Four great podcasts about food, society, & health
Good listens for your daily walk
Like most people in 2020, I picked up a walking habit. Which became a listening habit, as I needed something to do to feel productive while walking endlessly and apparently aimlessly. The days of the endless walks are long over, but the podcast listening habit has stayed.
As I have written, there is no shortage of information about food and health, and the same is true specifically about podcasts, with the same caveats about quality. I’ve tried listening to many of them, but most focus either on cooking or dieting, neither of which feed my particular podcast listening needs, which are to keep me up-to-date on food system and policy research and to explore current issues in food from various perspectives.
So if you are new to the world of podcasts, let me share with you four of my very favorite recurring, newsy podcasts focusing on food, culture and society, and health.
The Leading Voices in Food, by the World Food Policy Center at Duke University, is a weekly-ish show is hosted by Norbert Wilson, director of the World Food Policy Center, and Kelly Brownell, professor emeritus of public policy at Duke University. This is a great quick listen (especially at my standard 2x speed!), with shows ranging from 15-30 minutes. It’s a bit dry and serious, because it’s essentially a question-and-answer format between the host and the guest, usually the author of new book or article. But it’s short enough and important enough that it’s easy to overlook the dryness.
Gastropod, by the journalists Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber, “looks at food through the lens of science and history.” Gastropod comes out twice a month and is a longer podcast that I like to savor on my weekend neighborhood walks. This is just a great listen. Both of the hosts’ voices have an infectious sense of wonder and joy and a touch of silly, but they are very serious journalists. The podcast is a proper longform radio program, a story stitched together from interviews with diverse experts, banter between the hosts, and relevant sounds. I listen to this podcast for my scholarly nerd interests, but I would also put it on in the car for long rides with my teenagers, with fewer complaints than when I pick music.
Gastronomica, the podcast featuring discussions about articles and issues published in Gastronomica, The Journal for Food Studies. This podcast is my most recent discovery and it is terrific—I hope they keep going. The members of the journal’s editorial collective take turns hosting the podcast, which usually features an interview with an author from a recent piece. What I love about this podcast is hearing the authors discuss how they came to write about the topic, and also how they did the research or thought about the writing of the piece. If you are thinking about submitting to Gastronomica, start by listening to Episode 43, a conversation among four editors about what food studies needs.
The Food Chain, by BBC News is like a weekly longform magazine article styled into a modern podcast. The topics are quite varied and global (an episode on “forever foods”—featured sourdough starters and a Chinese soup base; another talks about the growing business of food halls, which are like groupings of food trucks). Each episode is about 25 minutes, with excellent production value and deep reporting.