The first record of tomatoes growing in England dates to the 1590s (though Wales has a slightly earlier claim). It isn’t until the 1720s, however, that recipes for their preparation start to appear. The delay has been blamed on fear of foods from outisde Europe, on the humoral theory, on piety and superstition, and probably lots of other factors too. While all those explanations have obvious attractions, the reality is much more prosaic than that.

Dr Serin Quinn tracked the true history of the tomato in England and found that temperature and technology, along with religious persecution, are much more convincing.

Notes

1. Serin Quinn’s paper on The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method was my introduction to her work.
2. As mentioned, you may also find Rebecca Earle on The true history of the potato in Europe an interesting listen.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Cover image lifted from The Gardener’s Chronicle, banner from Hortus Eystettensis, 1640, at Wikimedia

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Eating habits are formed young and can last a lifetime, which suggests that school meals could be an excellent place to address nutrition and sustainability. Sweden, with universal free school meals for every child, offered a real-life laboratory in which to see the impact of school lunches that are essentially the same but designed to be healthier for the pupils and for the planet.

These were experiments in which the researchers were delighted to be rewarded with negative results. No differences in how much children ate, no difference in food waste, and no difference in satisfaction with the school lunches.

Notes

1. The paper we discussed is Sustainable and acceptable school meals through optimization analysis: an intervention study, prompted by this comment in The Lancet: School meal programmes: improving health and equity in the European Union.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. I took the cover image from Swedish school lunch reform, nutrition, and lifetime income, which has some interesting information on the long-term impact of Sweden’s school meal programme.

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The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll. It was that ken who inspired Wendy Pojmann to investigate the whole phenomenon of barista cool and how the look of the professional Italian barista went out into the world, mutated in different ways, and returned to establish itself in selected spots in Italy. Pojmann concludes that “Barista Ken truly captures the globalized cool of espresso culture”.

Barista Ken, she also points out “may be … of mixed-race origins”. The bar owners and baristas that Grazia Ting Deng studied for her PhD, which later became the book Chinese Espresso, are by no means mixed race; they are pure Chinese. They are following in the footsteps of the many migrant Italians who took over neighbourhood bars to work for a better life. As they retire, and with children who don’t want to work in a bar, they sold to a new wave of migrants — from China.

As both Wendy Pojmann and Grazia Ting Deng discovered, very little is constant even in the fiercely traditional world of Italian espresso.

Notes

1. Wendy Pojmann’s article is Barista Cool: Espresso Fashion Transformed. She is also the author of Espresso: the art and soul of Italy.
2. Grazia Ting Deng’s book is Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. Her website contains links to other interviews and articles.
3. For an update on the icon of the hipster barista, take a look at an article from The New Statesman
4. espresso

   Here’s the transcript.

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Collard greens are a kind of cabbage that grows as loose leaves rather than forming a tight head. They’re eaten widely in parts of Europe and in East Africa, but perhaps most strongly associated with the food of Black people in the southern United States. There are many mysteries surrounding collards, like how and why did they become so popular in the US South. To that can be added the recent discovery of collards in oasis gardens in Morocco, where again they are associated with enslaved people trafficked from West Africa. Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have done their best to unravel the mystery of collards in Morocco and how that may shine light on their place in Southern foodways.

Notes

1. Collard Greens (Brassica oleracea var. viridis) in the Moroccan Oasis by Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi is published in Economic Botany. Fortunately, they also wrote about their work in The Conversation, which is where I first saw it.
2. If you want to see how they prepare collards in Morocco, Bronwen made a video.
3. While reading around the topic, I came across this lovely piece about food and belonging: Snow Falling on Collards.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Banner photo of the Draa valley by Richard Allaway. Cover photo of collards by Jeff Wright.

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“Food has long served as an instrument of statecraft,” write the authors of a new paper, and it isn’t hard to find examples of food weaponised in international relations and between factions in a single country. It can foment strife, through tariffs and blockades, as easily as it can promote peace through food aid. At the same time, conflict has an outsized influence on food and agriculture, from the mythical salting of a vanquished enemy’s fields to the very real genocidal famines today.

While political scientists are well aware of the ways in which food and agriculture can be used to achieve strategic aims, agricultural economists have tended to take a narrower view, worrying more about the perceived inefficiencies of subsidising farmers. Marc Bellemare and Bernhard Dalheimer want them to expand their vision.

Notes

1. Marc Bellemare shared the paper on his website at The Geopolitics of Food and Agriculture.
2. Rather than list the many episodes Marc has helped bring to life, I’ll let you select the ones that interest you.
3. Here is the transcript, for which you can thank (and perhaps join) the podcast’s generous supporters.
4. Apologies for the rather banal cover art; abstract concepts are hard to illustrate, no matter how important.

