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The Pamir Mountains of Central Asia hold a fascinating diversity of food crops. Exploring the area in the early years of the 20th century 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, rye, barley, oil […]

The regular interstitial round-up of delicacies to keep you fed between podcast episodes.

Bound to happen: a fake restaurant tops @TripAdvisor ranking in northern #Italy city http://t.co/hvEMqoLNse @TheLocalItaly @ItaliaaTavola — Eric J. Lyman (@EricJLyman) June 23, 2015 One reason why a dedicated recommendation engine might be more useful.

People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you’re looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal […]

Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as […]

My selections from the endless buffet of life. Reading the internets, so you don’t have to.

This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it. Hunters routinely clean up the animals they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts […]

Every two weeks I attempt to fill the void between audio episodes with a small selection of things that merited my attention, in the hope that some of them may do the same for you.

A Culinary History of Spam landed in my Other Podcasts feed the other day. Interesting stuff, in the two-geezers-talk-to-one-another-about-stuff-they’ve-learned genre. Of course I wasted no time in pointing the two geezers, who happen to be women, to my own offering on Spam. You might like it too.

By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I’d prefer not to eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, that would make me ill. As a result, I am fascinated by people who have to forego certain foods to stay well. I used to […]