iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 28/09/2026

The official Italian radicchio consortium warned members not to share their secrets with a bunch of upstart American growers. Fortunately they failed. A new book tells the story of more than a decade’s work by Lane Selman and the Culinary Breeding Network. eatthispodcast.com/radicchio

Cover artwork. A selection of gorgeously colourful radicchio leaves in a white dish with scalloped edges. Photo by Shawn Linehan.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 14/09/2026

New episode: The Truth About Picky Eaters Childhood pickiness wasn’t even a thing until the 1920s. Where did it all go wrong? A mix of well-intentioned advice with disastrous consequences, misguided psychology, and a heaping dose of industrial food. eatthispodcast.com/picky #podcasts #nutrition

Cover art. Toasted muffins with peanut butter gussied up to look like owls, with banana and blueberry eyes and strawberry beak and wings. Anything to tempt the child to eat.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 01/09/2026

eatthispodcast.com/ferments We can pickle it. But will we want to? Ken Albala thinks maybe not. We talked about fermentation around the world and the past and future of real pickles.

A man with a beard, wearing spectacles and a tan hat, peers over a glass of something pale and fermented.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 24/06/2026

There is a strand of thought out there that believes any and all legislation to do with seeds is evil and unnecesary. It is wrong. Here’s why. jeremycherfas.net/blog/why-we-...

A hand holding a packet of Red Sun sunflower seeds next to the very disappoint, very ordinary yellow sunflower that emerged from the seeds.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 17/06/2026

The first tomato plants in England were noted around 1590, but there aren’t many recipes until the 1720s. Why did it take so long? Stories you may have heard are probably wrong. @serinquinn.bsky.social explains what really caused the delay. eatthispodcast.com/tomato-engla... #podcast #tomato

Cover artwork, A Victorian advertisement for a heated glasshouse, with a gardener tending a plant above a section labelled Hot Bed.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 01/06/2026

More Sustainable School Meals Researchers in Sweden optimised school lunches to reduce GHG emissions while staying essentially the same. Negative result very positive; no changes in amount eaten, amount wasted and meal satisfaction. eatthispodcast.com/schoolfood #podcasts #food #nutrition

Cover art: Swedish children sit at a table eating the school lunch provided to every child for free.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 25/05/2026

Eat This Newsletter 303. Too much to summarise in such a confined space, but I believe it will satisfy your need for food-related goodies encountered online. Try it at buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #food #newsletters

Prevalence of obesity and overweight among adults in the USA and Italy from 1990 to 2022. The USA curve rises from 51% to 72%. The curve for Italy is effectively flat, from 46% to 49%

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 19/05/2026

Latest episode looks at the hipster baristas and Chinese espresso, both of which show that even traditions that define an identity are not as immutable as people sometimes think they are. eatthispodcast.com/espresso/ #podcasts #food #coffee

Cover art. A very dark espresso coffee in a glass cup, the better to see the essential cream floating on top, with coffee still emerging from the machine.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 04/05/2026

Collard greens are strongly linked to Black foodways in the US South. They are also valued in Morocco on the edge of the Sahara, although the outside world has only just found out about that. That raises so many questions. eatthispodcast.com/collards #food #agriculture #podcasts #Morocco

Cover artwork. Green, flat collard leaves are arranged around the stem, seen from above.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 06/04/2026

New Episode: In Search of the Real Cheeses After 10 years as a commercial cheesemaker, Trevor Warmedahl 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”. eatthispodcast.com/cheese-trek #podcast #cheese

Trevor Warmedahl with the abomasum of a goat kid, a common source of rennet for artisanal cheesemaking.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 30/03/2026

ETN 299: Supply lines down, linking continues 1) Cool as a cucumber, with added nomenclature 2) Meat and mushrooms, apostasy in Texas and Iowa 3) Anchovies, the best on the internet? 4) Olive Oil Tourism, the deets buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #food #newsletters

A paper fan from Japan with a painting of a cucumber on it to improve its ability to collect the user.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 24/03/2026

New episode: the paradox of old-fashioned modern olive oil. Some olive oil millers in Provence go out of their way to develop flavours that the EU calls “defects”. These oils can't be called extra-virgin, but they sell anyway. eatthispodcast.com/old-oil #podcast #food #olives

Clusters of ripe, violet olives on a leafy branch.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 15/03/2026

I’m resurrecting my post from this day in 2021 because I think the fundamental question still requires some sort of answer. jeremycherfas.net/blog/nikolai...

