Eat This Podcast

That sink is where Rachel Roddy, an English woman in Rome, prepares meals to share with her partner Vincenzo, their young son Luca, and a horde of appreciative readers of her website and, now, her first book. Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, features the sink on its front cover. That probably makes it one of the most famous sinks in Rome. So naturally when Rachel and I got home from our meeting in the new Testaccio market, it was the first thing I wanted to see. And photograph. Our conversation ranged widely, from book titles and domain names to the links between the food of Rome and the food of Manchester. And although she says she's a romantic and prone to nostalgia, it is also clearly the case that Rachel Roddy loves learning about food and cooking, loves sharing what she's learned, and loves telling stories. Simple ingredients, for a satisfying cookbook and website. A couple of other links. Rachel mentioned her friend Fabrizia Lanza and the farm and cooking school she runs in Sicily. Here's what Rachel wrote recently about a wonderful idea called Cook the Farm. If you decide to follow the link, do give yourself time to pursue Rachel down all her intriguing rabbit holes.

It’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused consumers unable to read a label? All of the above? In a nutshell, on 12 August 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, informing him that two of Hampton Creek’s products: are in violation of section 403 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C. § 343] and its implementing regulations found in Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 101 (21 CFR 101). Just Mayo and Just Mayo Sriracha are the two products, and their crime is that they do not contain eggs. So they cannot be called “mayo”. Who sicced the FDA on Hampton Creek? has become the big question, as a pile of emails winkled out of the government by a Freedom of Information Act request seem to show that the American Egg Board orchestrated a campaign against Hampton Creek. I mentioned the story in my newsletter three weeks ago, which prompted Peter Hertzmann, an independent researcher and a friend, to suggest that the reality, as ever, is not quite so straightforward. Peter was good enough to fill me in on some of the background. Notes Peter Hertzmann’s website is well worth exploring for all sorts of good things. The American Egg Board is just one of several commodity checkoff programs. There have been some very interesting challenges to the whole idea of a mandatory checkoff, one of which recently featured on BackStory, a history podcast. I did ask if I could use it, but no reply yet; you can hear the segment here, but you will need a sharper legal brain than mine to decide whether mandatory funding of something called government speech raises First Amendment concerns. What got Peter and me into the sciencey discussion of mayonnaise and emulsions was his mention of the Harvard University Science and Cooking lecture series. I’m mortified to admit that I didn’t know about it. Many of the lectures are on YouTube, and one in particular that Peter pointed me to showed Nandu Jubany from Can Jubany restaurant in Spain making an aioli from nothing but garlic, salt and olive oil, and a bit of water. You can see him do that from about 13:30 to 17:30 in this video, but the intro, on emulsions, is worth watching too if you want to a better understanding. I’m sharing, without comment, some of the AEB material obtained by Ryan Shapiro. The FDA’s letter is, of course, online. The banner image of a mayonnaise emulsion under the microscope is from a scientific paper on substituting eggs with a modified potato starch.

Megan Kimble -- that's her on the left -- is a young journalist in Tucson, Arizona. Back in 2012, she set out to stick it to the processed food man, by eating only unprocessed food for a year. Her book Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food tells the whole story. It's odd that two books that have at their core the prevalence of processed food came out within a month of one another, but while Anastacia Marx de Selcado explains how it is that the US military came to occupy supermarket shelves, Megan Kimble simply wants nothing to do with processed foods. Her reasons boil down to taking control of what she eats and boosting the local economy. Along the way she discovers she can't really do without chocolate, so she learns to make her own. Notes Megan Kimble has a website.

Have you ever stopped to wonder what drives the incessant innovation in processed food? Who thought that an energy bar would be a good thing to exist? What was the logic that drove the development of the cheese-flavoured powder that coats so many snacks? Even instant coffee; why was that needed? The answer to all these questions, and many more, can be traced back to the US Army’s Natick Center, outside Boston, Massachusetts. That is where the Combat Feeding Directorate of the US army, with the help of academics and large food processing companies, designs the rations that sustain American soldiers and much of the rest of America and the world. Soldiers need rations that are lightweight, that don’t spoil over time, and that can withstand some pretty brutal handling. The rest of us pay for the same. Author Anastacia Marx de Selcado’s book Combat-Ready Kitchen, published in early August, lifts the lid on how the army has invaded almost all aspects of processed food. Notes Combat-Ready Kitchen is available from Amazon and elsewhere. If you buy from that link, I get a tiny pittance. Anastacia Marx de Selcado has a website, of course. The banner photograph shows a high pressure processing production line, © Moira Mac.

The O-Pipin-Na-Piwin Cree Nation have suffered generations of maltreatment at the hands of various official entities. Moved from their homelands further south, they now occupy small scattered settlements in northern Manitoba, where summers are short and the land infertile. Having adapted to some extent to their new circumstances, large dams, built to supply energy to the rest of the province and beyond, flooded their traditional fishing and hunting grounds, destroying their livelihoods even further. Being so remote, the supply chain for outside foods is tenuous and expensive, with prices way beyond those found further south. No wonder, then, that the people are suffering an epidemic of malnutrition and its attendant diseases. But after years of maltreatment, the people are starting to reclaim their foodways and learning new ways to feed themselves sustainably. Andi Sharma, a policy analyst with the Northern Healthy Foods Initiative, told me about the problems and some of the incipient solutions. Notes The banner image is part of a very early map of the area now occupied by the indigenous people and Manitoba Hydro. The Northern Healthy Foods Initiative is trying to improve food security in a variety of ways. I didn’t spend much time following up on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but I’m struck by the historical similarities between Canada and Australia, and, again, by the power of food as a political weapon.

The heat here in Rome has been something the past couple of weeks. Not up to 2003 of blessed memory, but hot nevertheless. The last thing I needed was for the fridge to start playing up, but it did, making horrible noises. Ignoring the disaster foretold, I defrosted the darn thing, which not only solved the problem (temporarily) but also provided inspiration for this episode of Eat This Podcast. At the back of the fridge I found things I had completely forgotten. That prompted me to dig around in the back of the store cupboard too, where there were lots of other things of which I was vaguely aware, but not aware enough actually to have used them. All of which prompted a musing on store-cupboard essentials, gifts from well-meaning friends, and the whole neophilia-neophobia tension. I hope I didn’t ramble on for too long. Some the things that did not make it into my rambles: The whole business of gleaning that gave rise to grano arso I find fascinating. Gleaners were surely the first dumpster divers. The practice is enshrined in the Old Testament and I like the idea that richer landowners sometimes deliberately left fruit behind in their vineyards and orchards and grain in their fields that the poor might gain. I am not competent to say anything more about Ruth than that I find her’s a very moving story. The other story behind grano arso is that it was not the stubble-cleansing fires that burnt the gleaned wheat grains but rather the heat from steam-powered threshing machines. Probably both. I don’t know whether any Pugliese who remembers the old stuff would agree that smoked or oven-burnt flour is in any way a substitute, but I like it. Here’s a recent entry point to my adventures with grano arso. I do feel rather ashamed about the garum thing. After my podcast Lauren Stacy Berdy was so kind to send me a bottle of her American garum and I still haven’t tried it. But I will, and soon, I promise. And perhaps I’ll report back here.

