Eat This Podcast

"Food is essentially the sentence," says Clair Woods-Brown.

What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.

"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough." Wes Jackson

The qualities that make durum wheat so attractive for pasta have nothing to do with the size of the semolina particles from which it is made.

"I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day."

Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can't deliver either.

Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.

Nathan Myhrvold is right: "The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”

Bakers who grind their own grain are all utterly in love with the flour they get. I'm jealous.

If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.

It needn't actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.

All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.

There's a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.

Perhaps there's more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.

A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!

St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.

A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.

Ferragosto and the Feast Day of the Assumption of Mary; connected, perhaps, by a sheaf of wheat.

Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.

How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called Bake Like an Egyptian.

That kernel of wheat isn't actually a seed or a berry, at least not to a botanist. The rest of us can call it what we like.

Synthetic wheat; it isn't natural, but it is a very good thing.

Credit where credit's due: The Father of the Green Revolution had an unacknowledged father himself.

Today's Red Fife would not qualify as an official Canadian Western Red Spring Wheat, but that doesn't matter. People want Red Fife because it is Red Fife, not just any old high-quality Canadian wheat.

"In order to improve cultivated plants it is necessary to have the 'building material' required ... And to use their most valuable qualities for hybridisation."

In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.

Farro is not spelt. It isn't einkorn or emmer either. Farro "is an Italian ethnobotanical concept".

Very quick or slightly slower, in just a few hundred years, domesticated wheat spreads all over the Fertile Crescent.

How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?

Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?

It's a trick scouts and survivalists know: you don't need a heat-proof container to boil water.

Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn't all that difficult.

It's magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods.

In 1946 Geoffrey Pyke, an eminently sane scientist, put forward the idea of using what little coal there was to refine sugar rather than feeding it to locomotives. Human muscles would make far better use of the energy than steam engines. The problem Pyke tried to tackle remains essentially unsolved: where is the power for food production to come from?

How do farmers' markets and concentrated food industries that depend on long food chains stack up when it comes to food-borne illness? Truth is, nobody really knows.

The number of firms that own the food brands you see is much smaller than you think. That's not good for consumers or suppliers.

Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves.

A hop crop flop in Europe made the fortunes of growers in the Pacific north west of America, none more so than in Oregon's Willamette valley. Ezra Meeker, the hop king, promoted the gemütlichkeit of hop-picking in the old country as the frontispiece to his book; the reality was somewhat different.

Eating is a political act, as Wendell Berry reminded us. Which is why I was very happy to sample the food on offer by Syrian refugees in Hummustown.

Even before the Romans, grain arrived in what was to become London by water, and it continues to do so today, although the mechanics of the trade have changed beyond recognition. One of the last people to move grain by water upstream from London shares her experience and the history of moving grain by water.

The Imperial Food Products fire wasn't really an accident; circumstances conspired to make it extremely likely If it hadn't happened in Hamlet, it would have happened somewhere else.

A second visit to Scariff in County Clare, Ireland, to hear from the people working hard to save Ireland's vegetable heritage and make seeds available to a new generation of gardeners.

Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing.

Tom Nealon on the plague-stopping power of lemonade.

Jaan Altosaar on his practical approach to food

Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread

Parke Wilde on SNAP and nutrition

First let's decide what kind of food supply system we want, then use that to bring about a renaissance in real farming.

A trip to the Sheep's Head peninsula in West Cork and one of the pioneer cheesemakers there, Jeffa Gill.

Many of the things you might believe about the history of agriculture in America just aren't true.