

December 24, 2023

Hello As promised last week, something a little different to round out the year. A quiz, 18 questions, one for each episode. You can find some way to...

Eat This Podcast: Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice

December 18, 2023

In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew...

Eat This Newsletter 225: The World Turns

December 11, 2023

Hello I cannot tell you how happy I am that we are rapidly approaching the turn of the year. Only a week or so to wait. There’s something soul-crushing about...

Eat This Podcast: A New Story for Maize Domestication

December 4, 2023

Hello Modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and...

Eat This Newsletter 224: Life Happens

November 27, 2023

Hello This should have been a podcast episode week, and yet here we are with another newsletter. Life got in the way, as it will occasionally. I do beat...

Eat This Newsletter 223: Enough to Go Around

November 20, 2023

Hello Some strange truths season this collection of food and nutrition stories. War and Chickpeas I’m thankful that I am not teaching a class on “food,...

Eat This Podcast: Honey and Adulteration

November 13, 2023

Hello Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding...

Eat This Podcast: Fat, Salt, Sugar

October 30, 2023

Hello Could Ice Cream Possibly be Good for You? In a word, yes. So why weren't we told? Before he uncovered "Nutrition Science's Most Preposterous Result,"...

Eat This Newsletter 222: Blimey

October 23, 2023

Hello Experts offer odds of food riots in Britain, and this Limey wants to know what to do with his. In between, diverse views on agricultural biodiversity....

Eat This Podcast: Jewish Food in Rome

October 16, 2023

Hello Today is the 80th anniversary of the roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of the Jews of Rome. That much I knew as I was planning this episode. More...

Eat This Newsletter 221: Linked

October 9, 2023

Hello Every item in today’s issue seems to link up with at least one other thing, which I suppose reflects the reality of the food system. Food Fight Back in...

Eat This Podcast: Small Dairy

October 2, 2023

Every aspect of large, industrial food creates a niche for people who want a less standardised alternative, and if the stars align you may have producers...

Eat This Newsletter 220: Mischief

September 25, 2023

Hello Sometimes a big story seems to have been everywhere I look, and I wonder whether it is worth including here. So I ask people not quite as nerdy as me,...

Eat This Podcast: Food Riots in England

September 18, 2023

In her latest book English Food: A People’s History, Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due...