Podcasts

Prehistoric cooking pots Early farmers were also fishing

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Early Neolithic farmers in Switzerland, illustration by J. Näf

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:40 — 18.1MB)

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Harry Robson on board a boat with the sun near the horizon
Harry Robson
Six thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food, and those pots have now revealed that in many respects the diets of the two cultures were more alike than different. The hunter-gatherers were processing dairy foods, while the farmers were cooking fish and other aquatic resources.

That’s the conclusion of a massive study of more than 1000 pot fragments by 30 scientists. Harry Robson, one of the team leaders, explained the results and the light they shed onto the transition to farming.

Notes

  1. Harry K. Robson is in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. The paper we talked about is The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. Banner illustration shows early Neolithic farmers in Switzerland, by J. Näf, from this publication. Cover photograph of a pot from the Funnel Beaker culture in Denmark, made by the earliest farmers across the western Baltic, CC-BY-SA by Arnold Mikkelsen, The National Museum of Denmark.

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Podcasts

The Invention of Baby Food What’s good and when to offer it

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Supermarket shelves showing a bewildering arrays of different types and formats of baby food

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:08 — 26.8MB)

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Amy Bentley portrait

In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the average baby wouldn’t have a tooth in its head for another five or six months. Amy Bentley, a professor at New York University, has charted the rise and continuing rise of baby food, from its earliest emergence in upstate New York and Michigan to its proliferation today. Commercial baby foods made sense, she thinks, as a safer and more convenient alternative to home-made options, and still today may form the bedrock of the best-nourished period of a child’s life. But they also reflected an American exceptionalism rooted in the triumph of World War Two.

Early advertisement for Gerber baby food

The adorable infant in Gerber’s advertisements was originally a pencil sketch that the artist said she would finish in colour if selected. Gerber preferred the sketch, and “repeated requests” prompted the company to offer a reproduction, suitable for framing, in exchange for 10¢. Strangest of all, some people seemed to think the baby was Humphrey Bogart, who was 29 qwhen the sketch was made. A little old for baby food.

Notes

  1. Get a copy of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet from an independent bookshop. And here is Amy Bentley’s website.
  2. I’ve been trying to keep you up-to-date with the lead contamination story in Eat This Newsletter, but just last week Marion Nestle took a look at lead and pesticides in baby food.
  3. Here is the transcript.
  4. I took the photos of baby food.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Podcast Xmas Quiz You can’t win unless you enter

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Mosaic of cover art from the 18 episodes of 2023
Perhaps this will help while away a few minutes as you wait for a new episode to drop. One question for each of this year’s 18 episodes. There will be prizes, but I want to try and ensure that they are things you actually want, so probably tokens or gift cards of some sort. You have until midnight GMT on 1 January 2024 to submit your entry

NB: I need an operational email to ensure I can tell you if you are a winner. That is all I will use it for.

Podcasts

Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice A 25-year effort to track down an elusive but ubiquitous source of flavour in Indian cooking

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A branch encrusted with Parmotrema petrolatum, Black Stoneflower, a lichen used as a spice in many Indian dishes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:11 — 23.2MB)

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Cover artwork

In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elusive contribution to flavour, best described as “you know it when it’s missing”.

Priya Mani eventually identified the strange thing in her soup as a lichen called Parmotrema perfolatum, commonly known in English as black stoneflower. Lichens are an odd group of plants made up of algae or bacteria living within the cells of a fungus. You’ve seen them on rocks and trees, I’m sure. Black stoneflower turns out to be ubiquitous in Indian cooking, though its presence is not often remarked. Its popularity may now be threatening its survival.

Notes

  1. Priya Mani has two Instagram channels, @priya.mani.design and @cookalore, which is a showcase for her Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Cooking.
  2. Her article Tasting a Tasteless Taste: Stoneflower Lichens as a Spice in Indian Food is in Art of Eating No. 111 and, contrary to what I said in the podast, seems to be available to read.
  3. With apologies for the delay, here is the transcript.
  4. Banner photo by Priya Mani. Cover photo of putative Black Stone Flower by s_bala.
  5. You do know about John Wyndham’s book Trouble with Lichen, I hope.

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Podcasts

A New Story for Maize Domestication It took two teosintes

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Photomontage of a man atop a giant ear of corn at a country fair with assembled onlookers gawping at the scene

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:34 — 23.5MB)

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Portrait bust of Mayan maize god The ancestry of modern maize has long been a puzzle. Unlike other domesticated grasses, there didn’t seem to be any wild species that looked like the modern cereal and from which farmers could have selected better versions. For a long time, botanists weren’t even sure which continent maize was from. That seemed to be settled with the discovery in lowland Mexico of teosinte, a wild and weedy relative of maize, and a lot of work to understand the genetic changes from teosinte to maize. The big problem was that the genetic work also seemed to contradict the story, by finding remnants of different types of teosinte. A new research paper sorts out the story, which is now more complicated, better understood, and offers some hope for future maize breeding.

Notes

  1. A summary of their research by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and his colleagues is available at Science.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. Cover photo, sculpted head of a Mayan maize god, “represented as a vigorous youth with flowing hair likened to corn leaves”, he was considered to be the quintessence of beauty and refinement. Taken by me at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. Banner photo by William H. Martin, who became very rich making these sorts of postcards.

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