Eat This Podcast – Page 56 – Talking about anything around food

Podcasts

Little bits of 2017: Part IV Tom Nealon on the plague-stopping power of lemonade

8 January 2018 22 January 2018 7

Ask the internet “who invented mayonnaise?” and likely as not you’ll still be told it was a French chef after the battle of Mahon in 1756. Lacking cream, he whipped up an emulsion of egg yolks, oil and vinegar. How that was supposed to substitute for cream, history does not record. But then, history does not record the actual event either. It’s fake news of the finest kind.

Tom Nealon sets the record as straight as possible in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars. We talked about mayonnaise on the show, but when I asked Tom for his favourite story, that wasn’t it. This was.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:31 — 5.2MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Notes

Original episode: Mistaken about mayonnaise — and many other foods.

Huffduff it

Podcasts

Little bits of 2017: Part III Jaan Altosaar on his practical approach to food

1 January 2018 8 January 2018 1

Egg is to bacon as orange juice is to coffee. Smoked salmon is to dill as lamb is to asparagus. South Asian is to rice as Southern European is to thyme.

Just three of the relationships that Jaan Altosaar, a graduate student at Princeton University, uncovered in his research on machine learning and food. But when we had finished talking about the recommendation engine Jaan built, we moved on to some of his own personal food preferences. That was an eye opener for me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:02 — 2.7MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Notes

1. Original episode: A computer learns about ingredients and recipes.

Huffduff it

Podcasts

Little bits of 2017: Part II Rachel Laudan on the rise and fall of white bread

25 December 2017 1 January 2018 8

Changes in food fads and fashions are endlessly fascinating. Often, they’re related to status, as technological advances make formerly elite foods available to the masses. And then, of course, the elites have to find new foods to set themselves apart, sometimes adopting with glee foods hoi polloi were only too glad to abandon. That certainly seems to be the case for bread. Where once the whitest, lightest loaves were the preserve of nobility, nowadays the nobles flock to wholewheat, artisanal loaves.

Rachel’s Laudan’s book Cuisine and Empire examines many of the links between food and status. In this extract from our chat earlier this year, we talked about white bread’s reversal of fortune.

[Podcast]

Notes

The original episode: Food and status.
Linked from there too, Rachel Laudan’s post Why did our ancestors prefer white bread to wholegrains?

Huffduff it

Extra Matter

Two antibiotic surprises

23 December 2017 23 December 2017 0

UK government reports on antibiotic use in agriculture have resulted in calls for farmers to reduce their non-therapeutic use of antibiotics. To do that, though, it would help to know how much antibiotics farms actually use, a number that is surprisingly hard to uncover. A new survey of 358 dairy farms by the Dairy Herd Health Group at the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science provides some clues. ((The article – Hyde, RM., Remnant, JG., Bradley, AJ., Breen, JE., Hudson, CD., Davies, PL., Clarke, T., Critchell, Y., Hylands, M., Linton, E., Wood, E., Green, MJ. (2017) Quantitative analysis of antimicrobial use on British dairy farms Veterinary Record 181, 683. – is behind a paywall. I relied on a press release.))

The key finding is that farms vary a lot. More than half the antibiotics (per kilogram of cow) are used on just a quarter of the farms. The researchers point out that a good first step to reducing overall use of antibiotics on dairy farms would be to concentrate on the few farms using the most antibiotics.

Pressure may also come from supermarkets. On Wednesday The Guardian reported that first Marks & Spencer and then Waitrose, two of the more upmarket food retailers in the UK, published figures on the use of antibiotics by their suppliers.

And, in (almost) unrelated news, researchers at Arizona State University have discovered that bacteria in honeybee guts can transfer antibiotic resistance from one species to another. According to a press release:

“To our surprise, we found that instead of one gut bacterium acquiring resistance and outcompeting all the other gut bacteria in honey bees, the resistance genes spread in the bacterial community so that all strains of bacteria survived,” said Gro Amdam, a professor with ASU School of Life Sciences and co-author of the paper.

I’m surprised that this was a surprise. Horizontal transmission of antibiotic resistance among gut bacteria has been a concern in livestock and people since at least the 1960s. Why would bacteria in bees be any different.

Podcasts

Little bits of 2017: Part I Parke Wilde on SNAP and nutrition

18 December 2017 25 December 2017 0

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is supposed to give poor people in America enough help to buy a nutritious diet, and it has been under fire over the past year. Not only do people want to cut back on the benefits, some even want to make SNAP recipients undergo mandatory drug testing. Back in February, I spoke to Parke Wilde, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, about SNAP and what it can deliver in terms of nutrition. Here’s a small second helping of part of our conversation.