The Pamir Mountains of Central Asia hold a fascinating diversity of food crops. Exploring the area in the early years of the 20th century 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 chick peas 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.” Frederik van Oudenhoven first travelled to the Pamirs in 2007 to document what remained of that rich agricultural biodiversity. What he found was bewildering, until he began to talk to Pamiri people, and especially the older women, about their food and culture. The result is With Our Own Hands: a celebration of food and life in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, a new book by van Oudenhoven and his co-author Jamila Haider, that documents a culture that remains in danger of disappearing. Notes With Our Own Hands is published by LM Publishers, who say it will be available from tomorrow, 7 July. If you think you might want a copy, order without delay; until tomorrow the price is reduced to €34.50 from €54.50. You can get a taste here. There are also a couple of scholarly articles online. Imagining alternative futures through the lens of food in the Afghan and Tajik Pamir mountains and Food as a method in development practice. Photos by Frederik van Oudenhoven. The banner shows an Afghan settlement in Darvaz, along the Panj River, in autumn, with yellow mulberrry trees and red apricots. the other picture is Frederik and his co-author Jamila Haider.

People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you're looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal that you've thoroughly enjoyed, read what some of the people on some crowd-sourced websites have said about the place where you are eating. But I digress. Rather than wade through countless ninny-posts looking for a realistic recommendation, many visitors, and some residents, turn to one of the food writers based here. Among those, one person reigns supreme: Elizabeth Minchilli. Through social media, apps, books and tours, she tirelessly points people in the right direction. Her new book came out this spring. That’s a good enough reason for me to sit down for a drink with Elizabeth in her local neighbourhood. Notes The book is Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City. Her blog is here. Elsewhere, she’s @eminchilli. We met at Urbana 47 which is indeed a fun place to hang out. I captured the banner image, and the rigatoni a la gricia that grace the podcast cover on iTunes, at Perilli, immediately after Elizabeth and I met, and which, I swear, had been selected long before our conversation. The food is a lot more consistent than the typography.

Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as there has been for the Mediterranean fruit fly, the European corn borer, the giant African snail and many other pests. Most of the time, however, we remain blissfully unaware. And most of the time, pests either don’t get in or are detected fairly quickly and eradicated. I was lucky enough to hitch a ride on a field trip in Puerto Rico, organised by the local survey teams to show plant health experts how they go about the business of keeping pests from establishing. An aside: I can remember, back in the 1980s, sitting on a plane at Sydney airport ducking my head as the cabin staff wafted through spraying us with insecticide. These days, I learned, aircraft are mostly treated with persistent pesticides, eliminating the spray but not the need to keep insects out. Notes The opening and closing music is Che Che Cole, by Willie Colón with Héctor Lavoe. I had no idea when I chose it that like some species of giant African snail, it’s original home is apparently Ghana. Some incursions are better than others. The music in the middle is La Boriqueña, the national anthem of Puerto Rico, but the site where I found this version has apparently vanished in the interim. The banner photograph shows two male Mediterranean fruit flies facing off, and is by Derric Nimmo. The cover photograph of a giant African snail – no Photoshop – is by R. Anson Eaglin of USDA APHIS. And those pathetic dead snail shells? They’re the ones I found, all excited like, but they weren’t the pests I was looking for.

This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it. Hunters routinely clean up the animals they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts but also, usually, the heart and lungs and any meat damaged by the bullet. The hunter takes home the meat and scavenger animals get to snack on the gut pile. It's been that way for a long time. Unfortunately, recent research has shown that much of the gut pile, and some of the meat the hunters take home, is contaminated with microscopic pieces of lead. That could be damaging the people who eat the meat, and it has been accused of hampering the recovery of the Californian condor. I heard the story from Matt Podolsky, a wildlife biologist and film maker who worked with the condor recovery programme. That's him (in the hat) with one of the condors; even the size of that tag doesn't give a very good impression of the size of the bird. Notes Matt Podolsky’s film Scavenger Hunt tells the story of the efforts to persuade hunters in Arizona to adopt non-lead ammunition. Not everyone agrees that lead in deer carcasses is the main source of lead in condor blood. Start here. Banner photograph of the Vermillion Cliffs, site of the Arizona condor releases, by Jerry and Pat Donaho. Chef and hunter talk on Nordic Food Lab Radio. Beware, it auto-plays. It is a good thing I don’t have a loaded weapon any time I visit SoundCloud. And if you want to know more about my close encounters with Californian condors, you’ll have to find a copy of my book Zoo 2000 or persuade me to scan and share the relevant pages. I no longer have any copies of the TV shows on which it was based, although there is one on YouTube.

By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I'd prefer not to eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, that would make me ill. As a result, I am fascinated by people who have to forego certain foods to stay well. I used to follow someone on the web who swore that something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™-- which, I learn, apparently requires initial caps and a TM symbol -- was the only thing that kept her alive. I never really investigated further, because that was before I had a podcast to feed and she more or less stopped writing about it. So when the chance arose to talk to someone who is living with the disease and the diet, I leaped at it. Victoria Young is a journalist who has been following the SCD™ for about seven years. She says that it has actually renewed her relationship with food, partly by making her think hard about what she eats. Far from being a dull diet that is all about avoiding things, it forces her to be inventive with the things she can eat. And she says she's never felt better. The medical establishment may not be too keen on the SCD™ but the proof of the pudding -- assuming you can in fact make a pudding that complies -- does seem to be in the eating. Notes Victoria Young's website links to her blog How to eat (when you can't eat anything at all). She tweets @tory21. The mother lode on the SCD™ is Elaine Gottschall's book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet. Once again, I'm plaintively asking you to rate and review the show on iTunes. I know that's pathetic, but it honestly does help. The banner photo of a stained section of inflamed bowel is from Wikimedia, and doesn't it take me back ...

