Welcome back! We’re easing back into the swing of things after our summer holidays with a bit of “cucumber season” fare. It’s our regularly scheduled programming, just a little bit…sillier. 

This week, we take a peek into the world’s first “sourdough library” with Karl De Smedt, head of the Puratos Sourdough Institute. Karl gives us a taste of his unconventional career preserving breadmaking biodiversity and explains why the starters in his library are a little like Europeans themselves. Plus: we learn why the Aalborg Zoo in Denmark is encouraging people to bring in unwanted pets and how Dominic “gave” Daniel Radcliffe his career(!).

You can take a virtual tour of the Puratos sourdough library here and check out Karl on Instagram here.

And if you want to find out more about the Stop Killing Games campaign, watch this video.

This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. But it’s contributions from listeners that truly make it all possible—we could not continue to make the show without you! If you like what we do, you can chip in to help us cover our production costs at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (in many different currencies), or you can gift a donation to a superfan. We'd also love it if you could tell two friends about this podcast. We think two feels like a reasonable number.

This week's Inspiration Station recommendations are two books, Patrick Radden Keefe’s spellbinding history of the Troubles, “Say Nothing,” and the novel “Second Best” by French author David Foenkinos.

00:00:00 First things first: WTF is up with strawberry pasta in Poland?

Producers: Morgan Childs and Wojciech Oleksiak