A faked photo of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov among the seed drawers of the Institute of Applied Botany in St Petersburg

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 09/03/2026

Extra virgin olive oil appeared in 1960, after a decade of scandalous adulteration. Then, it denoted quality. Today, not so much. “I would argue,” says Carl Ipsen, “that a bigger problem today than fraud is transportation and storage.” eatthispodcast.com/evoo #podcast #food #OliveOil

Cover artwork: fresh yellow-green olive oil emerging from the centrifuge and flowing down a chute.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 27/02/2026

”You are more likely to find the raw ingredients for a better future for the food system at the Waffle House than you are at your local farmers’ market.” Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz talking about their new book Feed The People! eatthispodcast.com/ftp #agriculture #food #podcast

A black and white photograph of a Waffle House late at night with a quote from the book superimposed in purple lettering. The quote reads ”You are more likely to find the raw ingredients for a better future for the food system at the Waffle House than you are at your local farmers’ market.”

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 24/02/2026

Is the food system broken? No, say @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social and Gabriel Rosenberg. Their new book explains Why Industrial Food Is Good and How To Make It Even Better. We had a good chat, from cellular agriculture to labour in the food industry. eatthispodcast.com/ftp #agriculture #policy

Podcast cover artwork, an illustration from the cover of the book.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 28/01/2026

Eat This Newsletter 294: All wet * A water sommelier walks into a spa ... * Never mind food prices, how did water get so costly? * Arizona attempts to keep Saudi Arabia out of its aquifers. All the news that's fit to drink at buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #newsletter #food #water

XKCD 2982 shows "How Water Filtration Works" an absurd flow from well water to faucet.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 30/12/2025

New episode: Cooking in Maximum Security. Prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons have a right to cook in their cells. A new book shares their recipes and the tools they invent to make them. #podcast #food #Italy eatthispodcast.com/prison

Cover artwork, a drawing by Mario Trudu from the book shows how to make Spaghettone Infinito by squeezing pasta dough from a small plastic bottle into a pot of boiling water.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 15/12/2025

The easiest way to be absolutely certain that the gift you give is exactly what the recipient wants. eatthispodcast.com/give-again #podcast #nutrition #poverty @give-directly.bsky.social

Cover artwork, a detail from The Gift of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch, showing a Black man wearing a crown and a bearded White man in a turban, both with golden gifts.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 01/12/2025

New month, new episode, a chat with Berliner Luisa Weiss @luisaweiss.bsky.social about how she became a food blogger, how that changed her life, and how the Berlin food scene is changing. eatthispodcast.com/berlin #podcast #food #Berlin

Cover art, a plate of pfannkuchen, covered with icing sugar, one of them sliced open with red jam or jelly oozing out of it.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 17/11/2025

A Fresh Look at Domestication According to Robert Spengler, it wasn’t human selection that turned grass into wheat, or wolves into dogs. Domestication just happened in response to changes in the environment. eatthispodcast.com/domestication #podcast #agriculture #archaeology

Cover artwork. A Neolithic sickle with flint chips embedded in a wooden handle with bitumen or tar.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 05/11/2025

New episode: Revolutions are Born in Breadlines. Maria Fedorova’s new book looks at how the Volga famine of 1920 catalyzed exchanges of food aid, technology, and agricultural ideas. Humanitarian, yes, and also deeply political. eatthispodcast.com/usa-ussr #podcast #agriculture #history

Cover artwork. A Russian stamp shows a heroic tractor and driver of 1924

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 28/10/2025

Eat This Newsletter 286: Cravings The people who need a healthy diet most can’t afford one, while the people who can easily afford it don’t seem to want it. buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #food #newsletter #nutrition

The cost of a healthy diet in US currency

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 20/10/2025

In 2008, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but around the world, as I learned from @gastroirl.bsky.social eatthispodcast.com/spice-bag #food #Ireland

Cover art, with a close up of the contents of a spice bag, including chips, red and green peppers, onion and, presumably, bits of chicken

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 07/10/2025

Revisiting Historical Recipes Even if you manage to make an old recipe, you’re left with an insoluble mystery: how should it taste? If you’re in search of some notion of authenticity, that is the ultimate stumbling block. There is just no way to know. Or is there? eatthispodcast.com/past-taste

Cover artwork, with a detail from a 17th century Dutch still-life of a fruit pie.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 22/09/2025

