Gastropod

By Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Arts History Food

What's Gastropod about?

Food with a Side of Science & History

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LAST EPISODE

You're Wrong About Prohibition

05.11.2021

For most of us, Prohibition seems like a peculiar American experiment—a doomed attempt by straight-laced religious conservatives to ban alcohol, and, with it, fun. But as it turns out, we've got it all wrong: Prohibition was actually a progressive struggle ...

Gastropod episodes:

05.11.2021 You're Wrong About Prohibition For most of us, Prohibition seems like a peculiar American experiment—a doomed attempt by straight-laced religious conservatives to ban alcohol, and, with it, fun. But as it turns out, we've got it all wrong: Prohibition was actually a progressive struggle ...
04.27.2021 So Hot Right Now: Why We Love the Chile Pepper Perhaps no other plant is as entwined with pain and pleasure as the chile pepper. But why does it burn—and why on earth do we crave that uncomfortable sensation? How did capsaicin's fungus-fighting, digestion-enhancing, and adrenaline-triggering powers convince early hunter ...
04.13.2021 Easy A: The SuperRad Story of Home Economics If you grew up in the U.S., you might remember home economics class as the source of deflated muffins and horrifically distorted sewing projects. You might, like Jonah Hill’s character in Superbad, have thought of home ec as “a joke” ...
03.30.2021 Where There's Smoke, There's ... Whiskey, Fish, and Barbecue! As anyone who’s spent time by a crackling campfire or a barbecue pit can attest, the scent of smoke is unmistakable—and surprisingly mysterious. Smoke clings to clothing but vanishes in the breeze. You see it, but you can’t hold it. ...
03.16.2021 Phage Against the Machine If you thought food poisoning was just a matter of the occasional stomach upset from a dodgy shrimp or two, the CDC has some unsettling numbers for you: foodborne bacteria is responsible for at least 48 million cases of illness, ...
03.09.2021 Guest Episode: Mission: ImPASTAble from The Sporkful See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
03.02.2021 Why Thai? It’s hard to imagine the American restaurant landscape without Thai food: Tom yum and pad see ew are practically household names, and pad thai is the ultimate quarantine comfort food. (It's apparently zombie apocalypse comfort food, too, as shown on ...
02.16.2021 Hot Tips If you live in the United States, you’re familiar with a curious mathematical ritual that takes place at the end of every restaurant meal—it’s time to tip, with all the stress the process entails. How much should you leave? Who's ...
02.03.2021 TV Dinners Cue the dramatic music, it’s quiz time: Can you identify the people behind these catchphrases? “Yum-O!” “Pukka!” “Bam!” “Peace, love, and taco grease!” The answers are below—but if you’ve already caught on, then you’re well aware of how entrenched TV ...
12.22.2020 The Brightest Bulb Imagine, for a moment, a world without garlic: garlic-free garlic bread, tzatziki sans Allium sativum, a chili crisp defanged. If this sounds like the makings of a horror story to you, you’re not alone. Garlic consumption in the U.S. has ...
12.08.2020 Like Water in the Desert Over the past century, we've transformed the arid lands of the American west into year-round, well-irrigated agricultural powerhouses. Today, fruits, nuts, and nearly all of our leafy greens are grown in the desert, using water diverted, stored, and supplied at ...
11.24.2020 The Magic Cube You could call it the Swiss Army knife of the kitchen: bouillon is a handy ingredient, whether it comes as bottled brown gloop, or a cube wrapped up in shiny foil like a tiny present. Today, cooks around the world ...
11.10.2020 The Big Apple Episode There’s nothing more American than apple pie—or is there? We might prescribe an apple a day and call our largest city the Big Apple, but this legendary fruit originally hails from the mountains of Kazakhstan. This episode, Michael Pollan (something ...
10.27.2020 The Hangover: Part Gastropod Morning fog. Gallon-distemper. Busthead. These are all names for alcohol's age-old after-party: the hangover. But, aside from being a physical (and painful) manifestation of regret, what exactly is a hangover? What's happening in our bodies—and specifically in our livers—and can ...
10.13.2020 Snack Attack! To snack or not to snack? And what counts as a snack, anyhow? Plus the great meal vs. snack smackdown: is grazing good, or does eating between meals lead to waistline expansion? We’re asking deep questions about not-so-substantial foods in ...
09.29.2020 This Spud's For You Fried, roasted, mashed, steamed: it's hard to imagine life without the crispy, fluffy comfort blanket of potatoes. But until the late 1500s, no one outside the Americas had ever encountered this terrific tuber, and initially Europeans, particularly peasant farmers, didn't ...
