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 later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elusive contribution to flavour, best described as “you know it when it’s missing”.

Priya Mani eventually identified the strange thing in her soup as a lichen called Parmotrema perfolatum, commonly known in English as black stoneflower. Lichens are an odd group of plants made up of algae or bacteria living within the cells of a fungus. You’ve seen them on rocks and trees, I’m sure. Black stoneflower turns out to be ubiquitous in Indian cooking, though its presence is not often remarked. Its popularity may now be threatening its survival.

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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 long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize, and a lot of work to understand the genetic changes from teosinte to maize. The big problem was that the genetic work also seemed to contradict the story, by finding remnants of different types of teosinte. A new research paper sorts out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding.

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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 defrauding customers, and yet there is very little public outrage, except in the immediate wake of yet another revelation of wrong-doing. Honey adulteration is nothing new, as I heard from historian Matt Phillpott, who has been studying the practice ancient and modern.

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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 2 Diabetes. But while nutritionists were happy to recommend (low-fat) yoghurt, which seemed to offer similar protection, nowhere was ice-cream mentioned. David Johns wrote that article, and had previously looked into guidelines on cutting salt and the Big Sugar anti-fat conspiracy that never was. An interesting person to talk to about the intersection between nutrition science and public policy.

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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 sticking to my plan.

Rome’s former ghetto has become a tourist attraction, with an interesting museum under the Great Synagogue and plenty of other sites to see. And where there are tourists, there is food. The foodification of the ghetto, however, goes well beyond overpriced snacks. Both sides of the main street, the via del Portico Ottavia, are almost completely lined with restaurants. What I find most mysterious about this is that one of the most popular Roman foods, carciofi alla giudia, is freely available all over Rome and beyond. What makes this deep-fried delight Jewish? And how has food in the ghetto changed?

To help me understand the transformation of Rome’s Jewish foodscape I enlisted the help of Micaela Pavoncello, a member of the Jewish Community, and Sean Wyer, who has been studying the changes in the former ghetto.

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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. There are small dairies who offer fresh milk produced to the same exacting standards of hygeine without being further processed. Not raw milk (which also has its adherents and suppliers), but whole milk that has been pasteurised and nothing more. Almost as soon as I had published the episode on milk early last month, I was excited to come across an article about one such place, Saltrock Dairy in the southeast of Ireland. Saltrock operates a mobile vending machine from which customers can buy whole milk in recyclable bottles. I immediately made plans to talk to Cath Kinsella, whose brainchild it is.

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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 illuminates the present. Impossible to cover all that in a single episode, or even several, we set out to explore what happens when the vast bulk of the English do not have enough to eat. Food riots are a recurring feature of rural life in England, often the result of bad weather and always exacerbated by the action — or inaction — of the ruling classes. As Diane told me at the outset, “it might be faster to talk about what rebellions don’t have a food element”.

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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 cannot have enough of a good thing has created a monstrous industry. Dairy farmers have always had the short end of the stick, because fresh milk is inevitably a buyers’ market. Cows have been manipulated to divorce them from any kind of natural life. And milk drinkers are being fobbed off with a tasteless white liquid reconstituted from its constituent parts and with no hedonic value. And for what?

Mendelson places the start of the rot with George Cheyne, a Scottish physician whom she considers the original celebrity doctor. Partly as a result of avid personal networking, Cheyne became grossly obese. He was also often depressed, declaring that those “whose Genius is most keen and penetrating were most prone to such disorders”. Someone, Cheyne does not say who, told him about a Dr Taylor of Croydon, who had cured himself of epilepsy by a total milk diet. Cheyne visited Taylor, learned about the diet, and dedicated himself to it. He did lose weight, which he regained as soon as he loosened his dedication to milk, and in Bath and London hawked his diet to elite patients, who suffered “nervous complaints” that seldom troubled the lower orders.

It was the first fad diet, complete with celebrity fans and anecdotal miracle cures of nebulous ailments, and its core belief dominated subsequent expert ideas on nutrition and paediatrics. In our chat, we explored the wide range of effects triggered by the belief in milk as a superfood.

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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 passion developed, first for Italian food and then by extension for the food of her homeland. Her book, which emerged from her passion, shares stories and recipes from Iran, from Italy, and from all the countries in between, and it is simply gorgeous, showcasing her multiple talents: writer, cook, photographer.

I know I’m going to have to scan the pages, so that I can cook from it without splattering it in the kitchen.

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