Food stories with deeper roots.
Eat This Podcast treats food as a way into bigger systems: prisons, olive-oil law, domestication, famine, cheese traditions, and industrial agriculture. Its conversations are curious, precise, and calmly skeptical of easy stories.
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Eat This Podcast is a food show for listeners who are less interested in dinner ideas than in the forces that made dinner possible. It treats cheese, olive oil, breadlines, prison meals, domesticated plants, and industrial supply chains as clues. The result is calm, curious, and often quietly contrarian. An episode on cheesemaking is not just about flavor; it follows Trevor Warmerdahl, aka The Milk Trekker, through years of dairy practice, work exchanges, awkward translation, and resistance to uniform starter cultures. The olive-oil episodes ask why a product can be chemically low in acidity but still fail the modern idea of extra virgin. That question opens into law, technology, defects, taste, and the industrial pursuit of consistency. The prison episodes are more intimate and severe. Cooking becomes a way to talk about control, subjecthood, security, and how different prison systems imagine human dignity. The show also has room for large historical arguments. Domestication is examined as a process that may not have been consciously invented by humans at all. The Volga famine becomes a starting point for agricultural exchange between Soviet Russia and the United States. Industrial food is not treated as an automatic villain, either. Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Ditkovich’s arguments about democratic hedonism and everyday pleasure get a serious hearing, even when they push against cherished food-movement beliefs. Across these episodes, the format is steady: a thoughtful setup, a knowledgeable guest, and a willingness to sit with complexity. The pacing is reflective rather than urgent. The vocabulary can get technical, but the explanations stay accessible. There are no recipes at the center, and very little lifestyle polish. Instead, the show finds drama in classifications, tools, institutions, and the small practical choices people make around food. It is best for listeners who like scholarship with texture, and food stories that keep turning into anthropology, politics, and history.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy food as history, science, politics, and culture rather than lifestyle advice. It especially suits people drawn to thoughtful interviews, agricultural systems, and the surprising consequences of ordinary ingredients.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by using specific foods and practices as portals into wider systems, from olive-oil regulation to prison autonomy and plant domestication. It is patient, evidence-minded, and willing to challenge both industrial and romantic food narratives.
Using food to explore all manner of topics, from agriculture to zoology. In Eat This Podcast, Jeremy Cherfas tries to go beyond the obvious to see how the food we eat influences and is influenced by history, archaeology, trade, chemistry, economics, geography, evolution, religion -- you get the picture. We don't do recipes, except when we do, or restaurant reviews, ditto. We do offer an eclectic smorgasbord of tasty topics. Twice nominated for a James Beard Award.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Eat This Podcast follows everyday food into the histories, technologies and trade-offs that shape how it is produced and eaten.
Jeremy Cherfus treats food as a way into the systems and histories surrounding it. Eat This Podcast is built around focused interviews, with questions that move from familiar choices such as buying avocados or eating winter tomatoes toward carbon measures, labor, water use and…
A grocery question becomes an archaeological argument before your avocado has ripened.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Trevor learns beside Mongolian cheesemakers, with language and hard labor shaping the experience.
Trevor's frustration with uniform starter cultures sends him looking beyond the cheese plant. A job managing one takes him to Mongolia, where he later visits herders making cheese in yurts and small camps.
A prison cookbook opens a conversation about choice, time and making food in confinement.
At a maximum security prison outside Spoleto, a group of men wanted to design and produce books. Workshops with artist and anthropologist Matteo Guidi led to Cooking in Maximum Security, which Jeremy uses to talk about food, choice and time in confinement.
A food-history conversation about whether plants were domesticated before people knew it was happening.
Jeremy Cherfus asks Robert Spengler whether farming could have begun without anyone setting out to invent it. Spengler's book presents plant domestication as a gradual process, slow enough that people living through it may not have recognized the change.
Famine relief opens a path for farming ideas to move between Soviet Russia and the United States.
The Volga famine of 1921-1922 is the starting point for Jeremy Cherfus's conversation with historian Maria Fedorova about farming ideas moving between Soviet Russia and the United States. Famine relief brought Americans to Russia, while Russians sought American expertise.
An avocado question leads to the trade-offs behind everyday produce.
An avocado is a small shopping decision with a lot behind it. Jeremy Cherfus and food writer Louise Gray talk through the trade-offs involved in choosing fruit and vegetables: carbon emissions, seasonality, water use, labor, convenience and taste.
This episode explores the history of pellagra, a serious disease affecting peasants in Italy and the US, and the difficulty in determining its cause.
Jeremy Cherfuss challenges the hype around eating insects as a solution to food waste and environmental problems, citing a critical paper by Dustin Crummett.
This episode explores the history of how anchovies became a staple in Spanish cuisine, driven by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century.
Trevor Warmerdahl, the Milk Trekker, says a cheese-plant job near Ulaanbaatar led him into Mongolian yurts where milk, cheese, and fermentation were happening in the same room.
This episode explores why old-fashioned olive oil in Provence, despite low acidity, cannot be sold as extra virgin due to EU regulations against flaws, contrasting it with modern high-tech milling.
Jeremy Cherfuss interviews historian Carl Ibsen about the surprisingly recent origin of the 'extra virgin' olive oil category, tracing it back to a 1960 Italian law.
Jeremy Cherfus interviews Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Ditkovich about their book 'Feed the People', arguing that the industrial food system is not broken and promoting 'Democratic Hedonism' as a guiding principle.
Jeremy Churfers discusses the stark contrast between Italian and American prison cooking privileges with Edward Hasbrook, who shares his firsthand experience.
Matteo Guidi tells Jeremy Cherfus how men in Italian maximum-security prisons developed everyday recipes and kitchen tools under severe restrictions.
Eat This Podcast host Jeremy Cherfas interviews archaeobotanist Robert Spengler, head of the Archaeobotany Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, about his book 'Nature's Greatest Success.' Spengler argues that plant and animal domestication was not a deliberate human invention but an unconscious co-evolutionary process — and that the concept of intentional breeding is only a few hundred years old, a product of the European Enlightenment.
Historian Maria Fedorova, author of "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921-1935," describes how the 1921-1922 Volga famine, which killed an estimated 5 million people, triggered a decade of agricultural exchange between the US and Soviet Russia.
Jeremy Cherfus opens Eat This Podcast's new season with Louise Gray's Avocado Anxiety, which won the Guild of Food Writers Award for investigative work.