Eat This Podcast

By Jeremy Cherfas

What's Eat This Podcast about?

Using food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. Eat This Podcast tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion — you get the picture. We don’t do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics.

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Eat This Podcast episodes:

04.15.2024
Passover and Easter Revisited
The last supper was a Passover Seder, and for two thousand years Passover and Easter have been linked. The links, however, are complex, which is why I am taking the opportunity to expand on a five-year-old episode. The rituals of the...
04.01.2024
Malta Besieged & Black-market Intrigues
Malta, just off the coast of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean, has always been of enormous strategic importance. As a result it has been claimed, and fought over, by empire after empire. Each time it was vulnerable to...
03.18.2024
The Case for Folic Acid Fortification
Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world. The main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the diet, and in 1991, the UK’s Medical Research Council...
03.04.2024
Anthony Mongiello, Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza
Anthony MongielloA recent documentary tells the story of how a kid from Brooklyn invented the stuffed crust pizza, sued Pizza Hut for ripping him off, and lost. It is a fascinating story, and left me in no doubt about who...
02.19.2024
Prehistoric cooking pots
Harry RobsonSix thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food,...
02.05.2024
The Invention of Baby Food
In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though...
12.18.2023
Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice
In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years...
12.04.2023
A New Story for Maize Domestication
The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a...
11.13.2023
Honey and Adulteration
Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is...
10.30.2023
Fat, Sugar, Salt
Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop Type...
10.16.2023
Jewish Food in Rome
Today is the 80th anniversary of the roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of the Jews of Rome. That much I knew as I was planning this episode. More recent events took me and everyone else completely by surprise. I am...
10.02.2023
Small Dairy
Every aspect of large, industrial food creates a niche for people who want a less standardised alternative, and if the stars align you may have producers nearby who are willing to fill that niche. So it is with Big Milk....
09.18.2023
Food Riots in England
In her latest book English Food: A People’s History, Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due recognition that “‘the English’ are not a single entity” and that the past necessarily...
09.04.2023
Milk is not a Superfood
Anne Mendelson’s new book Spoiled is subtitled The Myth of Milk as Superfood, and at its core argues that while there’s nothing wrong with fresh milk, at least for those who can digest it as adults, the belief that you...
06.05.2023
Pomegranates & Artichokes
Saghar Setareh left Iran in 2007 at 22 years old. She came to Rome to study graphic design and photography. The way she tells it, when she arrived she “certainly didn’t have a particular passion for food”. Slowly, though, that...
05.22.2023
Why Did the Artist Cross the Chicken?
Koen Van Mechelen (left) and Olivier Hanotte (right) sandwich a large marble bust of a crowing cosmopolitan rooster.In 1999, Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist, decided to cross a Belgian rooster with a French hen. The union of the Mechelse Koekoek...
05.08.2023
Feeding the People in Wartime Britain
Coupons and ration books during war was a way for the British government to try and ensure that restricted items were distributed as fairly as possible, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well most of the time. At...
04.24.2023
What is Wrong with Biofortification
About two billion people around the world do not get enough micronutrients in their diet. This lack of vitamins and minerals — often called hidden hunger — has severe and lasting effects on individuals and their societies. One very popular...
04.10.2023
Making Mr Song’s Cheese
Miranda Brown successfully stretches Mr Song's string cheeseI’ve long believed that the reason there is no milk or cheese in Chinese food culture today is because ethnic Chinese people are likely to be lactose intolerant. But that may well be...
03.27.2023
What Price Chicken Wings?
Wally ThurmanTime was when chicken wings were barely a thing, appendages that nobody much wanted to eat. Chickens were bred to deliver big breasts and wings were an afterthought until the advent of Buffalo wings in the 1960s. Now, and...
03.13.2023
Patrik Johansson, the Butter Viking
Ten years ago, the first episode of Eat This Podcast featured Ben Reade talking about some butter that he had buried in a Swedish bog, the better to understand the bog butter occasionally unearthed in Ireland (and elsewhere). The butter...
02.06.2023
Food Security in Egypt
Jessica BarnesEgypt spends about 3% of its budget subsidising bread for about three-quarters of its population. Threats to that subsidy provoke massive civil unrest, helping to topple the regime in 2011. As a result, bread and wheat are fundamental to...
01.23.2023
Fully Tested Tuna
Sean Wittenberg, Safe Catch CEOThere is an awful lot of disagreement on the subject of mercury in fish and shellfish and how harmful it might be to people. That’s especially true for tuna, which are top predators that accumulate mercury...
01.09.2023
Biodiversity at Liberty
Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively...
12.24.2022
Feed Your Baby Like a Fascist
At the end of the previous episode on mothers’ milk Professor Amy Brown mentioned an important source of anxiety for new mothers: they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten, and that pushes them to use a see-through...
12.12.2022
Some thoughts on markets and such
It has been a difficult year for food supplies, and even more so for food markets. Prices everywhere seem to be higher than they have been for a long time, and that’s just in retail shops. On international commodity markets,...
