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Eat This Podcast
@eatthispodcast.com
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Talking about anything around food
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A Fresh Look at Domestication

According to Robert Spengler, it wasn’t human selection that turned grass into wheat, or wolves into dogs. Domestication just happened in response to changes in the environment.

eatthispodcast.com/domestication

#podcast #agriculture #archaeology
Cover artwork. A Neolithic sickle with flint chips embedded in a wooden handle with bitumen or tar.
November 17, 2025 at 4:38 PM
eatthispodcast.com
New episode: Revolutions are Born in Breadlines.

Maria Fedorova’s new book looks at how the Volga famine of 1920 catalyzed exchanges of food aid, technology, and agricultural ideas. Humanitarian, yes, and also deeply political.

eatthispodcast.com/usa-ussr

#podcast #agriculture #history
Cover artwork. A Russian stamp shows a heroic tractor and driver of 1924
November 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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Eat This Newsletter 286: Cravings

The people who need a healthy diet most can’t afford one, while the people who can easily afford it don’t seem to want it.

buttondown.com/jeremycherfa...

#food #newsletter #nutrition
The cost of a healthy diet in US currency
October 28, 2025 at 9:36 AM
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In 2008, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but around the world, as I learned from @gastroirl.bsky.social

eatthispodcast.com/spice-bag

#food #Ireland
Cover art, with a close up of the contents of a spice bag, including chips, red and green peppers, onion and, presumably, bits of chicken
October 20, 2025 at 1:39 PM
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Revisiting Historical Recipes

Even if you manage to make an old recipe, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or is there?

eatthispodcast.com/past-taste
Cover artwork, with a detail from a 17th century Dutch still-life of a fruit pie.
October 7, 2025 at 9:31 AM
eatthispodcast.com
Eat This Podcast: The Miracle of Salt

Talking to Naomi Duguid about her book The Miracle of Salt and we managed to avoid the whole pink salt diet trick nonsense. So should you. Listen at eatthispodcast.com/salt

#food #podcast #salt
A long hill of salt, glistening white under a cloudy gray sky, dwarfs two workers in front of it. The foreground shows the shallow lagoon in Trapani, Sicily, where the water evaporates to concentre the brine.
September 22, 2025 at 1:29 PM
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Kicking off a new series talking to John Speth about that Neanderthal fat factory and a better explanation for why, when you look at nitrogen isotope ratios, Neanderthals seem to be even more carnivorous than lions and tigers.

www.eatthispodcast.com/maggots/

#podcast #food #agriculture
Cover artwork, a photograph of a reconstruction of a Neanderthal man standing in front of a painted background that shows a body of water and waves breaking. In his hand he seems to have a rabbit.
September 8, 2025 at 12:14 PM
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"Frozen potato products—most of which are french fries—now account for an average of about 50 percent of potato per capita availability at 58 pounds per person after decades of steady increases."

No surprise, but good to have the data.

ers.usda.gov/data-product...

#food #agriculture #potatoes
A bar chart showing changes in the availability of potato products in the US as snapshots from the 1980s, the 2000s and the 2020s. Fresh has declined by 20% while French fries have increased and are now the most popular form of potato.
September 5, 2025 at 8:46 AM
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If you’re puzzled by recent claims about “authentic” Parmigiano-Reggiano you might want to listen to Zachary Nowak explain how the rules effectively trapped the cheese in aspic.

www.eatthispodcast.com/what-makes-p...

#podcast #food #parmigiano-reggiano
A map showing a black line around the region in Emilia-Romana from which the milk for Parmigiano-Reggiano must come.
September 3, 2025 at 9:22 AM
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Thanks, once again, for giving me the opportunity to promote a past episode, with the wonderful Christy Spackman, about her book The Taste of Water. www.eatthispodcast.com/water/
A fountain in Rome labelled Acqua non potabile, warning that the water is not drinkable.
August 30, 2025 at 3:43 PM
eatthispodcast.com
What has the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to do with the middle of August? Is she just another in a long line of Mother Goddesses? Why is Virgo carrying a wheatsheaf?

Some answers in www.eatthispodcast.com/our-daily-br... from my month of daily podcasts on bread and wheat.

#bread #wheat
An illustration of the constellation Virgo from a star atlas, showing a woman holding a sheaf of wheat in her left hand and a palm frond in her right.
August 15, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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Ooops. Biofortified crops aren't doing nearly as well in Uganda as had been claimed.

iaes.cgiar.org/spia/news/bi...

#agriculture #biofortification
A rigorous impact study has shown that orange-fleshed sweet potato can lead to impressive gains in child growth outcomes. Imagine the aggregate gains in health that could have been achieved if millions of households had actually been reached or the benefits that might have been unlocked had the drop in reach been detected early and prompted course correction. When monitoring systems lose touch with on-ground realities, we risk becoming locked into path-dependent decisions that delay learning, derail funding, and undermine the potential benefits these innovations are designed to deliver.
August 13, 2025 at 11:22 AM
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A good day on which to be reminded of an ancient post: Schopenhauer on blogging.

www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/schopen...
Incredible are the folly and perversity of a public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds, of all times and all countries, for the sake of reading the writings of commonplace persons which appear daily, and breed every year in countless numbers like flies; merely because these writings have been printed to-day and are still wet from the press. It would be better if they were thrown on one side and rejected the day they appeared, as they must be after the lapse of a few years. They will then afford material for laughter as illustrating the follies of a former time. It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire.
July 4, 2025 at 9:16 AM
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Eat This Newsletter 273

Number one question: In the 17th century, did the Dutch really brush their teeth with butter?

