Our Daily Bread, Podcasts

The Abundance of Nature Our Daily Bread 01

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In the 1960s, using the most primitive of tools, an American plant scientist demonstrated that a small family, working not all that hard for about three weeks, could gather enough wild cereal seeds to last them easily for a year or more. Jack Harlan’s experiments on the slopes of the Karacadağ mountains in Turkey offer a perfect gateway to this exploration of the history of bread and wheat.

Photo of Wild einkorn, wild emmer and Aegilops species in Karacadag mountain range by H. Özkan.

Our Daily Bread, Podcasts

Our Daily Bread 00 Introducing a series on the history of wheat and bread

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33 — 1.3MB)

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It’s magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods. Join me, every day in August, as I dig into Our Daily Bread for the Dog Days of Podcasting with short episodes on the history of wheat and bread.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 082 A day late, a dollar short

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  1. Katherine Preston, aka The Botanist in the Kitchen, goes to town on a self-serving, bullshit-peddling soy milk manufacturer and finds several teaching moments in her rant of the month. My one complaint; why not name and shame Silk and it’s owners, DanoneWave?
  2. What’s behind the USA’s efforts to torpedo global efforts to encourage breast-feeding. What did you think?
  3. The most food secure country in the world? Hint: it isn’t the USA any more.
  4. Way, way more than you’ll ever need to know to refuse a bottle of corked wine. Just remind that sniffy sommelier that you’re grateful to chlorophenol O-methyltransferase for protecting us from evil.
  5. A move away from rice could save water and improve nutrition in India. Just one thing: “would [people] be willing to incorporate more of these alternative cereals into their diets”?
  6. The US discovers that an Argentinian beef carcass cut into steaks can be labelled “Product of U.S.A.” The EU has been wrestling with all this for decades.
  7. If a picture were worth 1000 words, Kay at Big Picture Agriculture would have written 6,000 words on corn (maize) in global trade.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 081 Summer abundance

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  1. Two posts about technological fixes in the food industry. Wouldn’t it be cool to eavesdrop on a discussion between David Zilberman and Rachel Laudan?
  2. Germany is helping India’s spice growers to undo some recent technological fixes.
  3. A peer-reviewed study of the Mediterranean diet is retracted on 13 June and republished a week later with essentially the same conclusion. Marion Nestle asks: What are we to make of all this?
  4. Hard to believe I somehow had not mentioned the first of One Angry Chef’s two carefully considered pieces about Jordan Peterson, but here they are: Thermidor Part 1 and Part 2.
  5. The London Review of Books often releases articles from a while back. Here’s a joy, Angela Carter reviewing Redcliffe Salaman’s classic book on the potato.
  6. CDC retracts finding that farmers have the highest suicide rate in the country. Solid detective work by Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki busts another agricultural myth.
  7. Farm Aid is awfully sorry about the high suicide rate among farm workers, but “will continue to prioritize farmer stress despite [the] retraction”.
  8. Maybe they should just go back and listen to Nathan and Bryce butzing the myths of American agricultural history.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 080 Is the living easy yet?

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  1. Have you ever wondered how all those different specialty sauces get to supermarket shelves? Wonder no more.
  2. By now we all know that chocolate is a fermented food, right? But there’s still so much we don’t know about The Microbial Ecology of Chocolate.
  3. You know what else is fermented? Coffee. Take a deep draught from the annals of coffee vessels.
  4. Date of Italy’s earliest olive oil pushed back a few hundred years. Probably a bit fermented by now.
  5. The author of Big Chicken scratches in the dirt to locate figures on the use of antibiotics in American agriculture.
  6. Which is a perfect opportunity to plug my podcast on antibiotics and agriculture, in case you haven’t heard it.