Eat This Podcast

Oct 28 2024 293 ep. 18 mins 2.3k

Eat This Podcast artwork

Using food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. In Eat This Podcast, Jeremy Cherfas tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion -- you get the picture. We don't do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics. Twice nominated for a James Beard Award.

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Anchovies Part 2

Oct 28 2024 23 mins

The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with the exception of the good people of Malaga, who developed a thing for deep-fried fresh anchovies. The rest of Spain resolutely ignored anchovi

Anchovies Part I

Oct 14 2024 23 mins

Marcela Garcés Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored. At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready

Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us

Sep 30 2024 23 mins

If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of p

Olives Reborn in the Salento

Sep 16 2024 24 mins

Silvestro Silvestori stands in front of some of the metal cans of his varietal olive oils. Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Sale

Avocado Anxiety: how to choose what to eat

Sep 02 2024 24 mins

Louise GrayWinner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse ga

Palatable is not Potable

Jun 17 2024 26 mins

Water is tricky stuff. It can be limpid and clear but dangerous, home to harmful bacteria and parasites. It can be murky, but perfectly safe to drink. It may smell of chlorine, which puts people off, but perversely that is a sign that no bacteria are present. So how do we judge the quality of water? That’s the subject of a new book — The Taste of Water — by Christy Spackman

Women Butchers

Jun 03 2024 25 mins

Cheap supermarket meat has been making life difficult for independent butchers for quite some time now. England has lost 60 per cent of its butcher shops in the past few decades, Australia 80 per cent. I couldn’t find figures for the United States. Against that background, there has been an uptick of interest from young people wanting to learn the skills needed to deconstru

Leftovers Through History

May 13 2024 28 mins

Eleanor Barnett We all know we’re supposed to reduce our food waste, but what exactly is the difference between waste and leftovers? For me, leftovers become waste when they turn green and furry, forgotten at the back of the fridge, but that’s a very narrow view. Eleanor Barnett is a historian whose book Leftovers: a history of food waste and preservation takes a much broader

What is Chametz?

Apr 29 2024 14 mins

One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that involves leavened grain. At one level, the search means that the house gets an extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year. At another, there are associations that equate ridding the house of chametz with ridding the mind of ego an

Passover and Easter Revisited

Apr 15 2024 37 mins

The last supper was a Passover Seder, and for two thousand years Passover and Easter have been linked. The links, however, are complex, which is why I am taking the opportunity to expand on a five-year-old episode. The rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, although always open to interpretation and evolution. And yet, although different Christi