09.15.2020 Moo-Dunnit: How Beef Replaced Bison on the American Plains—and Plate Saddle up, folks: Today’s episode involves the cowboys' lullabies and meat riots that helped make beef an American birthright. With the help of Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic, we tell the story of how and why the 30 ...
08.31.2020 What the Shell? Cracking the Lobster's Mysteries Consider the lobster roll: tender chunks of lobster bathed in butter or mayo, sandwiched between two slices of a squishy bread roll… Have we caught your attention yet? Lobster is a summertime staple in New England, a fixture on casino ...
08.25.2020 Guest Episode: Rocky Road with Science Diction This episode, Gastropod is bringing you a guest: Science Diction, a bite-sized podcast about words, and the science stories behind them. They answer questions like: what does the word “meme” have to do with evolutionary biology? And why do we ...
08.17.2020 Shatter-Proof: How Glass Took Over the Kitchen—and Ended Child Labor Cheers! The lively clink of glass on glass is a must for any festive gathering, whether you’re sipping champagne in a flute or lemonade in a tumbler. We rely on glass in the kitchen—for baking perfectly browned pies, preserving jams ...
08.03.2020 The Most Dangerous Fruit in America It's the epitome of summertime: there’s nothing like a cold, juicy slice of red watermelon on a swelteringly hot day. But, once upon a time, watermelons were neither red nor sweet—the wild watermelon has white flesh and a bitter taste. ...
06.16.2020 Dig for Victory You’ve seen the news: vegetable seeds are selling out. All that quarantine ennui has combined with anxiety about the gaps on supermarket shelves to create a whole new population of city farmers in backyards and windowsills across America. And everyone ...
06.03.2020 Shared Plates: How Eating Together Makes Us Human We love eating dinner together with friends and extended family, and we miss it! But why does sharing a meal mean so much—and can we ever recreate that on Zoom? As we wait for the dinner parties, cookouts, and potlucks ...
05.19.2020 Pizza Pizza! At last, an episode on pizza! But that raises a tricky question: what exactly is pizza? As it turns out, the original pizzas from eighteenth-century Naples looked nothing like a standard slice—they were more like a focaccia, topped with oil, ...
05.05.2020 Eating the Wild: Bushmeat, Game, and the Fuzzy Line Between Them It's a safe bet that your recent media diet has included the words "wet market," "zoonotic disease," and "pangolin," as experts take a pause from discussing COVID-19's spread and impact to speculate on the virus's origins. This episode, we're digging ...
04.21.2020 Eating the Rainbow: Or, the Mystery of the Orange Oranges, the Red M&Ms, and the Blue Raspberry From stripy fuchsia beets to unicorn doughnuts, the foods available today on grocery store shelves and in cafe displays are more brightly colored than ever. But this hasn't always been the case. This episode of Gastropod, we offer three stories ...
04.07.2020 A Tale To Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart You might have heard of Molly Malone, selling cockles from a wheelbarrow in Dublin, or of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, with her cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row—but the chances are most Gastropod listeners have never actually ...
03.24.2020 White vs. Wheat: The Food Fight of the Centuries White or whole wheat: while today the question is most frequently asked at the sandwich counter, the debate over the correct answer goes back literally thousands of years. In the past century, though, as white flour and thus white bread ...
03.10.2020 Licorice: A Dark and Salty Stranger Licorice is a polarizing candy: there are those who pick out the black jelly beans, those who think Twizzlers are better than Red Vines, and those who won't travel without a supply of salty dark lozenges. The dark and chewy ...
02.25.2020 To Fight Climate Change, Bank on Soil Our glaciers are melting, our forests are on fire, our harvests are increasingly decimated by either floods and drought. We are in a climate emergency that threatens our very survival, and it is, frankly, incredibly depressing. But this episode,
02.11.2020 Move Over Gin, We’ve Got Tonic Fever Just a few decades ago, gin & tonics were considered rather stodgy and boring, the drink of suburbanites at the golf club. Today, the century-old drink is hot again. In part, that’s due to a boom in craft gin distilling—a ...
01.28.2020 The United States of McDonald’s McDonald’s is mind-boggling. According to Adam Chandler, author of the recent book, Drive-Thru Dreams, it sells roughly 75 burgers every second and serves 68 million people every day—equivalent to 1 percent of the entire world’s population.
01.13.2020 Dinner Plate Invasion: Lionfish, Tiger Shrimp, and Feral Pigs, Oh My! Across America, feral pigs are on the rampage, wrecking fields of crops, hunting local wildlife to extinction, and even attacking humans. In the United Kingdom, Japanese knotweed is taking over the landscape: banks deny mortgages to infested properties...
