Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:53 — 26.5MB)

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Naomi Duguid is a writer, home cook and photographer based in Toronto, Canada. She is also a world traveller and has converted her experiences into a series of glorious books, part cookbook, part culinary anthropology, wholly fascinating. Her latest, The Miracle of Salt, is no exception. Recipes for everything from Acadian salted scallions to zucchini in golden sand sauce (for which you’ll first need to make some brined egg yolks) are seasoned with chapters on flavoured salts, salt harvesting techniques, the geography of salt and plenty more. About the only thing we deliberately didn’t talk about was lacto-fermentation, although there’s plenty of that too.

Notes

1. The Miracle of Salt is available at bookshop.org and elsewhere.
2. Naomi Duguid’s website.
3. A few years ago we talked about Exploring the World through Food.
4. Here’s a transcript, thanks to supporters of the podcast
5. Banner photograph by me, of the salt flats in Trapani, Sicily.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:20 — 21.5MB)

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The human remains at Neumark Nord, a Neanderthal site in Germany, are around 125,000 years old. Those at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) – aka the Body Farm – in Tennessee, a lot less. What connects them is a remarkable new explanation for the high nitrogen isotope ratios in Neanderthal remains. Normally, such high ratios are the result of eating lots of meat. John Speth thinks there’s a better interpretation.

Speth is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert on how hunter-gatherer societies survive, now and in the recent past, and that makes him a valued colleague of archaeologists trying to interpret the remains of Neanderthal societies. At the start of the summer, he was a co-author on two papers that shed light on Neanderthal diets. One identified the site at Neumark Nord as a fat factory where people extracted valuable bone grease in quantity. The other offers a more convincing explanation for why Neanderthals seem to eat as much meat as lions and tigers.

Notes

1. The two papers we talked about are Large-scale processing of within-bone nutrients by Neanderthals, 125,000 years ago and Neanderthals, hypercarnivores, and maggots: Insights from stable nitrogen isotopes. Science also had an interview with Melanie Beasley, who did the maggot work, on its podcast.
2. And the previous episodes with John Speth are Neanderthal Diets, a very early episode about how Neanderthals might have boiled starches, and It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you, the paper that prompted Melanie Beasley to measure the nitrogen isotopes of maggots.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. If you’re wondering why the banner is an old and extremely inaccurate reconstruction of a Neanderthal, the Field Museum, a worthy institution to be sure, makes its images available only from Getty Images, which charges through the nose. I hope they’re both happy with that arrangement.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:25 — 37.1MB)

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Pellagra — a terrible disease characterised by the four Ds: dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death — was first noticed in northern Spain in 1735 and in Italy soon afterwards. Physicians had no idea what to do about it. They established that it was a new disease, and quickly worked out that it was something to do with maize and that it seemed to afflict only very poor people. In Italy, sharecroppers grew and ate maize at the expense of any vegetables. And in the southern US, workers in mill towns subsisted on ground maize imported from the midwest because all the local land was down to cotton.

The struggle to understand the causes of pellagra and how to cure and prevent it played out first in Italy and then in the United States, where 1906 saw a large outbreak in Alabama. Competing explanations were driven by large egos and expediency rather than evidence. That was true even after Dr Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service proved that the disease was not contagious and that the deficiency could be quickly reversed with a proper daily diet or a tablespoon of dried yeast.

Notes

1. Pellagra and Pellagrous Insanity During the Long Nineteenth Century, by David Gentilcore and Egidio Priani is available under open access
2. Dana Landress recently published Famished for Freedom: Pellagra and Medical Clemency at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
3. I consulted loads of other publications; let me know if you want a source for anything.
4. Photograph of Joseph Goldberger from the Library of Congress.
5. Here is the transcript.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:15 — 15.9MB)

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Quite by chance, I booked a brief cycling holiday at an agriturismo based on a farm that is home to Quin Italia, an enterprise that aims to be the first supply chain for certified organic quinoa grown in Italy. The food at the agriturismo was excellent, as it usually is, but there were only two items on the menu that featured quinoa: a beer and a plate of deep fried croquettes that owed more to chickpeas than to quinoa. That was just one of the points I raised with Alessandro Biavati, chef and part-owner of Agrilocanda val Campotto.

Notes

1. Both the agriturismo and Quin Italia offer a lot more information on their websites.
2. Just in case anyone in Italy wants to support cycling, here’s the website for FIAB.
3. There’s a transcript, of course, with thanks to supporters of the podcast.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:19 — 26.0MB)

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Many countries have strict rules about who is allowed to give advice on diet and nutrition, but that doesn’t stop even qualified people from selling all kinds of snake oil. In this episode, I chatted with Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian and lead dietitian for the Mayo Clinic Diet. We talked about fad diets, and how they are inevitably unsustainable. About weight-loss drugs and whether they are being oversold. About the frustration she feels faced with bad advice, and how the Mayo Clinic’s caution may make it slow, but also makes it sure. About her dismay faced with questions about singular foods and singular nutrients. I learned a lot.

Notes

1. Tara Schmidt hosts the podcast On Nutrition from the Mayo Clinic Press.
2. I was fascinated to discover how many official dietary guidelines exist, though I should have pursued my question further. I’m interested in why people don’t meet them, not whether they could if they wanted to.
3. Here is the transcript, with thanks to all supporters.
4. Here is my episode on Fad diets. There may be some others in the section of related links below, although the thingie that does that has been playing up. You can always search for “diets”.

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