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Ben Reade recently got back from a trip to Kazakhstan, in search of the original wild apples. Last time we spoke, he was sharing bog butter. This time, bears, and how they may have helped to domesticate those apples.

The whole show will be published next week.

For more than eighteen months now, Eat This Podcast has been chugging along nicely, proving to myself that I can keep it fed and, I hope, keep listeners entertained. In that time, I’ve done very little to promote it, and although I’d prefer word of mouth to work its magic, I also recognise that I have to put my own mouth to use, as it were. In addition, all that has ever appeared on this website have been the actual podcasts and the show notes associated with each of them.

That’ll keep things pure, I thought.

Actually, though, it has been a bit of a straitjacket. I want to be able to point to other interesting podcasts about food. And, something that was brought home to me forcefully while I was editing a recording a few weeks ago, I want a way to share snippets that don’t fit in the main show, because they are worth hearing in their own right and also as little trailers for the longer shows.

The site’s design, however, made that a bit difficult. Now, after a bit of code-wrangling on my own account and with a lot of help from my friends, I think I’ve cracked it. There’s a new section, called Extra Matter, which houses trailers and posts, like this one, that don’t have any audio.

If you subscribe via iTunes or a podcatcher app, then the trailers will pop up automagically. No further action required. Subscribers to the email news might not get notice of trailers. I’m weighing the options. Is it worth a short email for a short piece of audio? Probably …

If you’re not already a subscriber, this will take you straight to iTunes and this will take you to the newsletter sign-up.

If you are, how about a little of that word of mouth stuff? Feel free to share with a friend.

Finally, another change that will keep you in touch: a Twitter account. Traffic will be low, so come along and follow me there.

That’ll do for now. As ever, I’d be delighted to receive any feedback you wish to offer. Details at the Get in Touch page.

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It is so easy to forget that very few people know anything about plant breeding and how vital it is to having enough to eat. The time it takes, and the resources it needs — financial, genetic, human — are just not something most people know about. No wonder, then, that many people don’t quite grasp the urgency with which we need to get cracking now to breed crops adapted to predicted climate conditions.

Susan Dworkin’s new book The Commons sidesteps that by hurling us 150 years into the future, to a world in which the failure to respond almost doomed our species to extinction. I thought it might be fun to talk to Susan and she agreed, but first I had to read the book. It turned out to be a rollicking good read, full of interesting characters and strange plot twists. All our old familiar friends are there. Large parts of the world have become very inhospitable, thanks to climate change. There’s an all-knowing Corporation that owns just about everything, including 85% of all humans in its domain. And the humans are shareholders in the whole enterprise. It all seems rather wonderful, except that there’s a problem: a new stem rust of wheat threatens a reprise of the famines and hardship of 100 years before. To say much more would be to give too much away. Let’s just say that the search for a solution is what drives the story forward.

Of course, I’m not the intended audience, so I have absolutely no idea how The Commons will be received by anyone else. I’m not even sure what the author would like us to be doing now to avoid the future she depicts. That was just one of the topics we talked about in a discussion that could have gone on a lot longer.

Notes

1. The Commons is available from Amazon as an e-book and a paperback.
2. If you are in the Washington DC area on 24 October, Susan Dworkin will be lecturing on “The Weather in the Supermarket: Climate Change, Seed Banks and Tomorrow’s Food” at the US Botanic Garden.
3. I “borrowed” the music — Mavis Staples singing Hard Times Come Again No More — from Beautiful Dreamer, a wonderful tribute album to Stephen Foster. Buy it if you don’t already have it (and if you like that kind of thing).
4. The banner photograph is my own.

I’ve been making a few changes around here to offer a little more. Unfortunately I ran out of time over the weekend so there may be some untidiness for a little while, especially in the iTunes feed, but I hope to have it all cleaned up quickly, with a proper explanation of what’s going on.

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Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built.

The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here.

Notes

1. More about Helena Attlee at her website