Australia: where healthier diets are cheaper …
10 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Australians devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. They could...
Mistaken about mayonnaise — and many other foods
27 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Alternative food facts tramp across the landscape the hordes of the undead. Tom Nealon's new book Fo...
A computer learns about ingredients and recipes
13 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps you’ve heard about IBM’s giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and no...
How much does a nutritious diet cost?
27 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
You can eat a perfectly nutritious diet for a lot less money than the US government says you need. B...
Food and status
13 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Food has always been a marker of social status, only today no elite eater worth their pink Himalayan...
In praise of meat, milk and eggs
01 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Giving up on animals as a source of food is a luxury that many people cannot afford. For poor people...
India’s bread landscape and my plans here
16 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
I recommend a podcast and share some plans for Eat This Podcast in 2017.
Long live the Carolina African Runner
09 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Is the Carolina Runner No.4 peanut "the first peanut cultivated in North America" and does it matter...
A deep dive into cucurbit names
31 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Continuing the short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes by getti...
The Great Epping Sausage Scandal
26 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Starting a short season of bits and pieces that didn't quite fit in the year's episodes with a look ...
We need to talk about diets
13 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Bad diet is now the number one risk factor for disease. Is the world going to tackle the problem?
The Culinary Breeding Network
28 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
If you going to breed vegetables for flavour -- perish the thought -- you need someone to help you d...
Foie gras
14 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Foie gras offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the...
Wine and cheese
31 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A new technique for asking how one taste affects another confirms a recent change of opinion. White ...
English sausages
17 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Who knows what evil lurks beneath the wrinkled skin of an "economy" English sausage? And what deligh...
Whiskynomics
03 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Did you know that malt whisky owes its existence in the marketplace to the stock market crash of 197...
A far from dismal scientist
19 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in th...
When is a zucchini not a zucchini?
05 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A story of exploration, aristocracy and promiscuity, all in the service of better food. What more co...
Small-scale spirits
22 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they're spreading, at least ...
A visit to Elkstone Farm in Colorado
08 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is...
Xylella is here and it could be dangerous
25 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change and global trade combine to make it ever more likely that new pests and diseases will...
How the Irish created the great wines of Bordeaux (and elsewhere)
11 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
You can thank the Irish Wine Geese for many of the Grand Crus of France.
Back to the mountains of Pamir
27 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what r...
Sweetness and light
13 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does no...
The True Father of the First Green Revolution
30 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global foo...
A brief history of Irish butter
16 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums...
Where’s the latest episode?
09 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
By rights, there should have been an episode last week, but there wasn't because I was just back fro...
It is OK to eat quinoa
18 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Quinoa -- that darling of the health-conscious western consumer -- came in for a lot of flack a few ...
Welcome to the Wonderbag
04 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
At this year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food I talked to Jon Verriet, who’s been re...
The evolution of food culture in Mali
21 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to cradles of agriculture, West Africa does not often get a look in. The Sahel is bett...
Crackers about Indonesian food
07 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
I'm on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I'v...
Chewing the fat about chewing the fat
22 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been h...
The haybox through history
08 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Huffduff it This year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food was dedicated to The ma...
An English woman’s take on Italian cooking
01 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Roddy, after about 10 years of hard slog, is an overnight sensation. She's just scooped t...
Egyptian street food in London
25 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As promised, another second helping from one of 2015's episodes, before we get to the new stuff. Thi...
Tulip bulb soup
05 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As ever, I’m taking a little break and bringing you some repeats from 2015. This one is prompted b...
An experiment in sound and taste
21 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Irish music and its influence on the taste of Irish beer
Aquae Urbis Romae
07 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Following the ancient aqueducts to trace the history of the waters of Rome
How to measure what farms produce
23 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the pa...
The Dark Ages were a time of prosperity
10 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of th...
Going further than food miles
26 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Forget organic. Eat local.” Nice, simple advice, from the cover of Time magazine. But more or l...
Fifth quarter: Rachel Roddy’s Rome
12 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
That sink is where Rachel Roddy, an English woman in Rome, prepares meals to share with her partner ...
Just Mayo and justice
28 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An ev...
A year of cooking almost everything from scratch
14 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Megan Kimble -- that's her on the left -- is a young journalist in Tucson, Arizona. Back in 2012, sh...
The military-culinary complex
31 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever stopped to wonder what drives the incessant innovation in processed food? Who thought ...
100% food insecure: poor people in a rich country
17 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The O-Pipin-Na-Piwin Cree Nation have suffered generations of maltreatment at the hands of various o...
Larder inessentials
20 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The heat here in Rome has been something the past couple of weeks. Not up to 2003 of blessed memory,...
Culture and agriculture in the Pamirs
06 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Pamir Mountains of Central Asia hold a fascinating diversity of food crops. Exploring the area i...
How to eat well in Italy
22 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are ...