What kind of business wants customers to buy less? The beef business, or at least, one tiny corner of the beef business. Mark Shelley is an environmental film-maker turned cattleman who raises grass-fed beef near Carmel, California. The methods he and many others have adopted make beef far less environmentally damaging than industrial methods. Quite apart from anything else beef is, as Mark puts it, "the big elephant in the room" when it comes to climate change. Anything to address that ought to be welcomed, and grass-fed beef is far less damaging. It does, however, cost more, not least because we're all paying the external costs of industrial meat. That's fine, Mark says. We should all be eating better beef, just doing so less often. How to make that happen? Mark has no idea, he's just doing his bit, one piece of meat at a time. Mark's recent visit to Italy offered the chance to find out more. I completely forgot to ask him about the drought. Notes Tassajara Natural Meats has a website. I reckon they're too busy taking care of the cattle to take much care of the website. Photo by Carrie Cizauskas, used with permission. You may remember that ages ago Eat This Podcast talked about the benefits of frozen beef.

This episode is a repeat of one first published in October 2014, and the reason is that it has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. I'm utterly thrilled by the news, and gratified that more people have downloaded episodes and subscribed to the show. Strangely (at least to me) the original did not see huge renewed interest, which is why I thought it worthwhile repeating. If you've heard it, and don't feel like listening again, you could go and listen to one of the other two nominees, in the notes below. Being nominated is an immense honour. I won't know whether I have actually won until the award ceremony on 24 April. The original show notes:Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built. The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here. Notes More about Helena Attlee at her website The other award nominees are Gravy and The Feed. Intro music by Podington Bear.

Street food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the rich world too. Burrito trucks, Korean barbecue in a taco, ceviche, you name it; all are available on the streets of London and Los Angeles, Sydney and San Francisco. They have strange exotic takes on porchetta on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, and pizza ovens parked in English railway station forecourts. In many neighbourhods you can barely move for falafels. One of the iconic street foods of Egypt – koshari – is now available in London, in a slightly upmarket hole in the wall place. I've always maintained that this podcast is not about happening restaurants or the latest groovy cocktails, but the chef who made Koshari Street happen happens to be a friend, so on a recent visit, I went to try for myself. And, of course, we talked about far more than the restaurant. Notes Koshari Street is at 56 St Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4EA. And online Anissa Helou is also online and her book Mediterranean Street Food is still available. We were interrupted by Lauren Bohn, and she too has an online presence, although there’s not much evidence there of her interest in food.

Drinking Italian wine anywhere -- even in Italy -- can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn't cover in an extensive conversation with Marco Lori, a sommelier who kindly agreed to be grilled. I'm somewhat in awe of people who seem really to know their wines, and so I took the opportunity to ask Marco to try and lift the veil. That he did, with great good humour. There is so much I don't understand. Like, what exactly do wine people mean when they talk about the smell of green peppers in a wine? Try as I might, I just don't get that. And the resurgence of natural wines. And I had no idea that careful winemakers go through the harvest bunch by bunch, selecting this one for their top-notch wine, that one for a slightly lesser version. So much to learn. So little time. Notes Jeremy Parzen touched on the latest labelling madness on his website. Absolutely sweet winemakers, quoting Bob Dylan: “to live outside the law, you must be honest”. Marco Lori's website is Off the Vine. Say I sent you; it might do us both some good. This is that wine I mentioned. I haven't managed to find it for sale locally. Yet. Intro music by Cerys Matthews. I hope she doesn't mind. I mean, I don't mind her website playing music to me unbidden.

Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-shift cold frames, greenhouses and what have you, where, in time-honoured tradition, old men in baggy corduroys and cardigans go to smoke a pipe and gaze out on serried ranks of cabbages, leeks and potatoes. But they are also places where young families are growing their own food, where immigrants are introducing new kinds of fruit and veg, and where people can find a respite from the city. Just recently, they’ve become the backdrop to yet another reality TV “game show”. In that respect, perhaps, like cooking food, growing food may be more of a passive entertainment than an active pastime. Nevertheless, allotments remain in demand. They have a long history, born out of food riots and strife, and in many cases a threatened future as the land they occupy is much more valuable for building plots than for garden plots. Jane Perrone, gardening editor at The Guardian, spilled the beans. Notes Jane Perrone’s book The Allotment Keeper’s Handbook: A Down-to-Earth Guide to Growing Your Own Food is available from Amazon and elsewhere. She also has a blog. James Wong’s Homegrown Revolution is the book Jane Perrone credited with introducing people to new things to grow on their allotments. Banner photo of Stuart Road Allotments modified from one by sarflondondunc. The spade handle, likewise, modified from a picture by Paul Zappaterra-Murphy

A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very interesting meeting it was too. The topic was Food, Hunger and Conflict, a reminder that food and control of the food supply can be both a weapon in human conflicts and a natural source of conflict. Talks ranged widely, from the politics of starvation under the Nazis to hunger in colonial Indonesia to the part food riots in the past played in winning food security. Some of it was – and I’m avoiding obvious wordplay – very hard to listen to. All of it was enlightening. There wasn’t as much time as I hoped during the packed but brief programme to record everything I wanted to, but I did get to talk to Ian Miller about force feeding and to Christianne Muusers about one Dutch wartime recipe that most people would rather forget. I hope to have some of the other speakers on the show soon. Notes Details of the Symposium here Ian Miller has a website called Digesting the Medical Past. 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 Thomas Ashe's funeral.

One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fundamental facts of life. Too often, we hear all sorts of extravagant claims being made that a bit of more analytical thought would show were somewhat less than likely to work out. No names, no pack drill; let's just say that natural selection has had an awful long time to try things out, and if something hasn't arisen (yet) there may well be a good reason why it isn't that great an idea. There are some people, however, bucking that trend, and Ford Denison is one of them. His book, Darwinian Agriculture: How Understanding Evolution Can Improve Agriculture came out in 2012, and I devoured it. Some recent publications reminded me that I have long meant to talk to Ford Denison about his ideas. He was kind enough to agree, and while that is no substitute for reading his work, it might just provoke people who haven't already done so to try. I hope so. No bones about it, the resulting episode is a personal pleasure for me. There is a danger, though, that in talking to someone about something I think I understand, at least partially, I forget to keep other listeners in mind. So I'd be interested to know what you thought of the show. And, more generally, would you be interested in more basic science of this kind, related, always, to food and drink? Notes Just to be transparent, the link to the book is an Amazon Affiliate link; if you buy it, I get some paltry percentage. But nobody has yet, to my knowledge, ever done that for any of my links. My somewhat gushing review is here. I stand by it all. Banner image by Arnaud Sobczyk and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of agriculture and what, if anything, it can learn from nature. Right now, he's worried.

Why is arrabbiata sauce always served on penne pasta? What's wrong with my spaghetti cacio e pepe? Maureen Fant, co-author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way first explained all back in February 2014 in one of the year's most popular episodes.

