Eat This Podcast

Not so long ago, the only clues we had to animal domestication came from archaeological digs. If you were lucky, you could get a reasonably accurate date for bones that were definitely not from wild animals, although the origin stories they told were vague and unsatisfying. More recently, molecular biology has come to the rescue in the form of DNA sequences, which can even — again with a bit of luck — be extracted from very old bones. Better yet, it has become routine to sequence DNA from all manner of living creatures, and those sequences can shed light on ancient events even when there are no bones in the picture.

Olivier Hanotte is one of the foremost experts on livestock DNA, with a particular interest in indigenous African cattle. We spoke about research on chickens, sheep and cattle, and how understanding the history of domestication offers ideas for how to sustainably improve African cattle so that they can feed the growing African population.

This picture of a fat-tailed sheep comes from A new history of Ethiopia.: Being a full and accurate description of the kingdom of Abessinia. Vulgarly, though erroneously, called the empire of Prester John. In four books ... illustrated with copper plates. by Hiob Ludolf, published in English in 1684. On the subject of “fat and ponderous“ sheep tails, Ludolf says:

the least of them weigh Ten and Twelve, the biggest of them sometimes above forty Pound, so the Owners are forc’d to tye a little Cart behind them, wherein they put the Tayl of the Sheep, as well for the convenience of Carriage and to ease the poor Creature, as to preserve the Wooll from durt and nastiness, and being torn among bushes and stones.

Notes

1. The latest paper on African cattle is behind a paywall, but Olivier Hanotte wrote an excellent article about it for The Conversation.
2. The chicken paper is not behind a paywall. Have fun.
3. Nor is a paper on fat-tailed sheep from Ethiopia.
4. A proper discussion of fat-tailed sheep will have to wait, but in the meantime, here’s a fascinating blog post (and comments to match) on Anissa Helou’s website.
5. Here is the transcript.
6. Banner photo of cattle in Mozambique by ILRI/Stevie Mann. Red junglefowl photo by budak.

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Erika RappaportErika Rappaport’s study of tea meticulously documents the many ways in which tea, as it became one of the first global commodities, was responsible for so many aspects of modern life. In the course of our conversation, it became obvious that there is no single reason why the Brits turned to tea. They were drinking roughly equal amounts of tea and coffee to begin with, long before coffee leaf rust arrived in Ceylon, but it was mostly Chinese tea. When the British East India Company decided to try their hand growing tea in Assam, they came up against one big problem: back home, nobody much liked the taste of Indian tea. Persuading them to change their minds was a massive undertaking involving racist rhetoric, fearmongering, and little glimpses of heaven on earth. And it worked.

Notes

1. Erika Rappaport shared just a few stories from tea’s not so glorious history. There is masses more in her book, and if you’re looking for a long read in which to lose yourself (or a loved one), I highly recommend A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World.
2. Not entirely by chance, I also watched a video of William Dalrymple talking about his newish book The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. Tea barely gets a look in, but there is so much else to digest.
3. There is now a transcript, thanks to the show’s supporters

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This is the third in a little mini-series on taste. First came Margot Finn discussing disputations about taste and then Chad Ludington explained how you are what you drink. Now they’re both back, along with a snippet from a long-ago episode with sommelier Marco Lori to round out the discussion. I can’t guarantee that I won’t return to the subject again in the future, not least because I find it endlessly fascinating.

The challenge, I think, is disentangling aspects of gustatory taste that are common to all human beings from those that are overlaid — or do I mean underpinned? — by personal experience or cultural context. So when we say sweet is pleasurable and bitter aversive, what does it mean to say that an adult has a sweet tooth? I freely admit to having a bit of a sweet tooth myself, but I also revel in bitter tastes. How did that happen?

Another puzzle is the memory of complex flavours and how we analyse, process, store and recall the memory. I’ve never put much effort into being able to discriminate among similar but different tastes; I can just about recognise certain wines, for example, but am in awe of people who can discern a particular maker or, even more so, a vintage. So I’m intrigued by Chad Ludington’s thought experiment, that a bunch of randomly selected people would, over time, converge on liking the same few examples of a particular food. Would they? I’d love to see the experiment tried.

Our conversation sent me back to consider some things I first read back in 2011, on the website of Seth Roberts. He was an extremely interesting psychologist and writer who was a great one for self-experimentation. Seth wrote that side-by-side comparisons provided the best opportunity to learn about differences and resulted in an almost instant connoisseurship, which he called the Willats Effect after a friend who pointed it out to him. And, as Seth explained, there’s a downside to this:

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.

Starting with The Willat Effect: Side-by-Side Comparisons Create Connoisseurs and following the links from there you’ll see that although the results are sometimes confounded, it does seem to be the case that side-by-side comparisons very effectively show you what you like.

I’m ready to try that with chocolate. Or bitter liqueurs. You know where to find me.

Notes

1. Food Fights, the book that prompted this mini-series, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
2. Chad Ludington teaches history at North Carolina State University.
3. S. Margot Finn is “inconsistently” on Twitter.
4. Marco Lori’s website is Off the Vine
5. Banner photo from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Those barbels around its mouth are where it keeps its taste buds. Cover photo by Anne on Flickr. Twitter photo by Jason Lam from Flickr

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Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

Notes

1. Marcela Garcés’ paper is In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context.
2. La Centralita is in Albany, New York.
3. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of supporters
4. Banner photograph from Marcela Garcés.

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Another year, another International Year. Several, probably. The one that concerns me is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, as designated by the United Nations and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

I’m deeply skeptical about these things, and always wonder how else the money could have been spent to better effect. But the money is never available to be spent on anything else. So I’ll just take the opportunity to rail against people who can’t seem to separate the partially overlapping magisteria of botany and cuisine.

Notes

1. International Year of Fruits and Vegetables 2021
2. I just need to tidy up my notes, and then there’ll be a transcript here.
3. New year, new season, new appeal for support.

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