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Things seem to be picking up again after the (northern) summer lull. A bumper crop these past couple of weeks, even after some judicious weeding, so I’m going to go light on the interpretation.

Roman Herb Resurrected

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Eat This Podcast is back with new episodes. And they really are new, unlike most fad diets, which are usually just an old fad diet with a new wrinkle.

Banting, Atkins. South Beach. Whole30. Keto.

In Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets, Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill examine fad diets and the people who follow them as anthropologists might examine foreign cultures. Janet Chrzan helped me understand why people are drawn to fad diets and how they help to soothe, at least temporarily, some of the anxieties that surround food.

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I’ve just listened to a very interesting podcast episode about the growth of the dairy industry in the US, and I’m pretty sure I will have more to say on that in a day or two. In the meantime, though, I’m reminded of an episode of my own from 2018.

Gillian Hopkinson, of Lancaster University in the UK, explained the remarkable turnaround in the market for British veal.

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I’ve been hard at work on the next series. ETA: 19 September. But that hasn’t stopped me scouring the internets in search of additional sustenance.

Killjoy Preaching in the Desert

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There’s no use pretending otherwise. Today’s foray into the back catalogue is inspired by National Salami Day, which is not until next week and which is, frankly, deeply underwhelming. It does, however, remind me of one of the very first episodes of Eat This Podcast, recorded a little more than 10 years ago at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Jan Davison talked about The Authentic Air-Cured Sausages of Europe at the symposium on Wrapped & Stuffed Foods. She then sat down to talk to me for what became the second ever episode.

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A quick confession; I have finally uploaded transcripts for the four episodes on wheat and human history. Sorry it took so long. Supporters of Eat This Podcast, who make transcripts possible, deserve better than that. If you have been considering joining them, and I hope you have, I pray my slackitude won’t put you off.

Beyond Food Miles; Way Beyond.

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By a happy coincidence, today I can point you to a short episode that first saw the light of day exactly four years ago, as part of my lunatic attempt to podcast something about bread and wheat on every day of August 2018.

The episode is about Ferragosto, today’s big holiday in Italy. These days, it celebrates the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, but a couple of thousand years ago it was the peak of Emperor Augustus’ Feriae Augusti. How are they connected, and why is the constellation Virgo carrying a wheatsheaf?

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Little did I know last week, when I resurrected the episode in which Harry Paris explained watermelon names, that 3 August was National Watermelon Day. Mind you, every day is national something day. Today (8 August) is apparently National Zucchini Day, which is also appropriate. National Palm Oil Day? Not likely

The problem isn’t palm oil

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The only thing keeping me from a complete meltdown these days is watermelon. Two slices from the ripe, crimson quarter-slice, replete with spittable seeds, that lives on the bottom shelf of the fridge and is replenished as necessary. The greengrocer knows me and knows what I want, but it wasn’t always so.

When I arrived in Italy, I already knew that the scientific, Latin name for watermelon was Citrullus. That was no help. Depending on where you are, the Italian for watermelon is either anguria or cocomero which, to me, sounds way too much like cucumber. But the Italian for cucumber is cetriolo, and that sounds like citrullus, for watermelon. As for anguria, you better just listen to this brief episode from 2016, when Harry Paris tried to straighten me out.

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Was I happy that Russia and Ukraine appeared last week to have agreed a deal to allow some grain exports to leave the Black Sea ports? Of course I was. Was I surprised that Russia bombed Odessa less than 24 hours later? Not really. Recent bleats that “Russia has weaponized food” ignore the fact that food has always been a weapon, in peace and in war. I’m still hopeful that grain shipments from Ukraine will resume soon, but I’m also not impressed by meetings between Russia and Egypt (and other African countries).

We shall see.

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In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, we move on to empire.

The earliest city states in Mesopotamia built their fortunes on their position astride grain transport routes. Still today, the ability to tax grain as it moves and to control that movement is a source of political and commercial power around the world.

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Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange, invented in Venice and Genoa, created a piece of paper that increased in value as the time for delivery of the wheat drew near, but it was the need to avoid rank profiteering in times of war that created the futures market. Standard amounts of standard quality grain made buying and selling the crop even more efficient – and saved the Union army during the Civil War in the US.

Scott Reynolds Nelson traces the ways in which the wheat trade affected financial matters in his book Oceans of Grain. The story goes far beyond merely paying for the grain, extending to huge infrastructure projects and the consequences of their failure.

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Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage of the storability of seeds to move the food from where it grew to where it might be eaten. Wheat, the pre-eminent cereal, moved along routes that were ancient before the Greek empire, carried, probably, by ox-drawn carts and guided along these black paths by people remembered in Ukraine today as chumaki.

In this episode, Scott Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, tells me about the various ways in which the ability to move wheat more efficiently changed world history, geography and economics, for starters. All the best

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Many people take the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. But maybe there is much more to it than that. Maybe the story hides a secret so valuable that it was worth protecting with threats of divine retribution.