These aren’t the pests you’re looking for
08 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t...
Lead poisoning of hunters and game
18 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, i...
Enjoying life on a rather restricted regimen
04 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I'd prefer not to...
Grass-fed beef
20 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What kind of business wants customers to buy less? The beef business, or at least, one tiny corner o...
A second helping of citrus in Italy
06 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is a repeat of one first published in October 2014, and the reason is that it has been ...
A visit to Koshari Street
23 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Street food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can ...
An Italian wine education
09 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Drinking Italian wine anywhere -- even in Italy -- can be fraught with complications. Is that wine f...
A little about allotments
23 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller s...
Food, hunger and conflict
09 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very...
Agricultural foundations
26 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matt...
Future of agriculture
20 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who...
Pasta laid bare
12 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Why is arrabbiata sauce always served on penne pasta? What's wrong with my spaghetti cacio e pepe? M...
Cheese in aspic
05 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
There's a thin line between protecting the authenticity of a fine traditional food and preventing th...
Bread remembered
29 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Back in January I talked to Suzanne Dunaway about Buona Forchetta, the bakery she and her husband Do...
Garibaldi and citrus in Italy
22 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
One of my treats this year was sitting down with Helena Attlee to talk about her book The Land Where...
Another helping of turkey
15 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The conservation of the wild turkey was triumph, but it left ornithologists scratching their heads. ...
A partial history of the turkey
01 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is wonderful. Why would a bird from America be named after a cou...
Talking turkey
27 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
As people in North America prepare to give thanks and devour unimaginable quantities of food, we go ...
The festa dell’uva of the 1930s
17 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
These days, every little town and village in Italy has its sagra or festa, a weekend, or longer, in ...
Looking forward to the festa dell’uva
10 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1930s the Italian fascists decided that floats laden with giant grapes would be the vehicle t...
Exploring Kazakhstan’s apple forests
04 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Kazakhstan stretches across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea in the east to China in the west. The ...
Bears and apples
27 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last t...
A novel approach to food security
20 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is ...
Citrus in Italy
06 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the bot...
What’s cooking in Tasmania?
22 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. And share the process....
Garum brought up to date
08 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Garum is one of those ancient foods that everyone seems to have heard of. It is usually described as...
Rice from Randall’s Island, New York
25 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Randall’s Island is a small piece of land just east of 125th Street in New York’s East River. It...
Japanese food through Canadian eyes
11 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
I’m fascinated by Japanese food, but from a position of profound ignorance. I’ve never been ther...
Who invented dried pasta?
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The history of pasta, ancient and modern, is littered with myths about the origins of manufacturing ...
Vermont and the taste of place
14 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What do artisanal cheese and maple syrup have in common? In North America, and elsewhere too, they’...
What makes Parmigiano-Reggiano Parmigiano-Reggiano?
30 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Great wheels of parmesan cheese, stamped all about with codes and official-looking markings, loudly ...
Bones and the Mongol diet
16 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The growing popularity of “Mongolian” restaurants owes less to Mongolian food and more to, er, h...
Edible aroids
26 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creol...
Food tours and cooking classes
12 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many peop...
Rambling on my mind
28 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to spea...
Food prices and social unrest
14 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest...
The Global Standard Diet
31 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
We’ll have what they’re having has taken on a whole new meaning In a world in which you can g...
Food and finance
17 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Sure, you've seen Trading Places. But do you know about the history of futures contracts, or why som...
Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe
03 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
About a month ago I got wind of a conference called Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia ...
Pasta
17 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There’s supposed to be this whole mystique surrounding “proper” pasta: how to cook it, which s...
Food — and bombs — in Laos
03 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
A bombie cluster munition on a farm in Khammouane Province, Laos.©2010/Jerry Redfern Karen Coat...
Baking bread: getting big and getting out
20 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ah, the self-indulgent joy of making a podcast on one of my own passions. “They” say that...
A tasting menu
13 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The first episode of 2014 is a look back to some of the topics I covered in 2013, and for what I hop...
Fermentation revisited
18 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Apologies for the delay in publishing this podcast. One of the joys of not being tied to "proper" ra...
Hunger and malnutrition
02 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
One week jam, the next global hunger and malnutrition. That’s the joy of Eat This Podcast; I get t...
Jam tomorrow?
18 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Vivien Lloyd about to add warm sugar to her simmered fruit. What is jam? “A preserve made from ...
Backpackers and their food
04 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
When you’re on holiday, or just away from home, do you seek out the “authentic” local food, or...
Pecans and history
21 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The Guadalupe River that flows through Texas used to be known as The River of Nuts, a fact that Wiki...
Why save seeds?
07 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What, really, is the point of conserving agricultural biodiversity? The formal sector, genebanks and...
How to bake bread in a microwave oven
23 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could g...
Crispy crunchy mega-munchy
09 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is iden...