There's a thin line between protecting the authenticity of a fine traditional food and preventing the kinds of living changes that allowed it to survive long enough to become traditional. Zack Nowak, a food historian, looked at the rules governing the manufacture of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP cheese and the cheese's actual history. The rules say you can't, but could you make an equally good parmesan somewhere else? Extracted from the original episode broadcast after the 2nd Perugia Food Conference. Music by podington bear.

Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Don started and eventually sold. An early social marketing campaign and the perils of being driven by price made it worth listening to again. If you enjoyed this trailer, and hadn't heard the whole thing, you can listen to that here. Music by podington bear.

One of my treats this year was sitting down with Helena Attlee to talk about her book The Land Where Lemons Grow. Part of that interview didn't make it into the final podcast, so here it is now. And if you missed the original podcast, it's here. Music "Romanza" played by Clarence Simpson. Available at ccMixter.org under CC BY license.

The conservation of the wild turkey was triumph, but it left ornithologists scratching their heads. How many species were there? And where did they live?

For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is wonderful. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia?

As people in North America prepare to give thanks and devour unimaginable quantities of food, we go to the heart of the matter. Why are turkeys called turkeys? In next week's show, more about the American contribution to poultry culture.

These days, every little town and village in Italy has its sagra or festa, a weekend, or longer, in celebration of a particular local food. Although they have a whiff of tradition about them, most of these are relatively recent inventions, designed to attract tourists as much as honour the food and cement community relationships. I was surprised to learn, then, that in 1930 Mussolini’s Minister of Agriculture, Arturo Marescalchi, proposed a national celebration of the grape – the festa dell’uva – throughout the peninsula. There were many reasons. A glut of table grapes was certainly one, as the government sought to persuade the public to eat Italian. There were also political motives, celebrating Italy as a young nation and strengthening support for the fascists. The result, for a few glorious years, was an annual spectacle of amazing proportions. In Rome, markets were set up for each region to sell its table grapes, there were processions of outlandish grape-themed floats, and a good time seems to have been had by all. Ruth Lo, a PhD student at Brown University and scholar at the American Academy in Rome has been studying the period and generously agreed to talk to me about her work. Notes Ruth Lo recently presented a paper – Celebrating the festa dell’uva: Grapes and Urban Spectacle in Fascist Rome – at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Society in Atlanta, Georgia. L’istituto Luce, L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, was another arm for fascist propaganda. Some of the films Luce made are on YouTube. Two of my favourites, well worth the visit as historical documents, are the celebrations at the Basilica di Massenzio, these days the home of a literary festival, and one from Marino in the Castelli Romani, apparently Marescalchi’s inspiration and still going strong today.

In the 1930s the Italian fascists decided that floats laden with giant grapes would be the vehicle to drive forward Italian nationalism. Hear how in next week's Eat This Podcast.

Kazakhstan stretches across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea in the east to China in the west. The country is famous for many things – it is the largest landlocked country in the world, says Wikipedia – but among food and plant people it is most important as the home of the apple. The name of the former capital, Almaty, is often translated as Father of Apples, and it was to Almaty that Ben Reade, today’s guest, recently went with a botanist friend in search of good wild apples. He found them, and much else besides. It is worth pointing out that the now common wisdom – that the domestic apple Malus domesticus was selected from a wild relative Malus sieversii, rather than being a hybrid – has only recently been accepted. Barrie Juniper, of Oxford University, brought all manner of evidence to bear on the question, including some of the first DNA studies of crops. His book, The Story of the Apple is a great read, and some of his knowledge has clearly found its way to his daughter Sarah, The Apple Factor. I also spent a little time looking into Ben’s throwaway remark about “lightly fermented carrot salad”. The New York Times, no less, avers that “Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, … is a legacy of Stalin’s mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers.” I found a couple of recipes here and here, and although I haven’t tried either, I plan to do so soon. Neither seems to be “authentic,” not least because I’m not sure they would ferment at all. I’d be interested to know more. Notes I Went to the Fatherland of All Modern Apples is Ben Reade’s own account of his trip. The first ever Eat this Podcast consisted of Ben talking about bog butter. The guy gets around. Photos on this page from Ben, and there are lots more in his article.

Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time, bears, and how they may have helped to domesticate those apples. The whole show will be published next week.

It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and the resources it needs -- financial, genetic, human -- are just not something most people know about. No wonder, then, that many people don't quite grasp the urgency with which we need to get cracking now to breed crops adapted to predicted climate conditions. Susan Dworkin's new book The Commons sidesteps that by hurling us 150 years into the future, to a world in which the failure to respond almost doomed our species to extinction. I thought it might be fun to talk to Susan and she agreed, but first I had to read the book. It turned out to be a rollicking good read, full of interesting characters and strange plot twists. All our old familiar friends are there. Large parts of the world have become very inhospitable, thanks to climate change. There's an all-knowing Corporation that owns just about everything, including 85% of all humans in its domain. And the humans are shareholders in the whole enterprise. It all seems rather wonderful, except that there's a problem: a new stem rust of wheat threatens a reprise of the famines and hardship of 100 years before. To say much more would be to give too much away. Let's just say that the search for a solution is what drives the story forward. Of course, I'm not the intended audience, so I have absolutely no idea how The Commons will be received by anyone else. I'm not even sure what the author would like us to be doing now to avoid the future she depicts. That was just one of the topics we talked about in a discussion that could have gone on a lot longer. Notes The Commons is available from Amazon as an e-book and a paperback. If you are in the Washington DC area on 24 October, Susan Dworkin will be lecturing on "The Weather in the Supermarket: Climate Change, Seed Banks and Tomorrow's Food" at the US Botanic Garden. I "borrowed" the music -- Mavis Staples singing Hard Times Come Again No More -- from Beautiful Dreamer, a wonderful tribute album to Stephen Foster. Buy it if you don't already have it (and if you like that kind of thing). The banner photograph is my own.

Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built. The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here. Notes More about Helena Attlee at her website

What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. And share the process. Stir-fries, curries, Ethiopian wats, loaves of bread: John Grosvenor, a software developer, posts delectable images of much of his cooking on the social net ADN. That’s where I got to know him, and as we exchanged messages it became pretty clear that we were on more or less the same culinary wavelength. Never one to miss an opportunity to have my biasses confirmed, I thought it would be fun to talk to John in a bit more depth about his approach to cooking. John mentioned the pademelon, a small wallaby, which sent me scurrying first to Wikipedia and then out into the wilder reaches of the internet. I’m not sure whether John’s pademelons are the endemic Tasmanian species (Thylogale billardierii) or one of the other species of these little wallabies. Recipes weren’t that easy to find either: Pademelon wallaby and cashew stir-fry has a bit too many cans in it for my taste, but in general wallaby seems like it might be an excellent choice of meat, despite some confused stuff about wallabies and greenhouse gas emissions at one of the suppliers. A nicely prepared female pademelon does sound just the kind of thing to make a note of if I ever get to travel to Australia. Notes In between cooking, John Grosvenor makes excellent games for iOS. This week’s music is by Chad Crouch.