11.28.2022
A Restaurant’s Reckoning
Perhaps unsurprisingly, barbecue restaurants have featured in two really important decisions of the US Supreme Court. Katzenbach v. McClung held that Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, despite being a minuscule mom and pop operation, was nevertheless subject to the Civil...
11.14.2022
How to be a good host and a good guest
Megan Dean (left) and Matthew Smith (right) World Philosophy Day happens later this week, which makes it a good time to be asking what constitutes good behaviour in a host and, equally, in a guest. I’m prompted by a recent article...
10.31.2022
Feeding children well
People, not least parents, have becomes concerned about the increasing proportion of obese and overweight children in wealthier countries. It has even been called an epidemic. Can biology and anthropology deepen our understanding of childhood feeding and suggest possible solutions?...
10.17.2022
In search of tomato gold
Since the 1960s, European seed law could best be summarised as “everything not forbidden is compulsory”. There is a common catalogue of registered seed varieties, and only varieties on the list are on sale. With a flat fee for registration,...
10.03.2022
Mothers and Milk
A wet nurse (for that is what Hera was in all tellings of the story) created the Milky Way when her divine milk sprayed across the heavens. Today’s nursing mothers are not so blessed. Although women have a legal right...
09.20.2022
Fad diets
Atkins. South Beach. Whole30. Zone. Keto. Banting? Yes, Banting. Not the Frederick Banting of Banting & Best, discoverers of insulin, but his distant relative William Banting, author, in 1863, of the self-published Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Not...
07.04.2022
Empire and grain
In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, we move on to empire. The earliest city states in Mesopotamia built their fortunes on their position astride grain transport routes. Still today, the...
06.27.2022
Grain and finance
Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange, invented in Venice and Genoa, created a piece of paper that...
06.20.2022
Grain and transport
Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage...
06.13.2022
Persephone’s secret
Many people take the myth of Demeter — Ceres in Latin — and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. It is, but there may be more to it than that....
05.16.2022
Peanuts, Senegal and Slavery
Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, was an ideal base for the transatlantic slave trade, although the European powers that established themselves in the region found other goods to trade too. One of the most important was the peanut,...
05.02.2022
Garum: Rome’s new library and museum of food
It is impossible to avoid the past in Rome; indeed, the past is why so many people come to Rome. If you’re interested in the history of food, though, there’s been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut...
04.18.2022
Tomatoes: domestication and diversity
Plants of the weedy wild relatives of the tomato all look pretty much like one another, but under the surface they’re a seething mass of genetic diversity. That diversity — along with the discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico...
04.04.2022
Aaron Vallance — 1dish4theroad
Aaron Vallance’s writing at his website 1dish4theroad has twice been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers, not bad for someone who admits to having great difficulty doing his English homework at school. Even more, Aaron Vallance manages to...
03.14.2022
Yes, we have no plantains
Jessica Kehinde Ngo recently wrote an impassioned piece bemoaning the fact that “the plantain has long been eclipsed by its banana cousin”. That alarmed me a little, as did the question immediately afterwards: “Where can the curious go to...
02.21.2022
Food Philosophy
David Kaplan calls himself a taste realist. That means he really does think that there’s something there, in food or drink, that enables us to agree on what it tastes like, if only we have the vocabulary. Kaplan is professor...
02.07.2022
Unconditional cash to improve nutrition
Despite large investments in aid programmes, poverty and hunger remain persistent problems in many parts of the world. Most aid, though, gives people what the donors think they need. What if you give poor people cash, to spend as they...
01.24.2022
Ten thousand years of yoghurt
June Hersh The story is that way back when, Neolithic people discovered that they could eat milk that had gone sour with impunity, even though ordinary milk upset their digestion. The sour milk allowed them to get the nutritional benefit...
12.20.2021
High Art
Bologna likes to think of itself as the pinnacle of food culture in Italy, so it is a bit of a wonder that it took until the 5th edition of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work to...
12.06.2021
A visit to an ancient Roman bakery
Farrell Monaco at one of the two passes to the huge oven Down the River Tiber from Rome is the huge archaeological site of Ostia Antica, which used to be the main port for the city. It’s all ruins now,...
11.15.2021
The true history of the potato in Europe
The story that’s often told of the potato in Europe is one of ignorant, superstitious peasants and wily aristocrats. The peasants shun the potato until the wily aristo plays a trick on them to open their eyes to the true...
10.25.2021
Rachel Roddy: An A–Z of Pasta
Rachel Roddy is a marvellous conduit between the many cultures and kitchens of her adopted homeland and a world that simply cannot get enough of Italy. Her latest book is all about pasta, although she wisely recognised that there was...
10.11.2021
Midnight’s chicken: Indian food evolution
After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a chef brought the tandoor oven and his tandoori chicken from Peshawar to a new restaurant he opened in Delhi, the Moti Mahal. There, he created makkhani murghi, butter chicken; tandoori...
09.27.2021
Sushi
Eric RathThe California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination. Back in the mid 1980s, when I made a documentary for BBC TV about disgust and learned food habits, we chose sushi as our...