Elucidating the Eleusinian Mysteries is one small element in Scott Reynolds Nelson’s new book, Oceans of Grain. It looks at the many, many ways in which wheat and human history intertwine, which he’s been working on for years. It was finally published on 22 February this year.

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I had a very enjoyable time during the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table talk on how can we find reliable sources of information about food. I’d send you to a recording if there were one, but one reason we all found it enjoyable is that it was not recorded, so we were free to speak our minds.

I don’t think I am revealing any state secrets when I say that there was a lot of discussion about authenticity, especially about recipes. If you’re not interested in the first printed version, how do you know what is authentic? There were some interesting suggestions, but I had a different question. Why do some people care so much about authenticity? I still don’t know. Is that because I’ve never had my culture or cuisine or recipes appropriated? I’ve listened to diatribes about the awfulness of British food. Does that mean only awful British food is authentic? Of course not.

So, why do some people care so much about authenticity?

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A quck reminder of the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table on Wednesday of this week. Join Elizabeth Yorke, Anusha Murthy, Ken Albala and me for an open discussion about how can we find reliable sources of information about food. Details and link to tickets

Onwards!

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Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, was an ideal base for the transatlantic slave trade, although the European powers that established themselves in the region found other goods to trade too. One of the most important was the peanut, brought by Portuguese explorers to Africa, where it grew well, tended mostly by enslaved African labourers.

Jori Lewis’ book Slaves For Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History tells the tangled story of how colonial expansion and Christian missionaries simultaneously encouraged and opposed slavery, and how the history of peanuts and slavery still reverberates in Senegal.

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There is a kind of thread tying most of today’s newsletter items together. More on that in the final piece.

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You cannot avoid the past in Rome, but if you’re interested in the history of food there’s been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut its doors. A new museum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill and facing the chariot-racing stadium, has put food history back on the tourist map. I was very fortunate to get a guided tour from the director, Matteo Ghirighini, a few days before Garum, as it is called, opened its doors to the public.

I learned so much, including the French origins of a Roman street food and the most convincing origin story yet for perhaps the most contentious pasta dish.

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No apologies for devoting a lot of space to protein in one form or another. It is an important topic that we need to understand better.

Insect meal and cultured milk

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The discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico recently allowed researchers to finally tell a story of tomato domestication that fits all the available evidence. The feast of diversity that resulted in traditional tomato varieties, however, is not mirrored in genetic diversity. In fact, modern, scientifically-bred tomatoes are more diverse than traditional varieties, and almost a quarter of so-called traditional varieties are “tainted” by modern genetics.

Jose Blanca, one of the researchers involved in these two recent discoveries, told me more about what they found and what it means. Take a listen.

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I have a problem with podcasts that goes way beyond making my own. It is that I can really only listen when I am walking, flying, boating or training. Any other time, my attention is distracted by something and I lose the thread. That means I don’t have much time to listen. I do make the time for things that ought to be worthwhile, and sometimes I am glad I did. This is one of those times.

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Aaron Vallance’s writing at his website 1dish4theroad has twice been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers, not bad for someone who admits to having had great difficulty doing his English homework at school.

I first became aware of Aaron’s food writing through Curry and Kneidlach: A Tale of Two Immigrant Families, a story on his website co-written with Shahnaz Ahsan, and I’ve followed him ever since. A visit to London gave me the chance to meet Aaron in person and get an insight about what food and writing mean to him and how they relate to his practice as a doctor.

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Things have been a bit topsy-turvy lately, so please accept a newsletter instead of a podcast episode this week. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Organic disasters

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I’m still bleating on about the naming of things, and I suspect nothing will ever stop me.

Cattle denazification

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Jessica Kehinde Ngo recently wrote an impassioned piece bemoaning the fact that “the plantain has long been eclipsed by its banana cousin”. That alarmed me a little, as did the question immediately afterwards: “Where can the curious go to learn about its fascinating transnational history?”

For Jessica, “[e]ach bite of plantain connects me to my roots, though I am many miles from my father’s homeland”.

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This newsletter is half hypothetical and half rooted in reality. Which is which? I couldn’t possibly say.

What price patriotism?

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Discussions about food often “bump up against philosophy,” according to David Kaplan. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, and he thinks we could do a better job of thinking about food.

His book Food Philosophy: An Introduction shows us how, and we had a terrific conversation about it.

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In last week’s podcast, I asked whether we should distinguish food poverty from poverty, pure and simple. Following up, this week’s newsletter is largely about the cost of food.

As I write this, dawn is breaking on a day when Americans are predicted to eat 1.42 billion chicken wings, which this year are set to cost somewhere between 14% and 20% more than last year. What does that do to the price of 1.42 billion chicken legs? How about whole chickens with wings and legs intact?

