Eat This Podcast

Apples picked to perfume a room. Undocumented apples and apples with false papers. Foundlings that could give a supermarket apple a run for its money. Others that don't taste too good but are catnip to blackbirds. A heritage orchard in County Clare, Ireland.

Antibiotic resistance is one consequence of feeding animals large amounts of antibiotics -- about three times the amount given to people in the US. Why is it so hard to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture, and how else might we tackle the problem?

How an empty kitchen in Boston triggered a breakfast obsession and a new book on noodle soup.

If you really want to do good by spending more on your coffee, you need to look beyond Fair Trade and other certification schemes.

John Speth on how food we may consider disgusting is essential for survival in the Arctic, with added disgusting goodness from Paul Rozin.

Wheat growers are making use of hugely diverse evolutionary populations to give them the seeds they need.

A breed of pigs, well known as far back as 1338, almost vanished in the 1960s. Now it's back, and it's delicious.

Signs of the Venetian occupation are everywhere, as are the imprints of French and British rule. But there are also unique aspects to food and culture on Corfu.

A picture is worth way more than 1000 words when it reveals food trends over the past 50 years for more than 150 countries.

Australians devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. They could eat better for less money, but "affordable luxuries" get in the way.

Alternative food facts tramp across the landscape the hordes of the undead. Tom Nealon's new book Food Fights & Culture Wars aims to lay some of them to rest.

Perhaps you’ve heard about IBM’s giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that anyone can use.

You can eat a perfectly nutritious diet for a lot less money than the US government says you need. But would you want to?

Food has always been a marker of social status, only today no elite eater worth their pink Himalayan salt would be seen dead with a slice of fluffy white bread, once the envy of the lower orders.

Giving up on animals as a source of food is a luxury that many people cannot afford. For poor people in developing countries, a bit of animal source food can greatly improve their health and wellbeing.

I recommend a podcast and share some plans for Eat This Podcast in 2017.

Is the Carolina Runner No.4 peanut "the first peanut cultivated in North America" and does it matter anyway?

Continuing the short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes by getting to grips with the origin of "gherkin" and other names we give cucurbits.

Starting a short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes with a look at the Great Epping Sausage Scandal.

Bad diet is now the number one risk factor for disease. Is the world going to tackle the problem?

If you going to breed vegetables for flavour -- perish the thought -- you need someone to help you decide what's good. Enter the Culinary Breeding Network.

Foie gras offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a sociologist who got caught up in foie gras just before the topic exploded all over the food scene in Chicago.

A new technique for asking how one taste affects another confirms a recent change of opinion. White wine is often a better choice than red to accompany cheese.

Who knows what evil lurks beneath the wrinkled skin of an "economy" English sausage? And what delights won for the Cumberland and the Newmarket their coveted status of Protected Geographical Indication? Jan Davison, that's who. She wrote the book on English sausages and is the guest in this latest episode.

Did you know that malt whisky owes its existence in the marketplace to the stock market crash of 1973-74? Neither did I, so when one of the people I interviewed for the craft distilling episode a few weeks back made that claim, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, if you just plug "scotch whisky economic history" into an online search engine, you don't find anything of real interest, at least not in the first few thousand hits.

Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru? Seeking answers to basic questions.

A story of exploration, aristocracy and promiscuity, all in the service of better food. What more could you want?

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they're spreading, at least where they're allowed. British Columbia has gone from 5 to 50 in about three years. The USA now has more than 1000 registered small distilleries, almost a third of which are so-called "seed to sip" farm distillery operations. The British Isles too have seen a mushrooming of small distilleries. This episode is just a taste of things to come.

It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is relatively benign all year round and you can grow a great deal of produce without too much difficulty. But what do you do when you are at an altitude of more than 2000 metres with a growing season that is usually less than three months long? You do what you can, which in the case of Elkstone Farm, near Steamboat Springs in Colorado, means building four greenhouses, one of which is capable of ripening figs, citrus and even, occasionally, bananas. But it isn’t all greenhouses. Outdoors there’s a tangle of many different kinds of annual and perennial crops, which during the short growing season provide an abundance of fruits and vegetables.

