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An 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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I’m proud to revisit an episode from 2022, in which two country directors of the charity Give Directly told me how cash transfers in Rwanda and Malawi make a real difference to the lives of poor people there. The reason is Give Directly’s Pods Fight Poverty campaign, which aims to raise $1,000,000 for families in Rwanda. They’re more than 10% of the way there, and I hope this podcast can add to the total.

The reason I made the episode in the first place was to ask whether cash enables people to improve their food security and nutrition. As I heard, it does, which is why I am happy to be part of the campaign.

Notes

1. Please consider making a donation.
2. Miriam Laker Oketta and Esnatt Gondwe Matekesa both stressed how evidence guides Give Directly’s activities. The website’s section for research on cash transfers provides summaries.
3. The specific study Miriam Laker-Oketta referred to is Benchmarking a WASH and Nutrition Program to Cash in Rwanda.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. There’s a lot of economics literature on the problems of gift giving. Tim Harford offered some guidance.

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It can be hard to remember the food blogs of yesteryear, when everyone knew everyone and the actual recipes were usually easy to find, unencumbered by endless cruft. Luisa Weiss discovered blogs relatively early, and soon became one of the most-read food bloggers. She was also part of a lively, supportive community, regularly reading and conversing with more than 40 other food bloggers. One thing led to another and she found herself first in cookbook publishing and then with a contract to write her first book, a memoir with food. Two cookbooks followed. We met in Berlin to talk about all that and more.

Notes

1. Here’s a link to Luisa Weiss’ website.
2. She also, and this is both impressive and useful, managed to salvage all of the original The Wednesday Chef when it’s original host, Typepad, decided to close everyone down earlier this year.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Banner image liberated from an archive copy of The Wednesday Chef.

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Settled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.

That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

Notes

1. Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press.
2. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana

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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.

Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.

Notes

1. Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.
2. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.

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