12.17.2019 Meet the Queen of Kiwi: the 96-Year-Old Woman Who Transformed America’s Produce Aisle The produce section of most American supermarkets in the 1950s was minimal to a fault, with only a few dozen fruits and vegetables to choose from: perhaps one kind of apple, one kind of lettuce, a yellow onion, a pile ...
12.03.2019 Are Insect Guts the Secret to the Most Delicious Kimchi? This side dish of spicy, bubbly, funky pickled vegetables is such a staple in Korea that no meal is considered complete without it—but, recently, kimchi has found its way into burgers, pasta, grilled cheese, and even tacos. This episode,
11.18.2019 Menu Mind Control At its most basic, a menu is simply a way for a restaurant to communicate its offerings and their prices to its customers. But, perhaps even more importantly, says Alison Pearlman, author of a new book on menus called May ...
11.05.2019 Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction The earliest humans favored juicy, meaty mammoth at mealtimes. Ancient Romans loved their favorite herb, silphium, so much that they sprinkled it on everything from lamb to melon. In the 19th century United States,
10.22.2019 Tiki Time! Tiki bars are hot these days: you can enjoy a fruity tropical drink while surrounded by faux-Polynesian décor in most major cities around the U.S. and elsewhere, with new tiki spots opening every month. The trend is a revival of ...
10.08.2019 What’s CRISPR Doing in our Food? You’ve probably heard the hype: CRISPR will revolutionize biotech, cure disease, resurrect extinct species, and even create new-and-(not-so)-improved humans. But what is CRISPR—and what’s it doing in our food?
09.24.2019 Happy Birthday to Us: Gastropod Turns Five We launched Gastropod in September 2014, which means we’re turning five this month, and that’s approximately 100 in podcast years. We’re celebrating our birthday with a special episode featuring highlights from the past five years’ worth of episodes,
09.10.2019 Celebrate Mexico’s True National Holiday with the Mysteries of Mole In the United States, Cinco de Mayo is an excuse for margarita-fueled partying. But in Mexico, that date—the anniversary of a military triumph over Napoleon on May 5, 1862—is marked by a parade and not much else.
08.27.2019 Running on Fumes: Strawberry’s Dirty Secret This episode, we tell an age-old tale: an innocent young berry heads west to make its fame and fortune—but sells its soul in the process. In order for our hero, the strawberry, to defeat its nemesis, a fungus called wilt,
08.13.2019 Omega 1-2-3 Based on all the hype, you’d be forgiven for believing that the fish oils known as omega-3s are solution to every problem. Heart disease, dementia, depression, even obesity—the list of ailments that experts claim a daily dose of omega-3 can ...
08.06.2019 Meet Sharbat, the Ancestor of Sorbet, Syrup, Shrub, Sherbet, and Pretty Much Everything Else Cool Many of you won’t have heard of sharbat, the delightfully tangy, refreshingly icy Persian drink. But most of you will have tasted at least one of its many descendants: sorbet, sherbet, syrup, shrub, and even the julep. So, what is ...
06.19.2019 Super Fry: The Fight for the Golden Frite Shoestring, waffle, curly, or thick-cut: however you slice it, nearly everyone loves a deep-fried, golden brown piece of potato. But that’s where the agreement ends and the battles begin. While Americans call their fries “French,
06.10.2019 Eat This, Not That: The Surprising Science of Personalized Nutrition This episode, we’ve got the exclusive on the preliminary results of the world’s largest personalized nutrition experiment. Genetic epidemiologist Tim Spector launched the study, called PREDICT, to answer a simple but important question: do we each resp...
05.21.2019 Guts and Glory What does it mean when your stomach rumbles? How do our bodies extract nutrients and vitamins from food? Does what you eat affect your mood? Digestion is an invisible, effortless, unconscious process—and one that, until recently,
05.16.2019 BONUS: Introducing Science Rules! with Bill Nye We interrupt our regular programming to bring you news of a new podcast you might like. Bill Nye is on a mission to change the world—one phone call at a time. On his new podcast, Science Rules!, he tackles your ...
05.06.2019 The Great Gastropod Pudding Off Four bakers, one evening, and one challenge: Who can steam the best spotted dick? On this week’s action-packed episode, Tom Gilliford, Selasi Gbormittah, and Yan Tsou of Great British Bake-Off fame, along with honorary Gastropod member (and Cynthia’s p...
04.23.2019 Potatoes in Space! Today, a half century after Neil Armstrong took one small step onto the surface of the Moon, there are still just three humans living in space—the crew of the International Space Station. But, after decades of talk,