Garum is one of those ancient foods that everyone seems to have heard of. It is usually described as “fermented fish guts,” or something equally unappealing, and people often call it the Roman ketchup, because they used it so liberally on so many things. Fermented fish guts is indeed accurate, though calculated to distance ourselves from it. And garum is just one form of fermented fish; there’s also liquamen, muria. allec and haimation. All this I learned from Laura Kelley, author of The Silk Road Gourmet. Unlike most of the people who opine on garum, and who offer recipes for quick garum, she painstakingly created the real deal. She is also convinced that it isn’t really Roman in origin. We only think of it that way because history is written by the victors not the vanquished. And then there's the whole question of the Asian fish sauces, Vietnamese nước mắm and the rest of them. Independent discovery, or copied from the Romans? Notes Laura gives a full blow-by-blow on her website. Copying her is probably the only way to produce something that approximates genuine garum. She also mentioned colatura, a fish sauce still made in Italy. I haven’t tried it, although it is available, at least in the US, by mail order. Photo of the garum vats in Baelo Claudia by Janet Mendel.

Randall’s Island is a small piece of land just east of 125th Street in New York’s East River. It is also around 2 degrees further south than the northern limit of rice growing on Hokkaido in Japan. What could be more natural, then, than for a community farm on Randall’s Island to have a go at growing rice, a staple that the kids who come to the farm enjoy, but one that they’ve never seen growing? The assistant horticulture manager scored some rice seeds and with advice from her grandmother in Korea set to. They built a miniature paddy, like a flooded raised bed, and managed to harvest about six kilograms of rice. And that’s when their trouble began. Rice is darn difficult to hull and clean. A piece by Rachel Laudan tipped me off to the Randall’s Island rice, and I was excited to discover that the person who origially wrote the story for The New Yorker was Nicola Twilley, a writer whose Edible Geography (and other projects) I have long admired. Luckily for me, she was happy to talk. What intrigued me about the story of hulling rice in the northeastern US, was how it resonated with the plight of subsistence farmers in India, Bolivia and elsewhere. The women in many communities spend hours a day of hard and often dangerous work to prepare the seeds they have grown and harvested. I can’t blame them if they would just as soon sell their back-breaking crop and buy prepared convenience foods, and hang the nutritional consequences. I’ve seen for myself how electrical mini-mills remove this drudgery for women in the Kolli Hills of India, and in so doing boost the consumption of nutritious millets. The same sort of approach, an inexpensive, locally-built machine, has made processing quinoa much easier for farmers on the Altiplano of Bolivia. There’s something fitting about New York rice being treated in a similar way. Notes Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley’s website, is endlessly interesting and entertaining. If you’re into podcasts, don’t miss the great show Roman Mars and 99pi did based on her research into cow tunnels. Rachel Laudan has made something of a specialty of pointing out that growing cereals is the easy part; preparing them for food is what takes hard work and ingenuity. Ecological Rice Farming in the Northeastern USA is not nearly as silly as it may first seem. And for all the details of Don Brill’s rice hullers, you need to head over to Brill Engineering, which sounds a lot grander than an inveterate tinkerer with a basement full of bits and pieces. Daniel Felder, head of research at Momofuku, takes research into fermentation and terroir very seriously. Nicola has written about that too. Photo of Don Brill and a volunteer rice peddler by Nicola Twilley, as are all the others. Thanks.

I’m fascinated by Japanese food, but from a position of profound ignorance. I’ve never been there and I’ve never having eaten anything I could definitely say was “genuine,” aside from a wasabi chocolate cake baked by a Japanese friend. So the opportunity to talk to a Westerner living in Japan was one I leaped at. Jason Irwin is a Canadian who has been helping people in Japan learn English for the past seven years. He’s not in a big city, and he is part of a Japanese family, so he probably has a better understanding than many. He’s also leaving Japan soon. Time, obviously, to talk. As I mention in the podcast outro, I still find it rather remarkable that I can be online friends with a Canadian living in Japan and record us having a conversation. The recording bit is nothing special these days, I suppose, but the online friendship is the result of this thing called app dot net, aka ADN. It’s a special kind of social platform, one where the people who use it are the customers, as opposed to the others, where users are just a bulk commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. ADN celebrated its second birthday two days ago, and I've been there two years today. I've I get a lot out of ADN, not least my conversations with Jason, although I have never done anything to evangelize about it. Consider this a plug. Notes Cover photo is Ise-ebi: Crawfish or Spiny Lobster and Ebi: shrimp by Utagawa Hiroshige. Jason’s website is well worth a read. On food, I thought I would single out two posts about some of the Canadian foods he missed in Japan: Food I miss the most and I am not a chef ... but you'll have to ask him yourself for the details of how to prepare ham cooked in Canada Dry Ginger ale. Aside from everything else that people say it could be, I find ADN to be just a very fine micro-blogging platform. You might too. Banner photograph modified from an original by Linh Nguyen.

The history of pasta, ancient and modern, is littered with myths about the origins of manufacturing techniques, of cooking, of recipes, of names, of antecedents. Supporting most of these is a sort of truthiness whereby what matters most is not evidence or facts but – appropriately for us – gut feeling. Combine that with the echo chamber of the internet, and an idea can become true by virtue of repetition. So it is, by and large, for the idea that Arabs were responsible for inventing dried pasta and for introducing it to Sicily, from where it spread to the rest of the peninsula and beyond. You can find versions of this story almost everywhere you look for the history of dried pasta. Anthony Buccini’s gut feeling, however, was that this story was not true. His expertise in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics tells him that the linguistic evidence for an Arab origin gets the whole story backwards; rather, one of the principal elements in the spread of dried pasta through Italy and beyond was the commercial expansion of Genoa. The stuff itself was being made in southern Italy, the Genoese took the word and the stuff to the north and to Catalonia, and it was the Catalonians who took them to the Maghreb and the Arabs. So what did the Arabs do? They wrote it down in their cookbooks. And a bit more besides. Notes The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. World Pasta Day falls on 25th October. Enough time to prepare something special? Banner photograph taken by Su-Lin in Vancouver. Used with permission.

