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Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru? Seeking answers to basic questions.

As a privileged white male, I am honestly at a loss to respond appropriately to discussion of culinary appropriation and its equally evil twin, culinary imposition, a notion that, I think, only Rachel Laudan seems to have advanced.

Culinary appropriation up the wazoo.

Hot on the heels of — indeed prompted by — the podcast on zucchini, a quick look at an ill-founded attempt to patent the warts on pumpkins.

A story of exploration, aristocracy and promiscuity, all in the service of better food. What more could you want?

The great medieval bake off, selling off or selling out, iceberg, Native American cuisine, cast iron. Random enough for ya?

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about craft distilleries is how fast they’re spreading, at least where they’re allowed. British Columbia has gone from 5 to 50 in about three years. The USA now has more than 1000 registered small distilleries, almost a third of which are so-called “seed to sip” farm distillery operations. The British Isles too have seen a mushrooming of small distilleries. This episode is just a taste of things to come.

Gluten insensitivity, Key limes, food manga, Oz excesses, new yeasts and egg-free chutzpah.

It’s all very well trying to eat local in a place like Rome or San Francisco, where the climate is relatively benign all year round and you can grow a great deal of produce without too much difficulty. But what do you do when you are at an altitude of more than 2000 metres with a growing season that is usually less than three months long? You do what you can, which in the case of Elkstone Farm, near Steamboat Springs in Colorado, means building four greenhouses, one of which is capable of ripening figs, citrus and even, occasionally, bananas. But it isn’t all greenhouses. Outdoors there’s a tangle of many different kinds of annual and perennial crops, which during the short growing season provide an abundance of fruits and vegetables.

Gluten sensitivity, natural leavens, the Mediterranean diet and olive oil, almonds and some thoughtful little essays.