Best Jeremy Cherfas Podcasts (2024)

1
What is Chametz? 14:40

3h ago14:40

14:40

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 w…

1
Passover and Easter Revisited 37:46

11d ago37:46

37:46

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…

1
Malta Besieged & Black-market Intrigues 29:09

25d ago29:09

29:09

Malta, just off the coast of Sicily in the middle of the Mediterranean, has always been of enormous strategic importance. As a result it has been claimed, and fought over, by empire after empire. Each time it was vulnerable to a blockade of essential food supplies because the tiny island — Malta is only 27 kilometres long — cannot possibly feed its…

1
The Case for Folic Acid Fortification 21:54

1M ago21:54

21:54

Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is one of the most common severe birth defects in the world. The main cause is a lack of folate vitamin in the diet, and in 1991, the UK’s Medical Research Council halted a trial of folic acid supplementation early because it was obvious that the supplement was preventing a large number of cases. At the tim…

1
Anthony Mongiello, Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza 26:12

2M ago26:12

26:12

Anthony MongielloA recent documentary tells the story of how a kid from Brooklyn invented the stuffed crust pizza, sued Pizza Hut for ripping him off, and lost. It is a fascinating story, and left me in no doubt about who actually invented the stuffed crust pizza: Anthony Mongiello, that kid from Brooklyn. But it was the incidental asides Anthony d…

1
Prehistoric cooking pots 19:40

2M ago19:40

19:40

Harry RobsonSix thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food, and those pots have now revealed that in many respects the diets of the two cultures were mo…

1
The Invention of Baby Food 29:08

3M ago29:08

29:08

In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the average baby wouldn’t have a tooth in its head for another five or six months. Amy Bentley, a professor at New…

1
Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice 25:11

4M ago25:11

25:11

In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elus…

1
A New Story for Maize Domestication 25:34

5M ago25:34

25:34

The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in l…

1
Honey and Adulteration 23:02

6M ago23:02

23:02

Honey is the world’s third most-adulterated food. Survey after survey uncovers evidence that manufacturers — not necessarily beekeepers — are adding sugar syrups to bulk up the honey they sell. That may not be a health hazard, but it is defrauding customers, and yet there is very little public outrage, except in the immediate wake of yet another re…

1
Fat, Sugar, Salt 27:07

6M ago27:07

27:07

Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a long article looking into what it called “Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” the very robust finding that people who ate a modicum of ice cream each week were less likely to develop Type 2 Diabetes. But while nutritionists were happy to recommend (low-fat) yoghurt, which seemed to offer simila…

1
Jewish Food in Rome 29:27

7M ago29:27

29:27

Today is the 80th anniversary of the roundup and deportation to Auschwitz of the Jews of Rome. That much I knew as I was planning this episode. More recent events took me and everyone else completely by surprise. I am sticking to my plan. Rome’s former ghetto has become a tourist attraction, with an interesting museum under the Great Synagogue and …

1
Small Dairy 22:15

7M ago22:15

22:15

Every aspect of large, industrial food creates a niche for people who want a less standardised alternative, and if the stars align you may have producers nearby who are willing to fill that niche. So it is with Big Milk. There are small dairies who offer fresh milk produced to the same exacting standards of hygeine without being further processed. …

1
Food Riots in England 31:01

8M ago31:01

31:01

In her latest book English Food: A People’s History, Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due recognition that “‘the English’ are not a single entity” and that the past necessarily illuminates the present. Impossible to cover all that in a single episode, or even several, we set out to explore w…

1
Milk is not a Superfood 37:35

8M ago37:35

37:35

Anne Mendelson’s new book Spoiled is subtitled The Myth of Milk as Superfood, and at its core argues that while there’s nothing wrong with fresh milk, at least for those who can digest it as adults, the belief that you cannot have enough of a good thing has created a monstrous industry. Dairy farmers have always had the short end of the stick, beca…

1
Pomegranates & Artichokes 32:26

11M ago32:26

32:26

Saghar Setareh left Iran in 2007 at 22 years old. She came to Rome to study graphic design and photography. The way she tells it, when she arrived she “certainly didn’t have a particular passion for food”. Slowly, though, that passion developed, first for Italian food and then by extension for the food of her homeland. Her book, which emerged from …

1
Why Did the Artist Cross the Chicken? 28:17

11M ago28:17

28:17

Koen Van Mechelen (left) and Olivier Hanotte (right) sandwich a large marble bust of a crowing cosmopolitan rooster.In 1999, Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist, decided to cross a Belgian rooster with a French hen. The union of the Mechelse Koekoek and the Poulet de Bresse gave rise to a clutch of chicks that thrilled Vanmechelen with their diversi…