What do artisanal cheese and maple syrup have in common? In North America, and elsewhere too, they’re likely to bring to mind the state of Vermont, which produces more of both than anywhere else. They’re also the research focus of Amy Trubek at the University of Vermont, a trained chef and cultural anthropologist. Trubek gave one of the keynote speeches at the recent Perugia Food Conference, saying that terroir – which she translates as the taste of place – combines two elements. There is the taste itself, which when people talk about it with one another becomes a social experience that, she said, lends meaning to eating and drinking. And it is “a story we tell to assure that our food and drink emerges from natural environments and conditions.” Vermont cheese, at least the lovingly crafted artisanal kind, as much as maple syrup, reflects those concerns with natural environments and conditions. In our interview, we didn’t dwell too much on the scientific research underpinning Amy Trubek’s ideas. I found the idea that simply knowing the personal story of a cheese – who makes it, where, why – can influence how you respond to it fascinating. Taste, surely, is physiological. How would the story affect that? But it does. In one study of four different cheeses, people heard either a generic story about that cheese category, taken “from dairy science manuals,” or “socially and contextually relevant production information”. No matter how much they actually liked the cheese, or their “foodiness” on an established scale, people who had been told personal stories about the cheesemakers liked the cheese more than those told about the cheese alone. (See Note 3 below.) What’s more, according to Rachel DiStefano, who did a Master’s thesis with Amy Trubek, cheesemongers are vital allies in telling the stories and thus helping consumers to value artisanal cheeses. By contrast, terroir for maple syrup does seem to be less about personal stories and more about the soils the trees are in and the details of turning sap into syrup. Trubek has worked with a large, multidisciplinary team to create new standards and vocabulary that take discussions well beyond “sweet”. And yes, there is some evidence that soil does affect taste: [S]yrup produced from trees on limestone bedrock had the highest quantities of copper, magnesium, calcium and silica, which scientists hypothesized had a role in the taste. Shale syrups came in second in all of these substances, followed by schist. A final thought: Amy Trubek’s throwaway remark about fake maple flavour sent me down an internet rabbit hole that in the end proved surprisingly productive. Notes The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. Sign photograph by Katherine Martinelli. Consumer sensory perception of cheese depends on context: A study using comment analysis and linear mixed models. Rachel DiStefano has written about her field work, behind the counter of a specialist cheese shop in Cambridge, Ma. If you’re entertaining thoughts of maple syrup expertise, you’ll need to study the new sensory maps and be able to talk knowledgeably about the history of sugaring. Other images by Rachel DiStefano.

Great wheels of parmesan cheese, stamped all about with codes and official-looking markings, loudly shout that they are the real thing: Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. They’re backed by a long list of rules and regulations that the producers must obey in order to qualify for the seal of approval, rules that were drawn up by the producers themselves to protect their product from cheaper interlopers. For parmesan, the rules specify how the milk is turned into cheese and how the cheese is matured. They specify geographic boundaries that enclose not only where the cows must live but also where most of their feed must originate. But they say nothing about the breed of cow, which you might think could affect the final product, one of many anomalies that Zachary Nowak, a food historian, raised during his presentation at the recent Perugia Food Conference on Terroir, which he helped to organise. In the end the whole question of certification is about marketing, prompted originally by increasingly lengthy supply chains that distanced consumers from producers. One problem, as Zach pointed out, is that in coming up with the rules to protect their product, the producers necessarily take a snapshot of the product as it is then, ignoring both its history and future evolution. They seek to give the impression that this is how it has always been done, since time immemorial, while at the same time conveniently forgetting aspects of the past, like the black wax or soot that once enclosed parmesan cheese, or the saffron that coloured it, or the diverse diet that sustained the local breed of cattle. One aspect of those forgettings that brought me up short was the mezzadria, a system of sharecropping that survived well into the 1960s. Zach has written about it on his website; some of the memories of a celebrated Perugian greengrocer offer a good starting point. Will some enterprising cheesemaker take up the challenge of producing a cheese as good as Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP somewhere else? No idea, but if anyone does, it’ll probably be a cheesemaker in Vermont, subject of the next show. Notes The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute. Wikipedia has masses of information about Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union and, of course, Parmigiano-Reggiano which may, or may not, be parmesan. Official site of the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano. Thanks to Zachary Nowak for his map of the soils of the Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. 2019-05-05 Updated with link to Internet Archive.

The growing popularity of “Mongolian” restaurants owes less to Mongolian food and more to, er, how shall we say, marketing. To whit: "It’s actually not a cuisine, but an INTERACTIVE style of exhibition cooking modeled after a centuries-old legend. According to this legend, 12th century Mongol warriors, led by the mighty warrior, GENGHIS KHAN heated their shields over open fires to grill food in the fields of battle!" The question of what the Mongols under Genghis Khan actually ate, however, is really rather interesting. In particular, did conquering that vast empire change their diet in any way? Jack Fenner and his Mongolian colleagues Dashtseveg Tumen and Dorjpurev Khatanbaatar analysed bones from three different cemeteries, representing Mongol elites, Mongol commoners and Bronze-age people from the same area, looking for differences in what they ate. They found some, but interpretation remains difficult. I didn’t think to ask Jack about using a shield as a wok. Notes Read Food fit for a Khan: stable isotope analysis of the elite Mongol Empire cemetery at Tavan Tolgoi, Mongolia if you have access to the Journal of Archaeological Science. There is also an accessible write-up at the Bones don’t lie website. I don’t plan to visit the Genghis Grill, although I’m happy enough to plunder their advertising copy. And to point out that the mighty warrior didn't become Genghis Khan until the 13th century. Images from Michael Chu, Dave Gray and Wikimedia. Music by Chad Crouch, aka Podington Bear. This show is a week late; apologies. There's a sort of explanation at my other website, which also provides hints of shows to come. Plus, an explanation of what Flattr is all about, and why I think you should flattr me and other content creators.

A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to work the sugar plantations of Surinam? Or is it Jewish, brought to Suriname by Dutch Jews? So began Karin Vaneker’s immersion in the world of edible aroids. Aroids are a large and cosmopolitan plant family, more commonly known as the arum family, and they include some of the most familiar houseplants. Many of them have starchy roots or tubers, and although these often contain harmful substances, people have learned how to process them as famine foods. A few species, however, are widely cultivated. The best-known of these is probably taro, Colocasia esculenta, which originated in southeast Asia and spread through the Pacific and beyond. That, however, proved not to be the elusive pomtajer that Karin and the Surinamese inhabitants of Amsterdam were looking for, which turned out to be a species of Xanthosoma. My conversation with Karin ranged far and wide, and to tell the truth I never did ask whether pom was Jewish or Creole. Most sources say it is indeed Jewish. Notes The whole question of Jews in Suriname sent me scurrying to the search engines, to discover that starting in the 17th century there was indeed an attempt to establish an autonomous Jewish territory there, on the Jewish savanna. This I gotta read more about. And having found that, I rushed to Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, only to be massively disappointed that neither pom nor Suriname feature in the index. The big photo is of purple-stemmed Colocasia, which I took at Longwood Gardens. As promised, a recipe for pom. You’ll have to find your own pomtajer. Karin has written on Cooking Pom and other edible aroids.