Eat This Podcast: The Miracle of Salt Talking to Naomi Duguid about her book The Miracle of Salt and we managed to avoid the whole pink salt diet trick nonsense. So should you. Listen at eatthispodcast.com/salt #food #podcast #salt

A long hill of salt, glistening white under a cloudy gray sky, dwarfs two workers in front of it. The foreground shows the shallow lagoon in Trapani, Sicily, where the water evaporates to concentre the brine.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 08/09/2025

Kicking off a new series talking to John Speth about that Neanderthal fat factory and a better explanation for why, when you look at nitrogen isotope ratios, Neanderthals seem to be even more carnivorous than lions and tigers. www.eatthispodcast.com/maggots/ #podcast #food #agriculture

Cover artwork, a photograph of a reconstruction of a Neanderthal man standing in front of a painted background that shows a body of water and waves breaking. In his hand he seems to have a rabbit.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 05/09/2025

"Frozen potato products—most of which are french fries—now account for an average of about 50 percent of potato per capita availability at 58 pounds per person after decades of steady increases." No surprise, but good to have the data. ers.usda.gov/data-product... #food #agriculture #potatoes

A bar chart showing changes in the availability of potato products in the US as snapshots from the 1980s, the 2000s and the 2020s. Fresh has declined by 20% while French fries have increased and are now the most popular form of potato.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 03/09/2025

If you’re puzzled by recent claims about “authentic” Parmigiano-Reggiano you might want to listen to Zachary Nowak explain how the rules effectively trapped the cheese in aspic. www.eatthispodcast.com/what-makes-p... #podcast #food #parmigiano-reggiano

A map showing a black line around the region in Emilia-Romana from which the milk for Parmigiano-Reggiano must come.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 30/08/2025

Thanks, once again, for giving me the opportunity to promote a past episode, with the wonderful Christy Spackman, about her book The Taste of Water. www.eatthispodcast.com/water/

A fountain in Rome labelled Acqua non potabile, warning that the water is not drinkable.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 15/08/2025

What has the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to do with the middle of August? Is she just another in a long line of Mother Goddesses? Why is Virgo carrying a wheatsheaf? Some answers in www.eatthispodcast.com/our-daily-br... from my month of daily podcasts on bread and wheat. #bread #wheat

An illustration of the constellation Virgo from a star atlas, showing a woman holding a sheaf of wheat in her left hand and a palm frond in her right.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 13/08/2025

Ooops. Biofortified crops aren't doing nearly as well in Uganda as had been claimed. iaes.cgiar.org/spia/news/bi... #agriculture #biofortification

A rigorous impact study has shown that orange-fleshed sweet potato can lead to impressive gains in child growth outcomes. Imagine the aggregate gains in health that could have been achieved if millions of households had actually been reached or the benefits that might have been unlocked had the drop in reach been detected early and prompted course correction. When monitoring systems lose touch with on-ground realities, we risk becoming locked into path-dependent decisions that delay learning, derail funding, and undermine the potential benefits these innovations are designed to deliver.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 04/07/2025

A good day on which to be reminded of an ancient post: Schopenhauer on blogging. www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/schopen...

Incredible are the folly and perversity of a public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds, of all times and all countries, for the sake of reading the writings of commonplace persons which appear daily, and breed every year in countless numbers like flies; merely because these writings have been printed to-day and are still wet from the press. It would be better if they were thrown on one side and rejected the day they appeared, as they must be after the lapse of a few years. They will then afford material for laughter as illustrating the follies of a former time.
It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 30/06/2025

Eat This Newsletter 273 Number one question: In the 17th century, did the Dutch really brush their teeth with butter? And a bunch of other morsels. buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #agriculture #food #newsletters

Painting. A Mound of Butter, by Antoine Vollon. A sumptuous, golden mound of butter with a knife stuck into it, the cheesecloth around it unwrapped, and a couple of eggs, sit on a dark brown table against a dark background.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 23/06/2025

Latest episode: Pellagra Pellagra is a dietary deficiency disease that ends in madness and death. And at one time was responsible for half the inmates in Italian asylums and 100,000 deaths a year in the US. Now it is all but forgotten. eatthispodcast.com/pellagra #nutrition #food #podcast

Portrait of Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service. He is a young white man with wavy hair and spectacles and gazes resolutely out of the frame. He is wearing a service uniform.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 17/06/2025

Another casual devaluation of farmer selection by calling it "genetic engineering". Other than that, an OK history that misses some juicy recent work on diversity in Europe: www.eatthispodcast.com/tomatoes/

