Archives

In the 1930s the Italian fascists decided that floats laden with giant grapes would be the vehicle to drive forward Italian nationalism. Hear how in next week’s Eat This Podcast.

My compadre Luigi hangs out on social media, where he came across “fermented taro leaves made into a patty“. He plunged in and researched anishi, so I don’t have to. For much more about taro and other edible aroids, why not listen to the podcast with Karin Vaneker?

Kazakhstan stretches across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea in the east to China in the west. The country is famous for many things – it is the largest landlocked country in the world, says Wikipedia – but among food and plant people it is most important as the home of the apple. The name […]

Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time, bears, and how they may have helped to domesticate those apples. The whole show will be published next week.

I mentioned changes. The background machinery to make them work is now in place, so I thought I’d explain what I’ve done here and why.

It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and the resources it needs — financial, genetic, human — are just not something most people know about. No wonder, then, that many people don’t quite […]

I’ve been making a few changes around here to offer a little more. Unfortunately I ran out of time over the weekend so there may be some untidiness for a little while, especially in the iTunes feed, but I hope to have it all cleaned up quickly, with a proper explanation of what’s going on.

Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new […]

What better to do with a surplus rooster than turn him into a delicious meal. And share the process. Stir-fries, curries, Ethiopian wats, loaves of bread: John Grosvenor, a software developer, posts delectable images of much of his cooking on the social net ADN. That’s where I got to know him, and as we exchanged […]

Garum is one of those ancient foods that everyone seems to have heard of. It is usually described as “fermented fish guts,” or something equally unappealing, and people often call it the Roman ketchup, because they used it so liberally on so many things. Fermented fish guts is indeed accurate, though calculated to distance ourselves […]