1
Feeding the People in Wartime Britain 25:27

12M ago25:27

25:27

Coupons and ration books during war was a way for the British government to try and ensure that restricted items were distributed as fairly as possible, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well most of the time. At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with cent…

1
What is Wrong with Biofortification 23:46

1y ago23:46

23:46

About two billion people around the world do not get enough micronutrients in their diet. This lack of vitamins and minerals — often called hidden hunger — has severe and lasting effects on individuals and their societies. One very popular approach to tackling hidden hunger is known as biofortification, engineering or selecting varieties of staple …

1
Making Mr Song’s Cheese 25:42

1y ago25:42

25:42

Miranda Brown successfully stretches Mr Song’s string cheeseI’ve long believed that the reason there is no milk or cheese in Chinese food culture today is because ethnic Chinese people are likely to be lactose intolerant. But that may well be an oversimplification. In looking at old texts, Professor Miranda Brown of Michigan University discovered r…

1
What Price Chicken Wings? 22:27

1y ago22:27

22:27

Wally Thurman Time was when chicken wings were barely a thing, appendages that nobody much wanted to eat. Chickens were bred to deliver big breasts and wings were an afterthought until the advent of Buffalo wings in the 1960s. Now, and especially in the run-up to the Superbowl and March Madness, wings are in much greater demand than breasts, which …

1
Patrik Johansson, the Butter Viking 23:05

1y ago23:05

23:05

Ten years ago, the first episode of Eat This Podcast featured Ben Reade talking about some butter that he had buried in a Swedish bog, the better to understand the bog butter occasionally unearthed in Ireland (and elsewhere). The butter for that experiment was made by Patrik Johansson, using methods taught him by his grandmother, lightly churned wi…

1
Food Security in Egypt 29:02

1y ago29:02

29:02

Jessica BarnesEgypt spends about 3% of its budget subsidising bread for about three-quarters of its population. Threats to that subsidy provoke massive civil unrest, helping to topple the regime in 2011. As a result, bread and wheat are fundamental to the government’s security and that of the people of Egypt. Wheat yields in Egypt are among the hig…

1
Fully Tested Tuna 20:25

1+ y ago20:25

20:25

Sean Wittenberg, Safe Catch CEOThere is an awful lot of disagreement on the subject of mercury in fish and shellfish and how harmful it might be to people. That’s especially true for tuna, which are top predators that accumulate mercury from all the fish they eat over their long lives. Many countries, including the USA, offer guidelines about how m…

1
Biodiversity at Liberty 25:28

1+ y ago25:28

25:28

Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively identical. This has never suited organic farmers or any other smaller scale growers, including home garden…

1
Feed Your Baby Like a Fascist 16:03

1+ y ago16:03

16:03

At the end of the previous episode on mothers’ milk Professor Amy Brown mentioned an important source of anxiety for new mothers: they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten, and that pushes them to use a see-through bottle and switch from breast to formula. It may surprise you to learn that the Italian Fascist regime came up with a soluti…

1
Some thoughts on markets and such 23:44

1+ y ago23:44

23:44

It has been a difficult year for food supplies, and even more so for food markets. Prices everywhere seem to be higher than they have been for a long time, and that’s just in retail shops. On international commodity markets, things have been wild. Wheat shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but had started rising well before that, in mi…

1
A Restaurant’s Reckoning 34:41

1+ y ago34:41

34:41

Perhaps unsurprisingly, barbecue restaurants have featured in two really important decisions of the US Supreme Court. Katzenbach v. McClung held that Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, despite being a minuscule mom and pop operation, was nevertheless subject to the Civil Rights Act and could not deny table service on the basis of race. Newman…

1
How to be a good host and a good guest 23:35

1+ y ago23:35

23:35

Megan Dean (left) and Matthew Smith (right) World Philosophy Day happens later this week, which makes it a good time to be asking what constitutes good behaviour in a host and, equally, in a guest. I’m prompted by a recent article that took the rise in food allergies and intolerances as a starting point to ask how a host should act when faced with …

1
Feeding children well 25:07

1+ y ago25:07

25:07

People, not least parents, have becomes concerned about the increasing proportion of obese and overweight children in wealthier countries. It has even been called an epidemic. Can biology and anthropology deepen our understanding of childhood feeding and suggest possible solutions? Tina Moffat certainly thinks so. She has studied how children are n…

1
In search of tomato gold 20:20

1+ y ago20:20

20:20

Since the 1960s, European seed law could best be summarised as “everything not forbidden is compulsory”. There is a common catalogue of registered seed varieties, and only varieties on the list are on sale. With a flat fee for registration, only the most lucrative varieties are registered, which suits big seed companies and tomato growers, but mean…

