Audio food

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  If you don’t know what a podcast is, it’s a bit like a radio show that you can listen to on demand – the equivalent of streaming video but without pictures.  My interests are pretty broad ranging in this area but, of course, one of those interests is food.  And by food, I don’t only mean recipe preparation but also food history and the role of food in culture.

I decided to write about food podcasts after listening to a couple of podcasts last week that bumped up against each other.  On one, Linda Pelacchio of A Taste of the Past was interviewing Prof. Ken Albala about his new book, Noodle Soup.  Albala is a historian and Chair of Food Studies at the University of the Pacific and his new book is, obviously, a celebration of noodles in soup.  By the way, A Taste of the Past is only one of the offerings of The Heritage Radio Network, a nonprofit dedicated to food radio.  I bet you didn’t even know that food radio was a thing. It was a good program, mainly because Albala is passionate, informative, and enormously entertaining.

A couple of days later, on Gastropod, another podcast, I was thoroughly enlightened and entertained by 45 minutes of conversation about the history of Italy’s pasta and the protocols of joining sauces to pasta.  The hosts, Cynthia Graber and Nicole Twilley, based the program on two books by Oretta Zanini de Vita, Encyclopedia of Pasta and Sauces & Shapes: Pasta the Italian Way, (the latter co-written with Zanini de Vita, who also translated both).  What was interesting about both programs was how completely passionate the discussion was about, basically,  a mixture of flour and water made into some kind of shape and covered with sauce or dunked in soup.

Albala kept marveling at how universal noodles are, having become an intrinsic part of nearly every cuisine (although you have to stretch to find the Indian noodle tradition) while Graber and Twilley explored how essential pasta was, not only to the Italian diet but to local Italian identity.  I now have no trouble believing that identical recipes produced in identical ways in identical shapes in the same town can have one name on one side of the street and another on the opposite side, because they mean something different on each side of the street.  Amazing…and wonderful.

By the way, the Gastropod interview inspired me to buy a copy of Encyclopedia of Pasta (expected to arrive any day now) and the Albala interview reminded me to mention his on-line course Food: A Cultural Culinary History.  It’s part of The Great Courses series of on-line lectures and is the best overview of the past 30,000 years of culinary history I’ve yet encountered.  It’s also been recently repackaged as a podcast.  Highly recommended if you have an interest in food history.

There are a few other food podcasts I’d recommend.  On the Heritage Radio Network (see link above), there are dozens of programs and I haven’t come anywhere close to working my way through all of them.  Of the ones I have sampled, I’d recommend Food Without Borders, A Hungry Society, Eating Matters, Origins, and Eat Your Words, although I have the sense that any of their programs contain some great shows on any given day.

Sporkful declares itself to be not for foodies but it is definitely edging towards the nerd-frontier, at least on the episodes that I’ve heard.  It comes from a perspective of people who love to eat and cook, without the gloss of professional chefdom.  The Clever Cookstr is shorter than many of its companions and has the feel of a couple of friends getting excited at the local anti-Starbucks.  Sometimes I find the topics a bit head-scratching but I’ve probably learned as much practical kitchen stuff from The Clever Cookstr as I have from any other podcast.

There really isn’t an organized, comprehensive way of finding what food podcasts are available and how to get them, which is both a bad thing and a good one.  On the negative side, there are some great people getting excited about food in all its glory who aren’t getting to everyone who might want to hear them.  On the other hand, when you do stumble across something great, you love it all the more.