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Trevor Warmedahl worked in commercial cheese operations large and small in the USA for about 10 years, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the uniformity of the final products and their dependence on purchased starter cultures and rennets. So he set off to learn about “other, older ways to go about the fermentation of milk and the care of dairy livestock and the making of cheese”.

That took him first to Mongolia, and another commercial cheese plant, but it was making the same, uniform, European-style cheeses that he wanted to leave behind. Nevertheless, that was the start of a six-year journey that he shares in his book Cheese Trekking.

Notes

1. You can follow Trevor Warmedahl’s continuing journey on Instagram and via his newsletter.
2. Cheese Trekking is published by Chelsea Green.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Photos from Trevor Warmedahl.

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In the previous episode, Carl Ipsen explained how the EU regulations for extra-virgin olive oil include tasting notes, and that if an oil has any of the forbidden flavours, it cannot be classified as extra virgin. So I was very surprised to read (in an issue of Edward Behr’s Art of Eating newsletter) about oils being produced in Provence that go out of their way to develop some — but not all — of the EU’s “defects”. Just as with modern extra virgin, these old-fashioned oils rely on up-to-date equipment and the skill of the miller.

In this episode, the paradox of old-fashioned modern oil.

Notes

1. Old-Fashioned Olive Oil from Provence is the piece that prompted this episode. A few months back, Ed Behr had written about modern olive oil. Both contain fascinating tasting notes and more besides.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. I lifted some images from the Moulin Cornille website.

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Carl IpsenExtra virgin olive oil, as a formal classification, owes its existence to the disastrous state of Italian olive oil in the 1950s. At that time, esterification, a chemical process designed to extract the last drop of oil from the crushed olives, was permitted. It could also be used to extract oils from all manner of unlikely sources, and those too found their way into “olive” oil.

When extra-virgin was first codified, only around 20% of oil qualified. Today, you would be hard pressed to find any oil on sale that does not claim to be extra virgin. Is that any guarantee of quality? Not really, says Professor Carl Ipsen, author of a forthcoming new book tentatively entitled A True History of Olive Oil. In it, he traces the evolution of olive oil from its early role as a lubricant of industrial development, when less than 1% was considered edible, to today, when it is almost exclusively used for food.

Notes

1. Carl Ipsen’s website contains links to some of his publications, including From Cloth Oil to Extra Virgin: Italian Olive Oil Before the Invention of the Mediterranean Diet, the essay that won the Sophie Coe Prize in 2021.
2. Here is a transcript. Thank supporters of the podcast.

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Jan Dutkiewicz (left) and Gabriel Rosenberg

A lot of people who care about these things will tell you that the food system is broken. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg insist that it is not. Bits of it may not work as well as we might like, but overall it delivers greater abundance, diversity, and nutrition at a lower cost than at any time in history.

They argue the point at length in their new book Feed the People! Why industrial food is good and how to make it even better. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg write engagingly and the book is a good read. And for those bits of the food system that are not working so well, they offer plenty of evidence-based recommendations that could help fix them.

Notes

1. Feed the People! is published by Basic Books.
2. How the New Food Pyramid Fits Into the Broader Conservative Project is their nuanced look at the vexed topic of food guidelines in the United States.
3. Gabriel Rosenberg has a newsletter, The Strong Paw of Reason, and there’s more of Jan Dutkiewicz’s work at The New Republic.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Banner photos of the authors by Tim Atakora and Harris Solomon.

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Bird’s Eye View of United States Penitentiary Lewisburg, PA

One of the things I found most interesting about the previous episode, Cooking in Maximum Security was that prisoners in Italy not only cooked pretty elaborate meals, but that it was their right to do so. The ability to make at least some food for themselves seems to be taken for granted among prisoners in Italy. Not so in the United States, where Hollywood has made us all aware both that food is often the spark that ignites a riot and that some prisoners can get away with cooking much more elaborate meals. It surprised Edward Hasbrouck too, who shared memories of his brief time in a federal prison with a friend we have in common. He agreed to talk to me about his experiences of food in prisons gained at Lewisburg Federal Prison in the early 1980s, long before ramen became the bedrock of prison food systems.

Notes

1. Edward Hasbrouck’s main website contains loads of information about travel and more besides. The non-profit he mentioned is Papers, Please! – The Identity Project.
2. I’m grateful to Peter Rukavina, who shared a link to Matteo Guidi’s episode, which is how Edward Hasbrouck found it and where he commented.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Banner photo from an old postcard of Lewisburg Penitentiary.

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Matteo GuidiAn extremely unlikely source (see note 3) tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book.

Notes

1. Matteo Guidi has built a website for Cooking in Maximum Security that gives a lot more information.
2. Matteo’s site has purchase details, but you might do better going directly to Half Letter Press.
3. It was Cory Doctorow’s fabulous Pluralistic that sent me in search of Matteo Guidi.
4. Banner and cover images by Mario Trudu, taken from the book.
5. Here is the transcipt.

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