That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.

Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.

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In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.

That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.

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After you’ve found an historic recipe, sourced appropriate ingredients, figured out the maddeningly imprecise quantities, and grappled with instructions that are often little more than a reminder for someone who already knows how to cook the dish, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or maybe there is.

Marieke Hendriksen of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and her colleagues recently published a paper outlining a procedure for approaching the taste of the past rigorously. After a thorough analysis of early cookbooks as well as medical texts and botanical treatises from the Low Countries, they settled on an apple pie from the 1669 De Verstandige kock.

Dough

To make an apple pie the Wallonian way

After all the analysis and experimentation, though, there’s only one thing to do: taste the end result.

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Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating. Her latest, The Miracle of Salt, is no exception. Recipes for everything from Acadian salted scallions to zucchini in golden sand sauce (for which you’ll first need to make some brined egg yolks) are seasoned with chapters on flavoured salts, salt harvesting techniques, the geography of salt and plenty more. About the only thing we deliberately didn’t talk about was lacto-fermentation, although there’s plenty of that too.

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The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explanation for the high nitrogen isotope ratios in Neanderthal remains. Normally, such high ratios are the result of eating lots of meat. John Speth thinks there’s a better interpretation.

Speth is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert on how hunter-gatherer societies survive, now and in the recent past, and that makes him a valued colleague of archaeologists trying to interpret the remains of Neanderthal societies. At the start of the summer, he was a co-author on two papers that shed light on Neanderthal diets. One identified the site at Neumark Nord as a fat factory where people extracted valuable bone grease in quantity. The other offers a more convincing explanation for why Neanderthals seem to eat as much meat as lions and tigers.

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The struggle to understand the causes of pellagra and how to cure and prevent it played out first in Italy and then in the United States, where 1906 saw a large outbreak in Alabama. Competing explanations were driven by large egos and expediency rather than evidence. That was true even after Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service proved that the disease was not contagious and that the deficiency could be quickly reversed with a proper daily diet or a tablespoon of dried yeast.

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Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian and lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet. We talked about fad diets, and how they are inevitably unsustainable. About weight-loss drugs and whether they are being oversold. About the frustration she feels faced with bad advice, and how the Mayo Clinic’s caution may make it slow, but also makes it sure. About her dismay faced with questions about singular foods and singular nutrients. I learned a lot.

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Puglia is massive. I mean that quite literally, not as youthspeak, though that too. Its northernmost point is actually north of my home in Rome, though admittedly not by very much, which is strange when you consider that for most people, Puglia is only the high heel itself. That’s true for me and for several past episodes here.

A new book that explores the whole province, and more particularly its food and ingredients, flashed through my feeds a few weeks ago. After just a quick look at the contents it seemed obvious that my next move ought to be to hop on a train to Polignano a Mare to talk to the author, Flavia Giordano. So that’s exactly what I did. It was a long day, and entirely worthwhile.

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