It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. Well, not entirely, and not like some Romans. I spoke to Francesca Flore, who offers both tours and cooking classes, and she reserved some choice words for those quintessential Roman dishes based on the famous quinto quarto, the fifth quarter of the carcass. Or, less obtusely, offal. Francesca told me that she's always been interested in food, and that while working in London she decided to take herself off to Australia to study Cooking and Patisserie at the Cordon Bleu School in Sydney. Back in Rome, she put all that knowledge to use catering private parties and branching out into food tours and cooking classes. We talked about what people want, what they get, and how she views the past and future of Italian food. Notes Francesca Flore’s flash website gives a taste of the food tours and cooking classes she offers. The Mercato Central in Florence has a website that is way too groovy for its own good. And, wonderfully Italian, an undated entry at a site called Florence Online, tells us both that the upstairs is closed and that “the vendors appear to want to stay where they are” in a tent below. Cover photograph, of Francesca supervising the sprinkling of icing sugar on cannoli, by Chris Warde-Jones for the New York Times.

This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself. So I hooked myself up to the audio recorder and went about some of my customary weekend cooking, muttering out loud about what I was doing and offering some reflections on my attitude to food and cooking. I hope the result sheds some light on where I’m coming from. Normal service will be resumed next episode. I started this exercise determined not to apologise either for having indulged myself so or for the audio quality. And I almost made it. But not quite. So, please accept my apologies, mostly for the quality of the audio at time. This stuff is not easy single handed. Also, no instructions from me on how to make your own yoghurt. If you want to learn the secrets of yoghurt as made by Turkish grannies, try The Food Programme. Notes The first recipe for my version of a light rye bread is here, though it doesn’t look very pretty. Pictures here. I need to transfer that recipe to the baking site, or better yet update it, because the current version is much better. A couple of earlier podcasts dealt with integrity vs “authenticity” and good industrialisation.

“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of his: “a graph that essentially tells you the whole story in one simple, self-explanatory picture.” Yes indeed, social unrest is caused by higher food prices. ((Yes, caused; this is no mere correlation.)) I could leave it at that, along with a link to the paper from which I lifted the picture. But this is a podcast. I have to talk to people, and that includes Marc Bellemare. Bellemare’s paper is a global investigation that doesn’t even attempt to ask whether the relationship between food prices and social unrest holds for countries or smaller areas. My sense, though, is that the relationship is strongest in more authoritarian regimes. At least, that’s where we’ve seen most food riots of late. In this, however, it seems I am mistaken. Marc pointed me to Cullen Hendrix, who has studied the links between social unrest and political regimes. Placating the urban masses who eat food at the expense of rural people who produce it has always been a fraught proposition, perhaps even more so for democracies. All of which raises the question that, I hope, keeps food policy wallahs and agricultural development experts awake at night. What’s so wrong with high prices anyway? Notes Marc Bellemare’s blog post on his paper Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. He also examined some of the reactions to the paper. “Even when presenting to the smartest people in the world, a picture is really worth a thousand words.” Find this and Marc’s other tips for conference and seminar presentations here. Cullen Hendrix’s website contains a copy of his paper International Food Prices, Regime Type, and Protest in the Developing World The sound montage at the beginning draws on various reports on Haiti, Egypt and Tunisia, all glued together by a splendid recording of a protest march. The banner photograph is adapted from an original by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

We’ll have what they’re having has taken on a whole new meaning In a world in which you can get pizza in Tokyo and sushi in Rome, diets have become truly global in reach. You could argue that this has made them more, not less, diverse. Where once rice dominated Asia, wheat, potatoes and corn have made huge inroads: increased diversity. On the other hand, places that used to enjoy their own, local staples – tef in Ethiopia, buckwheat in eastern Europe – have also come under the sway of the global behemoths, and so have lost diversity. Those are two conclusions of a massive data-mining exercise that has rightfully been getting a lot of coverage: Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security. I spoke to Colin Khoury, the study’s first author, about the increasing dominance of the big crops, the marginalisation of regionally important alternatives, and the sudden rise of a whole set of previously insignificant species. As we discussed, this new piece of research arose from a desire to provide updated and more accurate answers to the perennial question How many crops feed the world?, originally posed by Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen in 1990. It’s kind of gratifying to note that Colin Khoury first returned to that question in a guest post on one of my other platforms. And we’re still gnawing away at it over there, one way and another. So, how many crops feed the world anyway? [I]f you must know, it’s about 94 plant species that largely feed the world. To be more precise, according to the analysis of Colin and his colleagues, we can now say that 50 crops, or 94 species, contribute to 90% of food supplies at national level.

Sure, you've seen Trading Places. But do you know about the history of futures contracts, or why some things are traded on commodities markets and others aren't? I didn't, not really. So I spoke to Kara Newman, food writer and author of The Secret Financial Life of Food. One of the things Kara is keen to stress is that where money is involved, there's always a temptation to cut corners, and her book is full of delicious food-based scandals. One of her favourites is The Great Salad Oil Swindle. If you've never heard of it, there's an interesting reason why. The story of The Great Salad Oil Swindle has been told in a book by Norman C. Miller, based on his Pulitzer-winning articles. Some of Miller's original articles are online, and there's a nice account originally published in Accountancy. Bottom line seems to be that while everyone was making money, no-one was inclined to investigate too closely. And an interesting coda to the story, from those articles. The bankruptcy of De Angelis brought American Express almost to its knees. While it's share price was depressed, Howard Buffett bought a sizeable stake, believing the company fundamentally sound. It was a pretty shrewd investment. Notes Kara Newman's book is the Secret Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. She also has a website. Trading Places turned 30 last year. NPR's Planet Money did a bang up job of asking how accurate it was, with added Roman Mars. Photo of bacon and eggs by Phil Lees Engage

