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Climate change and global trade combine to make it ever more likely that new pests and diseases will threaten food supplies. A classic example is playing out now in Puglia, the region that includes the heel of Italy’s boot. The disease is caused by a bacterium — Xylella fastidiosa — that clogs the xylem vessels […]

Brexit unreality (yes, really), Romania locally, Berlin hopefully, obesity economically, beer diversity and sugar uneconomically.

Beyond mustard-and-cress: How to grow ’em.

You can thank the Irish Wine Geese for many of the Grand Crus of France.

This time for your delectation, stories of interdependence, local specialties, appropriation and imposition, here, there and everywhere.

In 2007, Frederik van Oudenhoven travelled to the Pamir mountains in Central Asia to document what remained of the region’s rich agricultural biodiversity. Almost 100 years before, the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov became convinced that this was where “the original evolution of many cultivated plants took place.” Soft club wheat, with its short ears, […]

Cheese mountains, whipped egg whites, edible petioles and anti-vegan thugs. Why not subscribe?

Before I read Christopher Emsden’s book Sweetness and Light: Why the demonization of sugar does not make sense I had no idea that the statistical correlation of air pollution and the epidemic of “diabesity” was stronger than the correlation with sugar. Or that among the indigenous people of Canada, those who still spoke their tribal […]

Bread, butter, cheese. And that’s not all: rice, melons, banana flavour too.

Today’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown. It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History … knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully […]