Eat This Podcast
Episodes
1000 days of noodle soup
11 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How an empty kitchen in Boston triggered a breakfast obsession and a new book on noodle soup.
Pushing good coffee
30 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If you really want to do good by spending more on your coffee, you need to look beyond Fair Trade and other certification schemes.
It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you
14 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
John Speth on how food we may consider disgusting is essential for survival in the Arctic, with added disgusting goodness from Paul Rozin.
Back to the future for the wheat of tomorrow
31 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Wheat growers are making use of hugely diverse evolutionary populations to give them the seeds they need.
Getting to know the cinta senese on its home turf
17 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A breed of pigs, well known as far back as 1338, almost vanished in the 1960s. Now it's back, and it's delicious.
A brief survey of the food of Corfu
03 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Changing Global Diets: the website
24 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A picture is worth way more than 1000 words when it reveals food trends over the past 50 years for more than 150 countries.
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 eat better for less money, but "affordable luxuri...
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 Food Fights & Culture Wars aims to lay some of them ...
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 novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Pri...
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. But would you want to?
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 salt would be seen dead with a slice of fluffy wh...
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 in developing countries, a bit of animal source f...
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 anyway?
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 getting to grips with the origin of "gherkin" and other...
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 at the Great Epping Sausage Scandal.
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 decide what's good. Enter the Culinary Breeding Net...
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 subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a so...
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 wine is often a better choice than red to accompan...
English sausages
17 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
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 1973-74? Neither did I, so when one of the people ...
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 the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible fo...
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 could you want?
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 where they're allowed. British Columbia has gone f...
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 relatively benign all year round and you can grow...
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 threaten food supplies. A classic example is play...
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 remained of the region’s rich agricultural biodiv...
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 not make sense I had no idea that the statistical co...
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 food security and yet who is almost unknown. It’...
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 but not others. It ought to be on all of them. Th...
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 from New York and the James Beard Awards, and I just ...
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 years ago. Skyrocketing prices caused some food ac...
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 researching the history of the haybox. That’s an i...
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 better known as a place of famine than of feasting, bu...
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've bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than...
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 here almost 25 years she developed something of an ...
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 material culture of cooking tools and techniques and...
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 the André Simon award for best food book in 2015, ...
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. This time, I'm remembering my trip to the little plac...
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 by an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that I’ve j...
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 past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yiel...
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 the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centurie...
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 less pointless. There’s so much more to food syst...
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 Vincenzo, their young son Luca, and a horde of app...
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 evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused cons...
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, she set out to stick it to the processed food man, b...
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 that an energy bar would be a good thing to exist?...
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 official entities. Moved from their homelands furth...
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, but hot nevertheless. The last thing I needed was...
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 in the early years of the 20th century the great Ru...
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 restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those...
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 want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give 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, it is about how what people leave behind affects th...
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 eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, that...
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 of the beef business. Mark Shelley is an environ...
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 nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. I'm ...
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 afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the...
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 from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Bett...
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 still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-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 interesting meeting it was too. The topic was Foo...
Agricultural foundations
26 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fund...
Future of agriculture
20 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of agricultu...
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? Maureen Fant, co-author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta t...
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 the kinds of living changes that allowed it to survi...
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 Don started and eventually sold. An early social mar...
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 Lemons Grow. Part of that interview didn't make i...
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. How many species were there? And where did they li...
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 country on the edge of Asia?
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 to the heart of the matter. Why are turkeys called...
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 celebration of a particular local food. Although t...
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 to drive forward Italian nationalism. Hear how in n...
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 country is famous for many things – it is the la...
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 time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time...
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 to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and th...
Citrus in Italy
06 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the differenc...
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. Stir-fries, curries, Ethiopian wats, loaves of br...
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 “fermented fish guts,” or something equally u...
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 is also around 2 degrees further south than the n...
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 there and I’ve never having eaten anything I could d...
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 techniques, of cooking, of recipes, of names, of a...
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’re likely to bring to mind the state of Vermont, ...
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 shout that they are the real thing: Parmigiano-Reg...
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, how shall we say, marketing. To whit: "It’s ac...
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 Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to w...
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 people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. We...
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 speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself...
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 in this episode. The picture on the left is one o...
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 get pizza in Tokyo and sushi in Rome, diets have be...
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 some things are traded on commodities markets and oth...
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 & Eastern Europe, 1800-present, at the University ...
Pasta
17 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
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...
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 Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes a...
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 turning cooking from an enjoyable hobby into a bu...
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 hope is a good reason. With a podcast, unlike a piece...
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" radio is the freedom to give a story the length it d...