Huffduff it

I’m proud to revisit an episode from 2022, in which two country directors of the charity Give Directly told me how cash transfers in Rwanda and Malawi make a real difference to the lives of poor people there. The reason is Give Directly’s Pods Fight Poverty campaign, which aims to raise $1,000,000 for families in Rwanda. They’re more than 10% of the way there, and I hope this podcast can add to the total.

The reason I made the episode in the first place was to ask whether cash enables people to improve their food security and nutrition. As I heard, it does, which is why I am happy to be part of the campaign.

   Huffduff it

   Huffduff it

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

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it

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.

   Huffduff it