Eat This Podcast
Food
About
Using food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. In Eat This Podcast, Jeremy Cherfas tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion -- you get the picture. We don't do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics. Twice nominated for a James Beard Award.
Episodes
- Hipster Baristas and Chinese Espresso
The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll…
- Collards: A Moroccan Mystery
This episode delves into the history of collard greens, examining their popularity in the US South and their recent discovery in Moroccan oasis gardens, associated with enslaved West Africans. The discussion potentially sheds light on thei…
- Geopolitics, Food, and Agriculture
This episode discusses the paper 'The Geopolitics of Food and Agriculture,' examining how food serves as an instrument of statecraft in international relations and internal conflicts, and how conflict impacts agriculture. It highlights the…
- In Search of the Real Cheeses
Trevor Warmedahl, disenchanted with uniform commercial cheeses, embarked on a six-year journey to explore traditional fermentation and cheesemaking methods. His experiences, starting with a trip to Mongolia, are chronicled in his book Chee…
- Old Modern Olive Oil in Provence
This episode discusses olive oil production in Provence, focusing on the paradox of oils that intentionally develop traditional 'defects' while using modern equipment and miller expertise. This contrasts with EU regulations for extra-virgi…
- The unstoppable rise of extra virgin olive oil
Professor Carl Ipsen discusses the history of extra virgin olive oil, explaining its classification emerged from 1950s Italian oil quality issues. He traces its shift from an industrial lubricant to a food product and questions current qua…
- The Food System Is Not Broken
Jan Dutkiewicz (left) and Gabriel Rosenberg A lot of people who care about these things will tell you that the food system is broken. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg insist that it is not. Bits of it may not work as well as we might l…
- Food Notes from an American Prison
Bird’s Eye View of United States Penitentiary Lewisburg, PA One of the things I found most interesting about the previous episode, Cooking in Maximum Security was that prisoners in Italy not only cooked pretty elaborate meals, but that it…
- Cooking in Maximum Security
Matteo Guidi An extremely unlikely source (see note 3) tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security . In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy ti…
- Cash remains a most effective gift
Miriam Laker Oketta, left, and Esnatt Gondwe Matekesa I’m proud to revisit an episode from 2022, in which two country directors of the charity Give Directly told me how cash transfers in Rwanda and Malawi make a real difference to the live…
- A Berliner Speaks
Luisa Weiss It can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon becam…
- A Fresh Look at Domestication
Robert Spengler III Settled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand t…
- Revolutions are Born in Breadlines
The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited th…
- The Spice Bag
In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find…
- Revisiting Historical Recipes
After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook t…
- The Miracle of Salt
Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating.…
- New Light on Neanderthal Diets
The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explan…
- Pellagra
Dr Joseph Goldberger Pellagra — a terrible disease characterised by the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death — was first noticed in northern Spain in 1735 and in Italy soon afterwards. Physicians had no idea what to do about…
- Quinoa in the Po Valley
Alessandro Biavati, chef. Quite by chance, I booked a brief cycling holiday at an agriturismo based on a farm that is home to Quin Italia, an enterprise that aims to be the first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. Th…
- Eat This Gets Advice
Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietiti…
- Puglia
Flavia Giordano and Carla the Italian greyhound Puglia is massive. I mean that quite literally, not as youthspeak, though that too. Its northernmost point is actually north of my home in Rome, though admittedly not by very much, which is s…
- The Paradox of Plenty
For much of the world, food has never been as abundant or as inexpensive as it is now, but at what cost? The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the cost of diet-related ill health is somewhere around $7 trillion, which is far…
- Farming’s Overlords
Jennifer Clapp The top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machinery, fertilisers, seeds, and pesticides. That kind of concentration, coupled with their size, gives these companies unprecedented…
- Quinoa’s rise and fall
Emma McDonnell For most of the 2000s, farmers in Peru earned a little more than one sol per kilogram of unprocessed quinoa they sold. Starting around 2007, the price began to climb as quinoa exports became a thing, averaging 9 soles per kg…
- Forbidden: Jews and the Pig
Jordan Rosenblum Perhaps the only thing most people know about Jewish dietary laws is that pork is forbidden. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricabl…
- Food facts are not the answer to fear of foods
Charlotte Biltekoff A new book takes a close look at people’s concerns about processed foods and how the processed food industry has failed to respond to them. The author, Charlotte Biltekoff, says she wanted to try and understand what was…
- Food, folklore and St Brigid
St Brigid of Kildare is one of the three patron saints of Ireland and has a strong connection with food and farming. St Brigid’s day falls on 1 February and traditionally marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year…
- Sensual, Salty, and a Little Bit Spicy
No apologies for once again casting my net in the fruitful waters of Basque cuisine and history. There is a pintxo — those tasty bites of stuff on a toothpick — that consists of a plump Cantabrian anchovy, a pickled guindilla pepper and an…
- Better Diets for All
A thorough trawl in 2020 brought to light more than 40 different kinds of policies around the world designed to improve diets to deliver better nutrition and health. And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines…
- Bennett’s Law
For a long time people have suspected that there is a kind of logic to what people buy as they have a bit more to spend on food. First, they change from coarse grains — things like sorghum or millet — to fine grains, wheat and rice, maybe…
- The Cost of a Healthy Diet
Anna Herforth, Imran Chiosa Will Masters, and Olutayo Adeyemi Let’s assume that people understand what they ought to eat to keep themselves healthy over the course of their lives and that the nutritious food to deliver good health is avail…
- Anchovies Part 2
The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with t…
- Anchovies Part I
Marcela Garcés Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored. At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium…
- Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us
If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding ou…
- Olives Reborn in the Salento
Silvestro Silvestori stands in front of some of the metal cans of his varietal olive oils. Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of droug…
- Avocado Anxiety: how to choose what to eat
Louise Gray Winner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local…
- Palatable is not Potable
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. It may smell of chlorine, which puts people off, but perversely that is a sign that no b…
- Women Butchers
Cheap supermarket meat has been making life difficult for independent butchers for quite some time now. England has lost 60 per cent of its butcher shops in the past few decades, Australia 80 per cent. I couldn’t find figures for the Unite…
- Leftovers Through History
Eleanor Barnett 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 when they turn green and furry, forgotten at the back of the fridge, but th…
- What is Chametz?
One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that involves leavened grain. At one level, the search means that the house gets an extremely thorou…
- Passover and Easter Revisited
The last supper was a Passover Seder, and for two thousand years Passover and Easter have been linked. The links, however, are complex, which is why I am taking the opportunity to expand on a five-year-old episode. The rituals of the Passo…
- Malta Besieged & Black-market Intrigues
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 claimed, and fought over, by empire after empire. Each time it was vulnerable to a blockade o…
- The Case for Folic Acid Fortification
Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world. The main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the diet, and in 1991, the UK’s Medical Research Council halted a trial of folic acid supp…
- Anthony Mongiello, Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza
Anthony Mongiello A recent documentary tells the story of how a kid from Brooklyn invented the stuffed crust pizza, sued Pizza Hut for ripping him off, and lost. It is a fascinating story, and left me in no doubt about who actually invente…
- Prehistoric cooking pots
Harry Robson Six thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vess…
- The Invention of Baby Food
In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the…
- Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice
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 only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in A…
- A New Story for Maize Domestication
The ancestry of 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 from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time…
- Honey and Adulteration
Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is de…
- Fat, Sugar, Salt
Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop T…