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Give Directly is a charity that was started by students at Harvard and MIT after their research showed that a lot of philanthopy was both very inefficient and not very effective. Unconditional cash has greater impact, at lower cost, than skills training, microcredit, farmer field schools and just about every other form of aid.

But does cash enable people to improve their food security and nutrition? That’s what I wanted to find out from Give Directly staff in Uganda and Malawi.

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Back in the swing of things now, alternating podcast episodes and newsletters.

STOP PRESS: This just in (see item 3 below): An African immigrant’s pizza wins global raves — and overcomes Italian prejudices.

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Way back when, Neolithic people discovered that they could eat milk that had gone sour with impunity, even though ordinary milk upset their digestion. Thus was the culture of yoghurt born, helping those Neolithic farmers to move into northern Europe. Fast forward 10,000 years or thereabouts, and the bacteria that soured milk were held to be responsible for the extreme longevity of Bulgarian peasants. That theory gave birth to a craze for Lactobacillus bulgaricus, as it was known, now increasingly popular in China.

All this and more I learned from Yoghurt: A Global History, a recent book by June Hersh. What I still don’t know is why those Neolithic people were even trying to drink milk, if it upset their stomachs. They were keeping sheep and goats, sure, but why were they milking them? Ideas?

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I had fully intended to release a podcast today, but the honest truth is that I’m not ready. I am still trying to get more guests lined up for the next season and I did not want to launch prematurely. In the meantime, here’s some reading matter.

The vegetarian’s vegetarian

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I hope you had a good break over the holiday season, if you had a break at all. I know I did. So, here we go again, with my hand-picked selection of food and farming stories from around the internets.

Traffic lights versus batteries

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The 5th edition of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work in Bologna focussed attention on food. All of the 11 exhibitions were really interesting and well curated, not least because they were often in glorious spaces that are not normally open to the public. But there was one that really caught my eye because it offered literally a new view of the foundations of America’s appetite for cheap beef.

Almost as soon as I got home I arranged to chat to the artist, Mishka Henner, about his work.

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Lots to get your teeth into in this issue, from public relations idiocy to the idiocy of ideology.

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Down the River Tiber from Rome is the huge archaeological site of Ostia Antica, which used to be the main port for the city. It’s all ruins now, of course, and open to the elements, but still incredibly suggestive. As you stroll around under the umbrella pines, it’s hard not to daydream about what things might have been like a couple of thousand years ago. In my case, with very little formal education in the matter, those daydreams are pretty foggy. When I get to something I know a little about, like a bakery, the fog clears a bit and I can begin to see some details.

With a genuine expert, however, things really come to life, so I was absolutely delighted to be able to visit the Mulino di Silvano at Ostia Antica with Farrell Monaco, who has studied, and brought back to life, the canonical bread of Ancient Rome. She brought the bakery back to life for me.

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In general, things that delight, instruct or entertain are the order of the day here. Occasionally, though, I find it necessary to point to stuff I really do not like. This is one of those days, in part.

It isn’t the science, stupid

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Perhaps you’ve heard stories about the history of the potato in Europe. Ignorant peasants shun the potato until a wily aristocrat — or even the monarch — plays a trick on them to open their eyes to the true value of the humble etc.

Mea culpa — I believed the story and even retold it myself on occasion. So I naturally slapped my forehead, hard, when I heard Rebecca Earle give an online lecture about the history of the potato and resolved to talk to her myself.

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It was nice to wake up this morning with the sun shining, although it will be awful to drink my tea this afternoon in the dark.

Still, I do love the constancy of change.

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Rachel Roddy’s new book is An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes.

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A mixed bag, and that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it.

I hope you do too.

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After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a young chef brought the tandoor oven and his tandoori chicken from Peshawar to a new restaurant he opened in Delhi, the Moti Mahal. There, he created , butter chicken; tandoori chicken in a sauce that combines tomatoes, butter and cream.

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Advanced technology is a wonderful thing — how else would I be able to communicate with you all? — but there are some problems that just aren’t amenable to technical fixes. Also, history will decide.

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The California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination, after a couple of thousand years of quiet evolution. In the mid 1980s, sushi was the poster child for the average Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods.

Interconnected

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And we’re back, after a terrific summer break.

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An unforeseen circumstance dashed my hopes, and perhaps yours too, of a new episode of the podcast today. But there’s no point in being your own boss if you can’t occasionally give your staff a break. Next week, and that’s a promise.

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The temperature suddenly dropped by about 10 degrees C a couple of days ago, a sure sign that I need to get back to producing episodes of the podcast. I hope to have one for you next week. In the meantime, here’s this week’s roundup of food news.

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My thanks to the people who wrote to tell me that garlic noodles is indeed a dish worth pursuing, and especially to Lenore, a supporter, who pointed me to her favourite online recipe. I have yet to try it, but I will, and I will report back.

First, though, this week’s collection of food-related trifles.