Eat This Podcast

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People looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you’re looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal that you’ve thoroughly enjoyed, read what some of the people on some crowd-sourced websites have said about the place where you are eating. But I digress. Rather than wade through countless ninny-posts looking for a realistic recommendation, many visitors, and some residents, turn to one of the food writers based here. Among those, one person reigns supreme: Elizabeth Minchilli. Through social media, apps, books and tours, she tirelessly points people in the right direction. Her new book came out this spring. That’s a good enough reason for me to sit down for a drink with Elizabeth in her local neighbourhood.

Notes

1. The book is Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City. Her blog is here. Elsewhere, she’s @eminchilli.
2. We met at Urbana 47 which is indeed a fun place to hang out.
3. I captured the banner image, and the rigatoni a la gricia that grace the podcast cover on iTunes, at Perilli, immediately after Elizabeth and I met, and which, I swear, had been selected long before our conversation. The food is a lot more consistent than the typography.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:09 — 11.8MB)

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Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as there has been for the Mediterranean fruit fly, the European corn borer, the giant African snail and many other pests. Most of the time, however, we remain blissfully unaware. And most of the time, pests either don’t get in or are detected fairly quickly and eradicated.

I was lucky enough to hitch a ride on a field trip in Puerto Rico, organised by the local survey teams to show plant health experts how they go about the business of keeping pests from establishing.

An aside: I can remember, back in the 1980s, sitting on a plane at Sydney airport ducking my head as the cabin staff wafted through spraying us with insecticide. These days, I learned, aircraft are mostly treated with persistent pesticides, eliminating the spray but not the need to keep insects out.

Notes

1. The opening and closing music is Che Che Cole, by Willie Colón with Héctor Lavoe. I had no idea when I chose it that like some species of giant African snail, it’s original home is apparently Ghana. Some incursions are better than others.
2. The music in the middle is La Boriqueña, the national anthem of Puerto Rico, but the site where I found this version has apparently vanished in the interim.
3. The banner photograph shows two male Mediterranean fruit flies facing off, and is by Derric Nimmo.
4. The cover photograph of a giant African snail – no Photoshop – is by R. Anson Eaglin of USDA APHIS.
5. And those pathetic dead snail shells? They’re the ones I found, all excited like, but they weren’t the pests I was looking for.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:13 — 13.0MB)

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This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it.

Hunters routinely clean up the animals they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts but also, usually, the heart and lungs and any meat damaged by the bullet. The hunter takes home the meat and scavenger animals get to snack on the gut pile. It’s been that way for a long time.

Unfortunately, recent research has shown that much of the gut pile, and some of the meat the hunters take home, is contaminated with microscopic pieces of lead. That could be damaging the people who eat the meat, and it has been accused of hampering the recovery of the Californian condor. I heard the story from Matt Podolsky, a wildlife biologist and film maker who worked with the condor recovery programme. That’s him (in the hat) with one of the condors; even the size of that tag doesn’t give a very good impression of the size of the bird.

Notes

1. Matt Podolsky’s film Scavenger Hunt tells the story of the efforts to persuade hunters in Arizona to adopt non-lead ammunition.
2. Not everyone agrees that lead in deer carcasses is the main source of lead in condor blood. Start here.
3. Banner photograph of the Vermillion Cliffs, site of the Arizona condor releases, by Jerry and Pat Donaho.
4. Chef and hunter talk on Nordic Food Lab Radio. Beware, it auto-plays.
5. It is a good thing I don’t have a loaded weapon any time I visit SoundCloud.
6. And if you want to know more about my close encounters with Californian condors, you’ll have to find a copy of my book Zoo 2000 or persuade me to scan and share the relevant pages. I no longer have any copies of the TV shows on which it was based, although there is one on YouTube.