Overlapping slices of a ribbed red tomato laid out on a wooden board.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 09/06/2025

New episode: Quinoa in the Po Delta Little did I know when I booked a cycling holiday in the Po Valley that I would be staying at the heart of Italy’s first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. Serendipity at its finest. eatthispodcast.com/quinitalia #podcasts #Italy #quinoa

Wide view at the Agrilocanda Val Campotto. A line of trees stretches towards and barn and the horizon, with massed blue-grey clouds in the sky.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 04/06/2025

The idea that “the diet” is fundamentally different from “what you put in your mouth to nourish yourself” is really bad for human well-being. Listen to Tara Schmidt, lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, in the latest episode, at eatthispodcast.com/dietitian #nutrition #diet #podcasts

An advertisement for Norma’s Burger Bar on the back of a bus in Ravenna, Italy. The text reads “Fuck the diet. Eat burgers.”

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 02/06/2025

Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but even qualified people keep selling all kinds of snake oil. Tara Schmidt, lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet, told me about her work Listen at eatthispodcast.com/dietitian #podcast #nutrition #food

A colourful spread of the many different kinds of foods that constitute a healthy diet, one that most people do not follow.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 25/05/2025

Trying to decide between two spellings, I consulted Google NGram, now I have questions. The rise from 1900 to 1940 is easy to understand, but what happened between 1942 and 1968? Plenty? And after 1968? Fear? #dietitian #dietician #food

A graph of word frequency for dietitian (in red) and dietician (in blue) 1800-2022. Both start to increase in the 1890s, but both decline after 1942, rising again in about 1968. Dietitian is generally more frequent.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 12/05/2025

Direct from Polignano a Mare, Flavia Giordano's love letter to Puglia's unique foods and ingredients, including some remarkable biodiversity. Melons eaten unripe, colourful carrots, and sporchia, a broomrape parasitic on broad beans. eatthispodcast.com/puglia

Flavia Giordano, holding her book and her Italian Greyhound, Carla. A young woman smiling at the camera, with dark hair tied in a headscarf and wearing a grey and white checked shirt. Behind her is a blue sky and a bluer sea.

Typical vegetables of puglia in a ceramic bowl decorated with a green border. Barattiere are round, pale-green melons, eaten unripe like a cucumber. Carrots cay be purple, yellow or orange. And sporchia are the dark purple shoots of a broomrape parasitic on broad beans.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 28/04/2025

Food has become cheaper and more abundant over the past 70 years or so by ignoring external costs. As a result, our planet and our health have suffered untold damage. Is it even possible to turn the food system around? Listen at eatthispodcast.com/paradox #podcasts #agriculture #food_systems

Cover artwork, a large and somewhat menacing combine harvester cutting a field of wheat looms over the viewer.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 17/04/2025

New episode: Farming’s Overlords. The top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machines, seeds, chemicals. That concentration, plus their size, gives them unprecedented power. www.eatthispodcast.com/titans #agriculture #podcasts #economics

The Jolly Green Giant reclining in front of tiny farmers, except he is red and has cloven hooves.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 04/03/2025

Most people know that Jewish dietary laws forbid pork. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity. buff.ly/tWejckF

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 03/02/2025

Food, folklore and St Brigid St Brigid’s Day, 1 February, marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year. There are special foods and other ritual celebrations, some of which delve in the pagan past. Listen at eatthispodcast.com/brigid #podcasts #Ireland

Cover artwork featuring a three-armed Cross of St Brigid made of brown rushes. The centre is a woven triangle with an arm of bound rushes emerging from each vertex.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 01/02/2025

A triskele made for St Brigid’s Day, today. There’s a huge amount of folklore and food surrounding St Brigid, which Caitríona Nic Philibin tells me about to kick off a new season of Eat This Podcast. Subscribe “wherever you get your podcasts” or right here: buttondown.com/jeremycherfas

A triskele, a three-armed cross, made in County Donegal for St Brigid’s Day. The Cross is made of rushes interwoven and takes the form of a triangle with three arms projecting from the three corners.

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Eat This Podcast @eatthispodcast.com · 27/01/2025

It is too easy to connect the dots. Sugar craving, cheap ultraprocessed calories, cheap food for enslaved sugar workers, the hidden horrors behind plenty, information deficits. I need a pinboard and some red string. buttondown.com/jeremycherfa... #food #newsletters

An illustration of a pinboard with several pages and photographs connected by loops of red string.

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