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A Dutch food writer tries to discover the origins of pom, the national dish of Suriname. Is it Creole, based on the foodways of Africans enslaved to work the sugar plantations of Surinam? Or is it Jewish, brought to Suriname by Dutch Jews?

So began Karin Vaneker’s immersion in the world of edible aroids. Aroids are a large and cosmopolitan plant family, more commonly known as the arum family, and they include some of the most familiar houseplants. Many of them have starchy roots or tubers, and although these often contain harmful substances, people have learned how to process them as famine foods. A few species, however, are widely cultivated. The best-known of these is probably taro, Colocasia esculenta, which originated in southeast Asia and spread through the Pacific and beyond. That, however, proved not to be the elusive pomtajer that Karin and the Surinamese inhabitants of Amsterdam were looking for, which turned out to be a species of Xanthosoma.

My conversation with Karin ranged far and wide, and to tell the truth I never did ask whether pom was Jewish or Creole. Most sources say it is indeed Jewish.

Notes

1. The whole question of Jews in Suriname sent me scurrying to the search engines, to discover that starting in the 17th century there was indeed an attempt to establish an autonomous Jewish territory there, on the Jewish savanna. This I gotta read more about. And having found that, I rushed to Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, only to be massively disappointed that neither pom nor Suriname feature in the index.
2. The big photo is of purple-stemmed Colocasia, which I took at Longwood Gardens.
3. As promised, a recipe for pom. You’ll have to find your own pomtajer.
4. Karin has written on Cooking Pom and other edible aroids.

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It is quite amazing how popular food tours and cooking classes are in Italy. When in Rome, many people seem to want to eat, and cook, like a Roman. Well, not entirely, and not like some Romans. I spoke to Francesca Flore, who offers both tours and cooking classes, and she reserved some choice words for those quintessential Roman dishes based on the famous quinto quarto, the fifth quarter of the carcass. Or, less obtusely, offal.

Francesca told me that she’s always been interested in food, and that while working in London she decided to take herself off to Australia to study Cooking and Patisserie at the Cordon Bleu School in Sydney. Back in Rome, she put all that knowledge to use catering private parties and branching out into food tours and cooking classes.

We talked about what people want, what they get, and how she views the past and future of Italian food.

Notes

1. Francesca Flore’s flash website gives a taste of the food tours and cooking classes she offers.
2. The Mercato Central in Florence has a website that is way too groovy for its own good. And, wonderfully Italian, an undated entry at a site called Florence Online, tells us both that the upstairs is closed and that “the vendors appear to want to stay where they are” in a tent below.
3. Cover photograph, of Francesca supervising the sprinkling of icing sugar on cannoli, by Chris Warde-Jones for the New York Times.

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This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself. So I hooked myself up to the audio recorder and went about some of my customary weekend cooking, muttering out loud about what I was doing and offering some reflections on my attitude to food and cooking. I hope the result sheds some light on where I’m coming from. Normal service will be resumed next episode.

I started this exercise determined not to apologise either for having indulged myself so or for the audio quality. And I almost made it. But not quite. So, please accept my apologies, mostly for the quality of the audio at time. This stuff is not easy single handed.

Also, no instructions from me on how to make your own yoghurt. If you want to learn the secrets of yoghurt as made by Turkish grannies, try The Food Programme.

Notes

1. The first recipe for my version of a light rye bread is here, though it doesn’t look very pretty. Pictures here. I need to transfer that recipe to the baking site, or better yet update it, because the current version is much better.
2. A couple of earlier podcasts dealt with integrity vs “authenticity” and good industrialisation.

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“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of his: “a graph that essentially tells you the whole story in one simple, self-explanatory picture.” Yes indeed, social unrest is caused by higher food prices. ((Yes, caused; this is no mere correlation.)) I could leave it at that, along with a link to the paper from which I lifted the picture. But this is a podcast. I have to talk to people, and that includes Marc Bellemare.

Bellemare’s paper is a global investigation that doesn’t even attempt to ask whether the relationship between food prices and social unrest holds for countries or smaller areas. My sense, though, is that the relationship is strongest in more authoritarian regimes. At least, that’s where we’ve seen most food riots of late. In this, however, it seems I am mistaken. Marc pointed me to Cullen Hendrix, who has studied the links between social unrest and political regimes. Placating the urban masses who eat food at the expense of rural people who produce it has always been a fraught proposition, perhaps even more so for democracies.

All of which raises the question that, I hope, keeps food policy wallahs and agricultural development experts awake at night. What’s so wrong with high prices anyway?

Notes

1. Marc Bellemare’s blog post on his paper Rising Food Prices,
   Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. He also examined some of the reactions to the paper.
2. “Even when presenting to the smartest people in the world, a picture is really worth a thousand words.” Find this and Marc’s other tips for conference and seminar presentations here.
3. Cullen Hendrix’s website contains a copy of his paper International Food Prices, Regime Type, and Protest in the Developing World
4. The sound montage at the beginning draws on various reports on Haiti, Egypt and Tunisia, all glued together by a splendid recording of a protest march.
5. The banner photograph is adapted from an original by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

We’ll have what they’re having has taken on a whole new meaning

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In a world in which you can get pizza in Tokyo and sushi in Rome, diets have become truly global in reach. You could argue that this has made them more, not less, diverse. Where once rice dominated Asia, wheat, potatoes and corn have made huge inroads: increased diversity. On the other hand, places that used to enjoy their own, local staples – tef in Ethiopia, buckwheat in eastern Europe – have also come under the sway of the global behemoths, and so have lost diversity. Those are two conclusions of a massive data-mining exercise that has rightfully been getting a lot of coverage: Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security. I spoke to Colin Khoury, the study’s first author, about the increasing dominance of the big crops, the marginalisation of regionally important alternatives, and the sudden rise of a whole set of previously insignificant species.

As we discussed, this new piece of research arose from a desire to provide updated and more accurate answers to the perennial question How many crops feed the world?, originally posed by Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen in 1990. It’s kind of gratifying to note that Colin Khoury first returned to that question in a guest post on one of my other platforms. And we’re still gnawing away at it over there, one way and another.

So, how many crops feed the world anyway?

[I]f you must know, it’s about 94 plant species that largely feed the world. To be more precise, according to the analysis of Colin and his colleagues, we can now say that 50 crops, or 94 species, contribute to 90% of food supplies at national level.