The Sporkful

In the 1930s, after a disastrous famine killed millions of Soviet citizens, Joseph Stalin made an abrupt turn in his approach to food. He ditched the idea that his countrymen could live on bread alone, and decided they should eat more joyously instead. The result of this campaign was "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food" — one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union.

Jacques Pépin has spent his career defying expectations. By 1958, at the age of 23, he had cooked for three French presidents. But he left that life to work at a high-end restaurant in New York, then gave that up to cook at Howard Johnson's, making food for the masses.

Comedian Margaret Cho has struggled with eating disorders for most of her life. When she was starting out in comedy, she used alcohol and drugs to mask her hunger, and later resorted to other methods of controlling her weight. When we received a note from a teenage listener struggling with her own eating issues, we invited Margaret to share her story and advice with the listener and other young people who might be headed down the same path.

Should you eat fast food on vacation, or should every meal be at a special local place? Is soup bar food? Does ice belong in milk?

Mandy Naglich is an award-winning home brewer who also writes and teaches about beer. Now she wants to become a Master Cicerone — basically the beer equivalent of a master sommelier. There are only 19 in the world, and just three are women. If Mandy wants to be number 20, she’ll need to pass a grueling two-day exam that includes identifying beers by taste and smell, pairing beers with food, and fixing a broken draft line. Dan selflessly offers himself up as Mandy’s beer-tasting study buddy, and we get a glimpse of the depth of her knowledge. But will it be enough for her to become a Master Cicerone?

To sign up for one of Mandy Naglich's virtual beer workshops, go to BeersWithMandy.com. //

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Transcript available at www.sporkful.com.

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What foods do Sporkful listeners resolve to eat more of in the new year, and why? And what’s Dan’s New Year’s food resolution for 2022? All is revealed in our annual year-end spectacular.

Sebastian Maniscalco is one of the top-grossing comedians in America, beloved for his stories about the food-obsessed family he grew up in, and his constant irritation at just about everyone around him. Now he’s parlayed his love of food into a new Food Network show, Well Done.

Professor Steven Alvarez believes you can read a taco. Look at the meat, the spices, and the tortilla. Each ingredient has a story that unlocks something about Mexican and American history and culture.

TikTok is the wild west of the food media world. It’s less professionalized than Instagram and YouTube, and it holds the promise of virality from the very first time you post. So we wondered: What actually makes a food TikTok go viral?

The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. It has 500,000 food books alone. A library with that many books has a lot of librarians, with expertise in just about every region, culture, and period of history you can think of.