Older episodes

Gastropod

What's Gastropod about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Gastropod episodes:

You're Wrong About Prohibition

So Hot Right Now: Why We Love the Chile Pepper

Easy A: The SuperRad Story of Home Economics

Where There's Smoke, There's ... Whiskey, Fish, and Barbecue!

Phage Against the Machine

Guest Episode: Mission: ImPASTAble from The Sporkful

Why Thai?

Hot Tips

TV Dinners

The Brightest Bulb

Like Water in the Desert

The Magic Cube

The Big Apple Episode

The Hangover: Part Gastropod

Snack Attack!

This Spud's For You

Moo-Dunnit: How Beef Replaced Bison on the American Plains—and Plate

What the Shell? Cracking the Lobster's Mysteries

Guest Episode: Rocky Road with Science Diction

Shatter-Proof: How Glass Took Over the Kitchen—and Ended Child Labor

The Most Dangerous Fruit in America

Dig for Victory

Shared Plates: How Eating Together Makes Us Human

Pizza Pizza!

Eating the Wild: Bushmeat, Game, and the Fuzzy Line Between Them

Eating the Rainbow: Or, the Mystery of the Orange Oranges, the Red M&Ms, and the Blue Raspberry

A Tale To Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart

White vs. Wheat: The Food Fight of the Centuries

Licorice: A Dark and Salty Stranger

To Fight Climate Change, Bank on Soil

Move Over Gin, We’ve Got Tonic Fever

The United States of McDonald’s

Dinner Plate Invasion: Lionfish, Tiger Shrimp, and Feral Pigs, Oh My!

Meet the Queen of Kiwi: the 96-Year-Old Woman Who Transformed America’s Produce Aisle

Are Insect Guts the Secret to the Most Delicious Kimchi?

Menu Mind Control

Of Ghost Foods and Culinary Extinction

Tiki Time!

What’s CRISPR Doing in our Food?

Happy Birthday to Us: Gastropod Turns Five

Celebrate Mexico’s True National Holiday with the Mysteries of Mole

Running on Fumes: Strawberry’s Dirty Secret

Omega 1-2-3

Meet Sharbat, the Ancestor of Sorbet, Syrup, Shrub, Sherbet, and Pretty Much Everything Else Cool

Super Fry: The Fight for the Golden Frite

Eat This, Not That: The Surprising Science of Personalized Nutrition

Guts and Glory

BONUS: Introducing Science Rules! with Bill Nye

The Great Gastropod Pudding Off

Potatoes in Space!

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