1
Mothers and Milk 33:22

1+ y ago33:22

33:22

A wet nurse (for that is what Hera was in all tellings of the story) created the Milky Way when her divine milk sprayed across the heavens. Today’s nursing mothers are not so blessed. Although women have a legal right to breastfeed in public across the United States and the UK (and many other countries), there are plenty of individuals who seem to …

1
Fad diets 27:19

1+ y ago27:19

27:19

Atkins. South Beach. Whole30. Zone. Keto. Banting? Yes, Banting. Not the Frederick Banting of Banting & Best, discoverers of insulin, but his distant relative William Banting, author, in 1863, of the self-published Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. Not the first fad diet by any means — Banting, a prominent London undertaker, had tried …

1
Empire and grain 31:30

2y ago31:30

31:30

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 …

1
Grain and finance 29:10

2y ago29:10

29:10

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 creat…

1
Grain and transport 30:25

2y ago30:25

30:25

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-emine…

1
Persephone’s secret 8:19

2y ago8:19

8:19

Many people take the myth of Demeter — Ceres in Latin — and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. It is, but there may be more to it than that. Why else would it be worth scaring participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries into saying absolutely nothing about what went on during these initiation…

1
Peanuts, Senegal and Slavery 19:06

2y ago19:06

19:06

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. Pean…

1
Garum: Rome’s new library and museum of food 22:44

2y ago22:44

22:44

It is impossible to avoid the past in Rome; indeed, the past is why so many people come to Rome. If you’re interested in the history of food, though, there’s been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut its doors, aside from a few restaurants resting on their laurels. A new museum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill and facing the chariot-racing…

1
Tomatoes: domestication and diversity 18:17

2y ago18:17

18:17

Plants of the weedy wild relatives of the tomato all look pretty much like one another, but under the surface they’re a seething mass of genetic diversity. That diversity — along with the discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico — has allowed researchers to finally tell a story of tomato domestication that fits all the available evidence. In esse…

1
Aaron Vallance — 1dish4theroad 26:18

2y ago26:18

26:18

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 great difficulty doing his English homework at school. Even more, Aaron Vallance manages to combine sharing great restaurants from the many diasporas present in London with being a doctor in the Nat…

1
Yes, we have no plantains 16:02

2y ago16:02

16:02

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?” My problems were, first, that I do not regard plantains and…

1
Food Philosophy 31:00

2y ago31:00

31:00

David Kaplan calls himself a taste realist. That means he really does think that there’s something there, in food or drink, that enables us to agree on what it tastes like, if only we have the vocabulary. Kaplan is professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, and aesthetics is only one of the areas of philosophy that he applies specifi…

1
Unconditional cash to improve nutrition 18:11

2y ago18:11

18:11

Despite large investments in aid programmes, poverty and hunger remain persistent problems in many parts of the world. Most aid, though, gives people what the donors think they need. What if you give poor people cash, to spend as they see fit? The leader in this field is a charity called Give Directly, started by students at Harvard and MIT after t…

1
Ten thousand years of yoghurt 23:56

2+ y ago23:56

23:56

June Hersh The story is that way back when, Neolithic people discovered that they could eat milk that had gone sour with impunity, even though ordinary milk upset their digestion. The sour milk allowed them to get the nutritional benefit of milk, and also favoured anyone who could actually tolerate a little lactose. And thus was the culture of yogh…

1
High Art 16:07

2+ y ago16:07

16:07

Bologna likes to think of itself as the pinnacle of food culture in Italy, so it is a bit of a wonder that it took until the 5th edition of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work to focus 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…

1
A visit to an ancient Roman bakery 26:39

2+ y ago26:39

26:39

Farrell Monaco at one of the two passes to the huge oven 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…

1
The true history of the potato in Europe 24:26

2+ y ago24:26

24:26

The story that’s often told of the potato in Europe is one of ignorant, superstitious peasants and wily aristocrats. The peasants shun the potato until the wily aristo plays a trick on them to open their eyes to the true value of the potato. The aristo might be someone like Antoine-Augustin Parmentier in France or Frederick the Great in Prussia, bu…

1
Rachel Roddy: An A–Z of Pasta 23:46

2+ y ago23:46

23:46

Rachel Roddy is a marvellous conduit between the many cultures and kitchens of her adopted homeland and a world that simply cannot get enough of Italy. Her latest book is all about pasta, although she wisely recognised that there was little point in trying to be encyclopaedic. Instead, she chose 50 shapes on which to hang history, culture, personal…

1
Midnight’s chicken: Indian food evolution 21:04

2+ y ago21:04

21:04

After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a 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 makkhani murghi, butter chicken; tandoori chicken in a sauce that combines tomatoes, butter and cream. Seventy years later, the internet was overrun by a …

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