Follow the food and you find the politics.
Rebecca McEnroy, Raj Patel and Tom Philpott host guest conversations that take food into trade policy, pandemic labor fights, a U.S. base on Guam and land movements. Sugar keeps coming back, from an extended interview with the late anthropologist Sidney Mintz to supply management rules and cleared cane fields.
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The Secret Ingredient is produced at KUT Radio in Austin, Texas, and it reads food the way a historian reads a document: as a record of who worked, who profited and who went without. Three people share the hosting. Rebecca McEnroy is host and executive producer at KUT. Raj Patel is an author and a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Tom Philpott is the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of 'Perilous Bounty'. Episodes are built around guest conversations, and the questions put to guests are political ones. Some episodes open on a jumble of ad-style slogans, a healthy breakfast here and two pizzas for the price of one there, before the talk turns to climate or trade. The episode with Frances Moore Lappé names hope itself as the ingredient and starts from Pandora's box, the Christian virtues, Kant and Nietzsche. Then it gets concrete. The guest describes how hard it has become for many people to live near a store with fresh food, and how family income once rose across every class before money began rushing to the top after the early 1970s. The COVID-19 series treats the pandemic as a test of a fragile food system and of the essential workforce it depends on. In the installment with Rob Wallace, the conversation rejects the claim that large-scale operations are biosecure and notes that state governors moved to suspend collective bargaining rights for workers. Ben Lilliston's episode on the Green New Deal asks what a trade deal built around local production, farmer income and climate resilience might look like. It also takes a self-described wonky turn into supply management, pointing out that sugar and cranberries already run under such systems. The show also travels well beyond Austin. A conversation about Guam calls the U.S. base there a 'spatial fix' for American troops positioned against China, then moves to the Progressive International and the argument that solidarity across movements is the only way forward. Rita Valencia and Charlotte Sáenz bring in the Proceso de Liberación de la Madre Tierra, whose aim of freeing Mother Earth rather than reclaiming territory drew in one of the speakers. The same episode describes cutting sugarcane, sharing chicha and the joy of working together, which people in Colombia call la juntanza. Sugar comes up in more places than those. An extended interview with the late anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who did the fieldwork for 'Sweetness and Power' in Puerto Rico, revisits a conversation the show first ran in September 2015 and covers his work on sugar, the development of anthropology and his role as an educator. The tone throughout is earnest, and the show makes no show of neutrality: its sympathies lie with workers, smallholders and movements for equity. For sugar history, the Mintz interview is the obvious way in. For policy, try the Lilliston episode, and for the widest frame, the conversation on hope.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants food treated as politics and history, with room for labor rights, trade policy, land movements and inequality, and who is comfortable with a show that openly takes sides.
What sets it apart: Where many food shows stay with cooking or eating, this one uses food as a way into labor, militarism, trade and land, and sugar runs through it, from Sidney Mintz's anthropology to present-day supply management.
The history and story behind the foods we eat.
Cranberry supply management: the dinner-table rabbit hole you didn't know you wanted.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A question about hope becomes a grounded look at food, inequality, and public power.
Hope is treated less as comfort than as a public question: what people can still do when systems feel fixed. The episode ranges through Pandora's box, Christian virtue, Kant, Nietzsche, and Camus before settling into the reissue of Diet for a Small Planet, where everyday eating…
A wide-ranging episode on Guam, military power, decolonization, and the food practices tied to sovereignty.
Guam comes through as a place where military power, decolonization, and food sovereignty are tightly linked. The episode follows Julian Agun's account of the island as a spatial fix for American troops, with the threat of China and other fears used to defend that presence.
Rita Valencia links sugarcane, chicha, and collective action to a shared vision of freeing Mother Earth.
The Secret Ingredient follows Rita Valencia as she frames liberation as something shared across Mother Earth, humans, and the beings bound up with them.
Rob Wallace connects pandemic risk to agribusiness, labor power, and the global food systems around them.
The episode frames COVID-19 as more than a public health emergency, placing it inside global agriculture and fragile food systems. Rob Wallace connects infectious outbreaks to agribusiness, while the conversation tracks the pandemic pressures placed on agricultural workers,…
Ben Lilliston links the Green New Deal to farm prices, trade policy, and supply management.
The Green New Deal is grounded here in agriculture, with climate resilience treated as inseparable from farmer income, rural development, local production, and trade policy.
Food history with the footnotes read aloud.
Where Asia's favourite foods came from, one at a time.
Rebecca McEnroy opens The Secret Ingredient by asking how hope survives inside pesticides, inequality, and climate damage, and Francis Moore LePay answers with 'evidence-based hope' and 'possible-ism.' LePay revisits the 50th anniversary of Diet for a Small Planet and the UC Berkeley Ag Library moment when she realized hunger comes from economic and political forces, not absolute scarcity.
The Secret Ingredient episode on Guam features Chamorro human rights lawyer Julian Aguon, who describes the island as a U.S.
The Secret Ingredient brings Rita Valencia and Charlotte Maria Sainz into a KUT Radio conversation about liberating Mother Earth instead of recuperating land.
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, joins The Secret Ingredient's COVID-19 series from self-quarantine in St.
["Ben Lilliston says the Green New Deal starts from a simple premise: \"The climate crisis is an emergency,\" and U.S.
Jim Goodman and Raj Patel say the Green New Deal mentions food briefly and leaves agricultural policy open for social movements to shape.
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez says Texas, the country’s largest carbon emitter, could lead a Green New Deal that creates millions of jobs and tackles climate change.
Naomi Klein says the Green New Deal draws on decades of environmental justice work, including Ecuadorian arguments about ecological debt between the global north and south.
This episode revisits a conversation with anthropologist Sydney Mintz about the history of sugar and its role in modern society.
This episode explores how modern industrial farming creates ideal conditions for pathogens, featuring evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace.
This episode explores the history and political significance of the peasantry, focusing on the International Day of Peasant Struggle and the 20th anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajás Massacre.
The hosts discuss the historical origins of the term 'technology' in the 1820s and its connection to steam engines, railroads, and societal transformation.