Climate change and global trade combine to make it ever more likely that new pests and diseases will threaten food supplies. A classic example is playing out now in Puglia, the region that includes the heel of Italy's boot. The disease is caused by a bacterium -- Xylella fastidiosa -- that clogs the xylem vessels that carry water up from the roots. No water means leaves shrivel and scorch and eventually the host plant can die. In 2013, Xylella was found for the first time in Europe, in olive trees near Gallipoli. Plant health plans swung into action, to try and eradicate, or at least contain, the disease. And so did politicians and activists, blocking progress with ignorance, half-truths and manipulation. In consequence, the disease has now spread to cover the whole of the Salento peninsula. In the view of people much more expert than I, there may now be no stopping Xylella. Rodrigo Almeida, of the University of California, published an article in Science last week, asking Can Apulia's olive trees be saved? As he is an expert, I see no reason to present a different point of view, so you may find the podcast one sided. So be it. Notes Rodrigo Almeida's article is behind a paywall, but if you want a copy, I'm sure I can help you find one. Thomas Simpson is keeping a website that offers quick and helpful translations of articles about Xylella. It is a great resource if you want to know more about the foolishness. While I have your attention, let's hear it for expertise.

You can thank the Irish Wine Geese for many of the Grand Crus of France.

In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what remained of the region’s rich agricultural biodiversity. Almost 100 years before, 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 chickpeas and lentils, melons and many fruits and vegetables; all showed the kind of diversity that Vavilov said pointed to the places where they were first domesticated. As he wrote, “it is still possible to observe the almost imperceptible transition from wild to cultivated forms within the area.” What van Oudenhoven found was bewildering; incomprehensible diversity in the fields and unspeakably dull food on his plate. It only started to make sense when he began to talk to Pamiri people, and especially the older women, about their food and culture. The result was a book – With Our Own Hands: a celebration of food and life in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and Afghanistan – by van Oudenhoven and his co-author Jamila Haider, which documents a culture that remains in danger of disappearing. That book recently won the Gourmand International award for Best Cookbook of 2015, which is why I am now repeating the conversation I had with Frederik van Oudenhoven in July of last year. Notes With Our Own Hands is published by LM Publishers and is available from them and other booksellers. For other notes, see the original episode notes. There are plans to make a documentary about the people and their culture. Watch a trailer here.

Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does not make sense I had no idea that the statistical correlation of air pollution and the epidemic of “diabesity” was stronger than the correlation with sugar. Or that among the indigenous people of Canada, those who still spoke their tribal language have far lower incidence of type 2 diabetes and obesity than those who have mostly lost their language. Does that let sugar off the hook as a dietary demon? There’s no doubt that as a potent source of calories, sugar can be a problem. But as a specifically toxic substance, as many authors have claimed? Emsden makes a good case that there is more to blame for society’s dietary woes than pure, white and deadly sugar. Personally, I’m not convinced there’s anything worse about sugar than that it packs a lot of calories into a small volume – but then so does peanut butter, even without added sugar. Notes Order Sweetness and Light from Amazon. The media’s latest sugar binge began recently with an article by Ian Leslie in The Guardian. Katherine Docimo Pett, aka Nutrition Wonk, followed up with a lengthy response. You may find Marion Nestle’s summary easier going. Or you may want even more meat, from Nutrevolve or Sheila Kealey. Banner artwork by Lucy Clink.

Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown. It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History ... knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully unaware of the men and women who created the plant varieties that keep us fed. I say as much at the beginning of the show, when I guess that perhaps one in a hundred people can name a plant breeder, and that the name they’re most likely to come up with is that of Norman Borlaug. (The true stats, from a very small, self-selected sample, are somewhat different. Two out of 13 – about 15% – can name a plant breeder, although neither of the names they came up with was Borlaug’s.) I thought Borlaug might be the most familiar plant breeder because he is credited as being the Father of the Green Revolution, for work that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Nazareno Strampelli, an Italian plant breeder, exactly foreshadowed Borlaug’s work by about four decades. His wheats doubled production in Italy and beyond and were crucial to the second green revolution ushered in by Borlaug. He was born on 29 May 1866, 150 years ago as I write this. He deserves to be better known (as do all plant breeders, actually). Notes There is very little about Strampelli’s life and work in English. I am indebted to Sergio Salvi for his books, articles and time, without which I could not have produced this episode. Music for the show graciously provided by Jon Fuller, aside from bits of soundtrack lifted from archive Italian newsreel. The banner image I grabbed from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator; it’s a little in joke for anyone who does know even a smidgen of the history of wheat. There is so much more to the story of Strampelli and the early days of plant breeding; would you be interested in an e-book?

The Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums but not others. It ought to be on all of them. This is a seriously interesting museum for anyone who likes butter, and in my book, that means just about everyone. (I refuse absolutely to say anything about the impact – if any – of butter on health, not least because there’s nothing certain one can say.) It sits next to the grand Butter Exchange, built when the Cork Butter Market sat like a colossus astride the global market. The Irish butter traded through Cork was done in by refrigeration, fell to the lowest level possible, and then emerged again after Ireland joined the European Union, by returning to the principles that made the Cork Butter Exchange great. The Butter Museum tells the whole story. This episode tells a bit of it. Notes Regina Sexton is @culinaryireland on Twitter. The Cork Butter Museum really is worth a visit. The banner photograph is my own, and the butter curls are by Dennis Miyashiro, used with permission. I snarfed the music from SoundCloud. I still have no idea how permissions there work.

By rights, there should have been an episode last week, but there wasn't because I was just back from New York and the James Beard Awards, and I just didn't have time to put something together. Also, of course, I didn't win -- that honour went to Gravy, from the Southern Foodways Alliance -- and richly deserved it was too. If I had won, I'm sure I would have found time to record something, but it was an immense honour just to be nominated again. So no episode, because nothing to say, but I have been thinking about the show, and the main conclusion is that I need to carve out more time for myself to make Eat This Podcast. To do that, though, I need to spend a little less time on paid work. And that's the biggest change I want to make here. After a lot of soul-searching, I'm going to put Eat This Podcast on the line and open a Patreon account. In case you don't know about it, Patreon allows you to engage with people who are making things you like with a regular cash donation. You can do different amounts, and you can do it either per item -- per show in my case -- or per month. Anyway, the point of this episode is to let you know why the show is late. Next week, I will, definitely, for sure, have a new show -- and details of how you can help me make more and better shows.

Quinoa -- that darling of the health-conscious western consumer -- came in for a lot of flack a few years ago. Skyrocketing prices caused some food activists to claim that the poor quinoa farmers of the high Andean plains in Bolivia and Peru were no longer able to afford their staple food. Every mouthful we ate was taken direct from a hungry peasant. Some people even gave up eating the stuff. Other writers retaliated by saying that high prices were the best thing that ever happened to those poor farmers. And agricultural economists saw an opportunity to prove their worth. The results are in. High prices are indeed good for farmers. And they had no impact on nutrition among either quinoa farmers or those who merely buy it from time to time. If you gave up on quinoa, you can take it up again with a clean conscience. But that's not to say all is perfect. In this episode, the impact of high prices on quinoa farmers, the problems to come and how western consumers can be part of the solution. Notes There’s quite a lot about quinoa’s various ups and downs over at the other place. This is a good place to start. Bellemare, Fajardo-Gonzalez and Gitter’s paper is Foods and Fads: The Welfare Impacts of Rising Quinoa Prices in Peru. Andrew Stevens’ paper is Quinoa Quandary: Cultural Tastes and Nutrition in Peru. Bioversity International has lots of information about Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services. Lots more from Andean Naturals at their website. The banner photograph I took in Cotacachi, Ecudaor. And the cover image uses a Wikimedia image by Christian Guthier - originally posted to Flickr as Homegrown Quinoa!, CC BY 2.0.

At this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food I talked to Jon Verriet, who’s been researching the history of the haybox. That’s an insulated container, into which you put hot food, which then keeps cooking thanks to the retained heat. Jon made the point that hayboxes often see an upsurge during times of war and hardship, when they can be promoted as good for the country because they save energy and money. Environmentally-aware types also like them, to save energy as they cook their lentils. Researching the haybox myself, I came across its modern incarnation, the Wonderbag, which neatly ties those two motivations together. When you buy one, perhaps for environmental reasons, you’re actually paying for two, one of which goes to a poor family to save money, fuel, time, water, everything. I thought that was worth a follow-up, and so sought out Sarah Collins, a South African social entrepreneur who developed the Wonderbag. Notes The Wonderbag website tells the story and links through to the Wonderbag Foundation. The University of California at Berkeley study mentioned in the podcast concluded that the Wonderbag saves 8–21% of the time family members spend cooking, 10–36% of fuel costs, and allows families to spend 36–60% more on food. Banner photograph thanks to Annie Templeton at Goedgedacht Trust. Cover photo by Edrea du Toit for Netwerk 24. The haybox through history episode, for convenience. Huffduff it

