Eat This Podcast -- Mother of God
Hello By a happy coincidence, today I can point you to a short episode that first saw the light of day exactly four years ago, as part of my lunatic attempt...
Eat This Newsletter 185: Heat
Hello Little did I know last week, when I resurrected the episode in which Harry Paris explained watermelon names, that 3 August was National Watermelon Day....
Eat This Podcast -- Watermelon Madness
Hello The only thing keeping me from a complete meltdown these days is watermelon. Two slices from the ripe, crimson quarter-slice, replete with spittable...
Eat This Newsletter 184: Catching up with reality
Hello Was I happy that Russia and Ukraine appeared last week to have agreed a deal to allow some grain exports to leave the Black Sea ports? Of course I was....
Eat This Podcast -- Grain and Empire
Hello In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, we move on to empire. The earliest city states in...
Eat This Podcast -- Grain and Finance
Hello Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange,...
Eat This Podcast -- Grain and Transport
Hello Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people...
Eat This Podcast -- Persephone's Secret
Hello Many people take the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. But maybe there...
Eat This Newsletter 183: Authentically awful
Hello I had a very enjoyable time during the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table talk on how can we find reliable sources of information about food. I’d...
Eat This Newsletter 182: Hot news, cold comfort
Hello A quck reminder of the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table on Wednesday of this week. Join Elizabeth Yorke, Anusha Murthy, Ken Albala and me for an...
Eat This Podcast -- Peanuts, Senegal and Slavery
Hello Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, was an ideal base for the transatlantic slave trade, although the European powers that established themselves...
Eat This Newsletter 181: True, that
Hello There is a kind of thread tying most of today’s newsletter items together. More on that in the final piece. Wheat worries A lot of people have talked a...
Eat This Podcast -- Garum: Rome's new library and museum of food
Hello You cannot avoid the past in Rome, but if you're interested in the history of food there's been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut its doors. A...
Eat This Newsletter 180: Novel food debate
Hello No apologies for devoting a lot of space to protein in one form or another. It is an important topic that we need to understand better. Insect meal and...
Eat This Podcast -- Tomatoes: domestication and diversity
Hello The discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico recently allowed researchers to finally tell a story of tomato domestication that fits all the available...
Eat This Newsletter 179: A fresh look at farming
Hello I have a problem with podcasts that goes way beyond making my own. It is that I can really only listen when I am walking, flying, boating or training....
Eat This Podcast: Aaron Vallance — 1dish4theroad
Hello Aaron Vallance's writing at his website 1dish4theroad has twice been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers, not bad for someone who admits to having...
Eat This Newsletter 178: Damned if you do and damned if you don’t
Hello Things have been a bit topsy-turvy lately, so please accept a newsletter instead of a podcast episode this week. Normal service will be resumed as soon...
Eat This Newsletter 177: Watchamacallit
Hello I'm still bleating on about the naming of things, and I suspect nothing will ever stop me. Cattle denazification There was an unfortunate, but all too...
Eat This Podcast: Yes, we have no plantains
Hello Jessica Kehinde Ngo recently wrote an impassioned piece bemoaning the fact that “the plantain has long been eclipsed by its banana cousin”. That...