And a bunch of other morsels.

buttondown.com/jeremycherfa...

#agriculture #food #newsletters
Painting. A Mound of Butter, by Antoine Vollon. A sumptuous, golden mound of butter with a knife stuck into it, the cheesecloth around it unwrapped, and a couple of eggs, sit on a dark brown table against a dark background.
June 30, 2025 at 12:29 PM
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Latest episode: Pellagra

Pellagra is a dietary deficiency disease that ends in madness and death. And at one time was responsible for half the inmates in Italian asylums and 100,000 deaths a year in the US. Now it is all but forgotten.

eatthispodcast.com/pellagra

#nutrition #food #podcast
Portrait of Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service. He is a young white man with wavy hair and spectacles and gazes resolutely out of the frame. He is wearing a service uniform.
June 23, 2025 at 3:49 PM
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Furthermore ...
A string puppet called Muffin the Mule, a great favourite on children's TV in the UK in the 1940s and 50s. He is whispering in the ear of Annette Mills, his creator.
June 19, 2025 at 8:41 AM
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Another casual devaluation of farmer selection by calling it "genetic engineering". Other than that, an OK history that misses some juicy recent work on diversity in Europe: www.eatthispodcast.com/tomatoes/
Overlapping slices of a ribbed red tomato laid out on a wooden board.
June 17, 2025 at 8:34 AM
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New episode: Quinoa in the Po Delta

Little did I know when I booked a cycling holiday in the Po Valley that I would be staying at the heart of Italy’s first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy.

Serendipity at its finest.

eatthispodcast.com/quinitalia

#podcasts #Italy #quinoa
Wide view at the Agrilocanda Val Campotto. A line of trees stretches towards and barn and the horizon, with massed blue-grey clouds in the sky.
June 9, 2025 at 1:23 PM
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The idea that “the diet” is fundamentally different from “what you put in your mouth to nourish yourself” is really bad for human well-being.

Listen to Tara Schmidt, lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, in the latest episode, at eatthispodcast.com/dietitian

#nutrition #diet #podcasts
An advertisement for Norma’s Burger Bar on the back of a bus in Ravenna, Italy. The text reads “Fuck the diet. Eat burgers.”
June 4, 2025 at 6:28 AM
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Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but even qualified people keep selling all kinds of snake oil.

Tara Schmidt, lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, told me about her work

Listen at eatthispodcast.com/dietitian

#podcast #nutrition #food
A colourful spread of the many different kinds of foods that constitute a healthy diet, one that most people do not follow.
June 2, 2025 at 7:15 AM
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Trying to decide between two spellings, I consulted Google NGram, now I have questions. The rise from 1900 to 1940 is easy to understand, but what happened between 1942 and 1968? Plenty? And after 1968? Fear?

#dietitian #dietician #food
A graph of word frequency for dietitian (in red) and dietician (in blue) 1800-2022. Both start to increase in the 1890s, but both decline after 1942, rising again in about 1968. Dietitian is generally more frequent.
May 25, 2025 at 8:47 AM
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Direct from Polignano a Mare, Flavia Giordano's love letter to Puglia's unique foods and ingredients, including some remarkable biodiversity. Melons eaten unripe, colourful carrots, and sporchia, a broomrape parasitic on broad beans.

eatthispodcast.com/puglia
Flavia Giordano, holding her book and her Italian Greyhound, Carla. A young woman smiling at the camera, with dark hair tied in a headscarf and wearing a grey and white checked shirt. Behind her is a blue sky and a bluer sea. Typical vegetables of puglia in a ceramic bowl decorated with a green border. Barattiere are round, pale-green melons, eaten unripe like a cucumber. Carrots cay be purple, yellow or orange. And sporchia are the dark purple shoots of a broomrape parasitic on broad beans.
May 12, 2025 at 3:39 PM
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Food has become cheaper and more abundant over the past 70 years or so by ignoring external costs. As a result, our planet and our health have suffered untold damage. Is it even possible to turn the food system around? Listen at eatthispodcast.com/paradox

#podcasts #agriculture #food_systems
Cover artwork, a large and somewhat menacing combine harvester cutting a field of wheat looms over the viewer.
April 28, 2025 at 3:47 PM
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New episode: Farming’s Overlords.

The top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machines, seeds, chemicals. That concentration, plus their size, gives them unprecedented power.

www.eatthispodcast.com/titans

#agriculture #podcasts #economics
The Jolly Green Giant reclining in front of tiny farmers, except he is red and has cloven hooves.
April 17, 2025 at 10:38 AM
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Most people know that Jewish dietary laws forbid pork. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity.

buff.ly/tWejckF
March 4, 2025 at 1:35 PM