About a month ago I got wind of a conference called Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe, 1800-present, at the University of Texas at Austin. In some dream world, I would have booked a flight there and then, packed my audio gear, and plunged in. Next best thing, thanks to the kind offices of Rachel Laudan, was to talk to Mary C. Neuburger, the conference organiser. It isn’t clear whether the symposium will give rise to a publication. I hope so. And if, by chance, any of the authors have made versions of their talks available, I would be delighted to link to them here. Just let me know. Other sources include The Austin Chronicle, which took the opportunity to visit and review a local Russian restaurant. And Mary Neuburger also mentioned Anya von Bremzen’s memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. That, I hope, is another story for another time, preferably not in a dream world. Looking through the conference programme, I had singled out a few papers that I thought might be of interest, and Mary was kind enough to deal with almost all of them, and more besides. Specifics: Bella Bychkova-Jordan, University of Texas “Traveling Foods: Diffusion of Native Food Complexes from the New World to Different Parts of Eurasia.” Michael Pesenson, University of Texas “Feasting and Fasting in Muscovite Rus.” Irina Glouchshenko, Moscow School of Higher Economics “Industrialization of Taste: Anastas Mikoyan and the Making of Soviet Cuisine in the 1930s.” Brian Davies and Kolleen Guy, University of Texas San Antonio “Why Don’t We Drink Russian Malbec: The Crimean Origins of a ‘French’ Varietal?” Nikolai Burlakoff, Independent Scholar "Borsch (Borscht, Bortsch, Borschch): From Hogweed Soup to Outer Space, the Improbable Odyssey of the World’s Best Known Soup Dish.” Mary Neuburger, University of Texas “Cooking for Bai Tosho: A Bulgarian Celebrity Chef Serves up the Past.” Engage

There’s supposed to be this whole mystique surrounding “proper” pasta: how to cook it, which shape with what sauce, how to eat it, all that. And if you’re not born to it, you’ll never really understand it. Well, maybe not, but with a little effort you can get a whole lot closer to authenticity. Maureen Fant, a writer and scholar who has lived in Rome since 1979, has a new book out with her collaborator Oretta Zanini de Vita, making their Encyclopedia of Pasta a tad more kitchen-friendly. Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is a curious blend of the constrained and the relaxed … just like Italy. One of the things they’re relaxed about is shapes for sauces, which came as a bit of a surprise. One of the things they’re not relaxed about is overcooked pasta, which did not. There was so much else we could have talked about, and the book is a one of those cookbooks that is as much a good read as a manual of instruction. As for my beloved cacio e pepe, fashionable or not, I am greatly encouraged by the the news that “[t]his is not a dish to make for a crowd … The smaller the quantity, the better the result.” That’s all the encouragement I need. Notes Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way is available from Amazon and elsewhere. I’m not too sure what to make of the whole mathematical pasta trope. It smacks to me of an answer in search of a question. Maureen Fant recently gave a great little interview on spaghetti carbonara that tries to set the record straight on this canonical dish. Cover photo by Stijn Nieuwendijk. Special treat If you listened to the podcast and made it this far, you know I promised you a special treat. Here it is. Little Richard sings On Top of Spaghetti. ’Nuff said? Engage

A bombie cluster munition on a farm in Khammouane Province, Laos.©2010/Jerry Redfern Karen Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes about food – among other things. She emailed to ask if I would be interested in talking to her about a book that she and her husband, photographer Jerry Redfern, have produced. It’s called Eternal Harvest, but it isn’t about food, at least not directly. Its subtitle is the legacy of American bombs in Laos. Some of those bombs are 500-pounders. Lots of them are little tennis-ball sized bomblets, which are as attractive to farm kids as a tennis ball might be, with horrific consequences. The story of unexploded ordnance in Laos was an eye opener, for me. But I also wanted to know about food in Laos, and so that’s where we began our conversation. Over the course of nine years and a bombing mission every eight minutes, round the clock, more than 270 million cluster bombs – or bombies – were dropped on Laos. The cluster bombs were a small part of the 2 million tonnes dropped on Laos, almost half a tonne of ordnance for every man, woman and child in the country. Some was aimed at breaking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The rest was jettisoned by pilots who had been told not to return to base with any bombs left in their planes. The failure rate, as Karen said, was around 30 percent. Unexploded ordnance remains an ever-present threat, and not only during the business of farming. About half the people killed, according a a 2009 report, were going after scrap metal. A scrap metal collector can make $5 a day, compared to the average wage of about $1 a day. And that’s not the only way the bombs are “beneficial”. Many farming families use craters – created by bombs that did explode – as fish ponds, improving both their income and their nutritional status. Casualties have dropped, from about 1450 a year in 1975 to about 350 a year in 2009, but less than one per cent of the land has been cleared. A technician with a UXO Lao bomb disposal team scans for bombs in a woman’s yard as she continues weeding. They work along a new road built atop the old Ho Chi Minh Trail.©2006/Jerry Redfern Notes Eternal Harvest: the legacy of American bombs in Laos has a website and is available from Amazon. I started reading up about bomb crater fish ponds at Nicola Twilley’s Edible Geography. Fascinating accounts of individual farmers bring an otherwise dry FAO field manual on common aquaculture practices in Lao PDR to life. The maps in this online post by Xiaoxuan Lu about her thesis give some idea of the scale of the problem. Karen writes online at The Rambling Spoon and elsewhere. There’s plenty there about restaurants, Lao cookbooks and that nine-day field trip we talked about. The music is a Lao folk tune called Dokmai (Flower) by a group called “Thiphakon (roughly, resonance of angels)”. I found it online. Engage

Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions. “They” say that turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a business is a recipe for disaster, and while I’m flattered that people will pay for an additional loaf of bread I’ve baked, there’s no way I’m going to be getting up at 3 in the morning every day to sell enough loaves to make a living. But there are people who have done just that, and one of them happens to be a friend. Suzanne Dunaway and her husband Don turned her simple, delicious foccacia into Buona Forchetta bakery, a multi-million dollar business that won plaudits for the quality of its bread – and then sold it and walked away. Suzanne was also one of the first popularisers of the “no-knead” method of making bread, with her 1999 book No need to knead. Using a wetter dough, and letting time take the place of kneading, has been around among professional bakers and some, often forgetful, amateurs for a long time, but it was Mark Bittman’s article in the New York Times that opened the floodgates on this method. Since then, as any search engine will reveal, interest in the technique has exploded, both because no-knead is perceived as easier and because the long, slow rise that no-knead usually calls for results in a deeper, more complex flavour. I've had my troubles with it, and had more or less given up on the real deal. But I’m looking forward to seeing how a quick no-knead bread turns out, especially now that I know that in Suzanne's case it was the result of a delicious accident. Notes If you created the graphic riff on Breaking Bad, or you know who did it, please let me know. I would really like to give proper credit. Engage