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Street food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the rich world too. Burrito trucks, Korean barbecue in a taco, ceviche, you name it; all are available on the streets of London and Los Angeles, Sydney and San […]

Drinking Italian wine anywhere — even in Italy — can be fraught with complications. Is that wine from the area in Piedmont known as the Langhe? Better not say so on the label, unless you have express permission to do so, or risk a fine. Labelling was one of the few topics I didn’t cover […]

Allotments seem to be a peculiarly British phenomenon. Small parcels of land, divided into smaller still plots, furnished often with a shed and make-shift cold frames, greenhouses and what have you, where, in time-honoured tradition, old men in baggy corduroys and cardigans go to smoke a pipe and gaze out on serried ranks of cabbages, […]

A couple of weeks ago I was at the 2nd annual Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food, and a very interesting meeting it was too. The topic was Food, Hunger and Conflict, a reminder that food and control of the food supply can be both a weapon in human conflicts and a natural source […]

One of the things I find most frustrating in agricultural research is that, despite the subject matter, it often bears little relationship to the fundamental facts of life. Too often, we hear all sorts of extravagant claims being made that a bit of more analytical thought would show were somewhat less than likely to work […]

Will biotechnology feed the world? Can organic agriculture? Ford Denison is a research scientist who has thought clearly about the future of agriculture and what, if anything, it can learn from nature. Right now, he’s worried.

Why is arrabbiata sauce always served on penne pasta? What’s wrong with my spaghetti cacio e pepe? Maureen Fant, co-author of Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way first explained all back in February 2014 in one of the year’s most popular episodes.

There’s a thin line between protecting the authenticity of a fine traditional food and preventing the kinds of living changes that allowed it to survive long enough to become traditional. Zack Nowak, a food historian, looked at the rules governing the manufacture of genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP cheese and the cheese’s actual history. The rules say […]

Having started this autumn to do little trailers for upcoming shows, I thought it would be an interesting way to prevent absolute silence over the holidays to adapt that format and revisit some of 2014’s episodes. Some of these mini-episodes represent a reworking of the original in much cut-down form. Others are stories that for […]

Of all the turkey’s misnomers, the official Linnaean name from 1758 must qualify as the wrongest: Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo. It crosses Greek roots with Latin to mean “guinea-fowl chicken-peacock chicken-peacock”. Wrong on five counts, but typical. The only thing the turkey’s namers have got right consistently is that the bird is not-from-here.