When it comes to cradles of agriculture, West Africa does not often get a look in. The Sahel is better known as a place of famine than of feasting, but it wasn’t always so, and even today the Bamana people of Mali have a rich food culture. Stephen Wooten – that’s him in the picture enjoying a meal with his friends and collaborators – is an anthropologist who has been working in Mali since the early 1990s. He gave a great talk at this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, after which we had a chance to talk about food in Mali and how it evolved from gathering and hunting through herding cattle and sheep to settled agriculture, along the way domesticating some important cereals such as millet. There's a lot more to the food culture though. Women and men work separately but together to ensure that the community can eat, with a strict division of labour and equally strict sharing of responsibilities. Notes The banner photograph, by Stephen Wooten, shows the antelope headdress worn by dancers in the Ciwara performance, a celebration that recounts the mythical origins of Bamana agriculture and that, like Bamana food culture, requires the participation of women and men. Huffduff it

I'm on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I've bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than admit defeat and just leave well enough alone, I decide to record a little reflection on the food of Indonesia, at least, the food I've eaten so far, halfway into the trip. I forgot to mention durian. I guess that tells you all you need to know about how little of an impression it made. Yes, it smells. Yes, the taste and texture are odd. It wasn't that bad, but I certainly won't be packing one in coffee grounds and triple-wrapping it to bring it back with me, as one colleague advised. Huffduff it

Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been here almost 25 years she developed something of an obsession. On the one hand, she watched “a bewildering decline in the quality and craftsmanship of Italian food together with a skyrocketing deification of it”. On the other, “in a vicious circle, the decline stimulated the explosion of the gastronomic nostaliga industry, which in turn, hastened the very process it claimed to quell”. This is not something you would notice. The modern idea is that Italian cuisine has always been more-or-less what it is, and that if there were a difference between social classes, it was more about how often they ate certain dishes, or the quality of the ingredients, than about what they actually ate. As Karima Moyer-Nocchi discovered, that rose-tinted view is at odds with what actually went on. In an attempt to make sense of the changes, Moyer-Nocchi turned to women, now aged 90 and more, who had grown up under fascism and who, perhaps, could shed light on the recent history of Italian food. She gently coaxed their memories of food from them, and created a book that is part oral history, part academic history, and that puts the current mania for Italian cuisine in perspective. There’s no way we could cover it all in one interview, but I think you can get some idea of how things have changed, mostly for the better, and also how little one knows about the real history of food in Italy. Notes The book is Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that if you follow that link straight to Amazon and buy it, I get a teeny reward. The banner image, from a photograph by Henri Roger-Viollet (I think), shows Mussolini taking part in the first wheat threshing in Latina in 1932, a temporary victory in the Battle for Wheat. The podcast cover image is from a photograph by Mario Giacomelli. In another episode about food in Fascist Italy, I talked to Ruth Lo about the festa dell’uva Huffduff it

Huffduff it This year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food was dedicated to The material culture of cooking tools and techniques and was full of fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed a talk on the hay box, the original slow cooker. The principle is simplicity itself. Bring a pot full of food to the boil and then insulate it really well so that it cools down very slowly. The food continues to cook as it cools down and if your insulation is good enough you can come back hours later to find a hot, properly cooked meal. The haybox actually has quite a long history, with three Gold Medals awarded to a Mr Johan Sörensen at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Various patents were granted to Sörensen and others, and the idea was promoted for "fishermen, pilots, and others whose small vessels are not generally so constructed as to enable them to procure hot food while at sea" and, eventually, domestic cooks. In his talk, Jon Verriet traced the ups and downs of the haybox from around 1895 to the present day. It was most popular in times of war, but always with a moral element to it, even if the moral lesson shifted slightly. Notes There’s a terrific account of The Self-acting Norwegian Cooking Apparatus in the New York Medical Journal, vol 10 (1870). Do not be distracted by either the preceding item (The Effects of Hashish) or the one after (When to Trephine). Thanks to Hedon for the link. The most recent incarnation of the haybox is the Wonderbag, created by a development worker after a restless night and now offering to save the planet and pull people out of poverty. Aside from that, most of the online writing about the haybox is survivalist stuff. I’m not linking to that. The banner image is from Ford Madox Brown’s The Hayfield. I’d like to think that his supper is under one of the little haystacks. The cover illustration is from The Fireless Cook Book, by Margaret J. Mitchell.

Rachel Roddy, after about 10 years of hard slog, is an overnight sensation. She's just scooped the André Simon award for best food book in 2015, a very big deal indeed for a first book. I'd been warming up this second helping for a day or two before that news came through last Friday. My original reason for revisiting this episode was that her book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, is due to be published in the US tomorrow, 2 February, under a somewhat different title: My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking The different titles were just one of the things we talked about and that are worth sharing again; Rachel's well-deserved award provides an extra reason. There's a lot more packed into the original, full-length episode. Rachel talked about how a website turned into a book and about how she's discovering life and cooking in one of the less glamorous towns of Sicily, the subject of her next book.

As promised, another second helping from one of 2015's episodes, before we get to the new stuff. This time, I'm remembering my trip to the little place in St Martin's Lane in London that serves a couture version of koshari, the iconic street food of Egypt. And one trouble with these second helpings is that there's not much new to say about the topic or the episode, so I'll just point you to the full episode from March 2015 and let you explore there. (I will also repeat the relevant show notes below). Speaking of new stuff, a couple of weeks ago, I was depressed about not being able to go to the Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food this year. Thanks to the great generosity of a friend, I was able to go, and the first new episode of the year will be one I recorded there. There wasn't any tulip bulb soup on offer this time, and perhaps that's just as well. Notes Koshari Street is at 56 At Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4EA. And online Anissa Helou is also online and her book Mediterranean Street Food is still available.

As ever, I’m taking a little break and bringing you some repeats from 2015. This one is prompted by an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that I’ve just listened to. They decided to cook a peacock for reasons that I think had something to do with the role of spices in global trade and the birth of capitalism in the 17th century. And who should they call on as their expert guide but Christianne Muusers. Long time listeners may remember that it was almost a year ago that I met Christianne at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food. We talked about the very antithesis of conspicuous consumption represented by a heavily-spiced peacock pie: tulip bulb soup, which kept some Dutch people alive through the hunger winter of 1943–44. The Amsterdam Food Symposium takes place again next week, on 15 and 16 January 2016. Unfortunately I really don’t think I can afford to go this year, which is a great shame. Notes Details of the Symposium here. Christianne Muusers’ site is called Coquinaria and there’s some more information on tulip bulbs as food from Green Deane. The tulip in the photo is China Pink, and I took it. The banner photo shows some Dutch ration coupons, from Wikimedia. Thanks for the inspiration to Planet Money’s We cooked a peacock, especially if it brings in a few listeners.

Irish music and its influence on the taste of Irish beer

Following the ancient aqueducts to trace the history of the waters of Rome

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 maize – has gone up 3.2 times, more than keeping up with the 2.3-times increase in population. And the total production of those three has gone up from 66 per cent of all cereals to 79 percent over the same period. Largely as a result, we no longer see the same large-scale famines that we used to. Yield, however, isn’t everything. Nor are calories, which some people have embraced as a better measure than yield. The world produces enough calories for everyone (ignoring for now the fact that there are problems with distribution) but calories are not enough. As Ruth DeFreis says in the podcast, “If calories were everything, why would we have a billion iron-deficient people?” Ruth and her co-authors have come up with an alternative measure, nutritional yield: “The number of adults who would be able to obtain 100% of their recommended DRI [dietary reference intake] of different nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare”. To me, this makes intuitive sense. Food – as opposed to, say, biofuel – is for nourishing people, not powering machines. So of course there’s more to it than calories. I’ve tried saying as much to pundits gung-ho for yield or calories, even before I read the paper, but with no great success. So when the topic came up again I jumped at the opportunity to speak to the lead author. Notes Ruth DeFries recently published The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture is in the 17 July 2015 issue of Science. My side of the little rant is at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. The calorie-fans can put their own side up if they’re so minded. A couple of weeks later, my compadre Luigi wrote about the Science paper and added his own views.

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 scratched out a living in ignorance and obscurity. Recent archaeological excavations, however, have changed the way people look at the Dark Ages. Richard Hodges, President of the American University in Rome, wrote a book back in the 1980s called Dark Age Economics, and it subscribed, more or less, to the prevailing wisdom. Recently, though, he has completely written the story, and Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit reinterprets this fascinating period in Europe’s development. He presented a very brief introduction at the recent sustainability conference organised by the American University of Rome and the American Academy in Rome, where he said that farming in the Dark Ages was much more productive and sustainable than people previously thought. Luckily, the American University in Rome is close at hand. There is a lot more I would have liked to go into; the spread of the plough, animal breeding, the wool economy. I confess I find this sort of thing very beguiling, and I hope you do too. Maybe another time. Notes Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit is published by Bloomsbury. I remember reading Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society when it first came out, and it made a huge impression. (As did Marv Harris, but that’s a story for another day.) The extreme weather events of 535–536 were news to me; they shouldn’t have been.

“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.