“Making a Meal of It” is a podcast about reimagining how food and humans relate to each other, about the bites that bind and divide us, and about the complexities of being a thing with a stomach. As a teacher, writer, and artist working in and with food, I try to put things together to see some of the bigger patterns within the making, eating, and disposing of food. I’m also interested in how food culture and food systems produce contradictions: joy and fear, hunger and satisfaction, exploitation and empowerment, and, most of all, that extraordinarily layered and perpetually confounding thing we call humanity.

Food is the single biggest and most important ecology that any of us participate in—it’s everything! That means that all that we do—whether it seems like it’s related to eating or not—comes back to food. Our cities and transportation routes, our language systems and scientific devices, our resource extraction and economic markets are all, in one way or another, connected to food. Because if we don’t eat, we don’t exist, and if we don’t exist, what good is an autoroute or a computer?

Today, in Westernized and industrialized countries, food has been made to appear simple by the large corporations and institutions that control a lot of our food supply. For pretty obvious reasons, they want us to just not spend too much time thinking before buying. Food is more complex than ever, but what we are presented with in our supermarkets, restaurants, and mass media tends to make it seem easy. Easy to buy, easy to eat, easy to dispose of. Maybe not so easy to digest….

Recomplexifying food, without making it complicated, is what this podcast is all about. I will be taking you on trips through the fabulously weird spaces of supermarkets and restaurants, kitchens and the internet. I’ll help you to large servings of meat and mushrooms and booze and fermented stuff. We’ll explore the politics of fat activism, and the environmental challenges of fishing and foraging. There will even be an episode dedicated to pudding. Mmm-hmm, pudding. From Swiss Miss single servings to the etymological roots of boudin noir and the sweet treats that the English serve at the end of their evening meals.

Guests from around the world and close to home will join me to figure things out and raise new questions. Jokes and wordplay will punctuate our conversations and reflections. I’ll throw in some theory too—the ways that food researchers like me and philosophers who I deeply admire try to make sense of gastronomic relations at the 100,000-foot level. All that and a bag of chips, as the expression goes.

Cause food is what? Please, say it with me: Everything.

(You can also read a longer version of this text on my blog.)

EPISODES

100: Trailer
101: Food Relationships
102: Buying & Selling
103: Fat
104: Systems in Conflict
105: Media, Tech & AI
106: Kitchens
107: Booze
107a: Gastronomy is dead…
108: Eco-gastronomy
109: Restaurants
110: Fermentation
111: Sugar & Sweetness
112: Meat & Power
113: Fish & Sustainability
114: Mushrooms
114: Pudding