What's Eat This Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Eat This Podcast episodes:

Passover and Easter Revisited

Malta Besieged & Black-market Intrigues

The Case for Folic Acid Fortification

Anthony Mongiello, Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza

Prehistoric cooking pots

The Invention of Baby Food

Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice

A New Story for Maize Domestication

Honey and Adulteration

Fat, Sugar, Salt

Jewish Food in Rome

Small Dairy

Food Riots in England

Milk is not a Superfood

Pomegranates & Artichokes

Why Did the Artist Cross the Chicken?

Feeding the People in Wartime Britain

What is Wrong with Biofortification

Making Mr Song’s Cheese

What Price Chicken Wings?

Patrik Johansson, the Butter Viking

Food Security in Egypt

Fully Tested Tuna

Biodiversity at Liberty

Feed Your Baby Like a Fascist

Some thoughts on markets and such

A Restaurant’s Reckoning

How to be a good host and a good guest

Feeding children well

In search of tomato gold

Mothers and Milk

Fad diets

Empire and grain

Grain and finance

Grain and transport

Persephone’s secret

Peanuts, Senegal and Slavery

Garum: Rome’s new library and museum of food

Tomatoes: domestication and diversity

Aaron Vallance — 1dish4theroad

Yes, we have no plantains

Food Philosophy

Unconditional cash to improve nutrition

Ten thousand years of yoghurt

High Art

A visit to an ancient Roman bakery

The true history of the potato in Europe

Rachel Roddy: An A–Z of Pasta

Midnight’s chicken: Indian food evolution

Sushi