Making a Meal of It – Détails, épisodes et analyse

This episode ends season one of Making a Meal of It on a sweet note, but also a savoury one, as well as a lofty (but reasonable) proposition for using pudding as an icon for systemic change. Conversations with food scientist Richard Hartel and saucissier-philosopher Nick Amberg show that the proof of the pudding is not just in the eating, but also in a whole series of steps both before and after. Maxime and David ponder the pleasure of nostalgia during ‘Stick This in Your Mouth!’, and the episode concludes with questions proposed by past Food Questionnaire respondents.

Guests:

Dr. Richard Hartel is a professor of Food Engineering with the Department of Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on phase transitions in foods, primarily sugar confections, chocolate, and ice cream, and he teaches courses in manufacturing and preservation, as well as candy science. His book, Food Bites: The Science of the Foods We Eat, is a lively read about everything from skunky beer to marshmallow peeps.

Nick Amberg is a CÉGEP instructor, food maker, photographer, improviser, and self-trained charcutier. He is also a maker of connections, a process idealist, and an excellent host.

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

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Mushrooms are the magical focus of this episode, though we only just touch the tip of their mycelial majesty. Conversations with entrepreneurs Nanae Watabe and Judith Noel Gagnon bridge the worlds of foraging, restaurants, humans, and mycelia, while Maxime and David taste two fungal flavours during ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’. Closing things off is the Food Questionnaire with artist and food scholar, Annika Walsh.

Guests:

Nanae Watabe is a Japanese and Mexican mushroom enthusiast, spreading fungi to the culinary-minded people of Mexico City. She is fluent in the languages and flavors of Mexico, Japan, and Italy, and has been involved in such food-related projects as managing a ranch and owning a sushi burrito stand. Her book, Estado de Hongos, reflects on and describes all things mushroom-y.

Judith Noel Gagnon is a biologist and co-owner of the Mycoboutique in Montreal, Québec, the “general store of mushrooms.” The shop offers dried mushrooms, mushroom-growing kits, mushroom excursions, and hundreds of other products from art to books to fermentation equipment.

Annika Walsh is a master student in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A transdisciplinary artist who was born in Chuzhou, China and adopted at 11 months of age by her family in Canada, Annika works with a wide variety of ingredients, materials, and collaborators to form her conceptual pieces.

Also mentioned:

• le Cercle des mycologues de Montréal (the Montreal Mycological Society)
• Anna Tsing’s article, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species”

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

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This episode takes a few different perspectives on alcohol—including making, serving, drinking, and not drinking it—as well as the benefits, effects, and privileges associated with consuming wine and cocktails. We start with liquids entrepreneur Jean-Sébastien Michel and his many points of view, and then hear from Alessandra Castelli, a food/wine/yoga/wellness educator. The ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’ features two rice-washed cocktails, and biophysicist Ruth Wilkins responds to the Food Questionnaire.

Guests:

Jean-Sébastien Michel is a former social sciences academic with a fascination for alcohol and prohibition. In 2012, he launched Alambika and Entreprises Jesemi, the retail and wholesale arms of his business, and the centre of his consulting practice and multiple collaborations, including with alcohol-education organization, Éduc’alcool.

Alessandra Castelli is a yoga teacher, gastronome, and organizer of events that involve all the senses. Her work connects people and places to create experiences for personal growth. She particularly enjoys making people feel good and, at the moment, casa B. is the living container of this and everything she likes.

Ruth Wilkins has a master degree in biophysics and a PhD in medical physics. She is Chief of the Ionizing Radiation Health Sciences Division at Health Canada, overseeing biological research on the health effects of ionizing radiation.

Other references

– Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “Drinking Games”

– recipes for a Rice-Washed Negroni, a Perfect Manhattan, and several variants on The Last Word (I prefer using yellow Chartreuse and not green…)

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

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This kitchens episode focuses on the ways in which our cooking spaces enable connection making, both among friends and family as well as within our inner selves and the world of imagination and poetry. Kitchen constructor Hubert Taschereau gives insights into spatial design, while literature scholar Alexia Moyer shares the ways that authors evoke character and place with references to kitchens. David and Maxime get a little spicy during ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’, and designer and artist Dawn Lee responds to the Food Questionnaire.

Guests:

Hubert Taschereau is the founder and former owner of Gepetto, a kitchen design, fabrication, and installation company. He has two kids, with whom he spends a good deal of time in his self-designed kitchen in Montreal.

Dr. Alexia Moyer runs an editorial collective called redline-lignerouge, manages a journal called Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation, and spends much of her free time trying to devise ways of getting her kids to eat mushrooms and parsnips. During the podcast, she referred to the following texts:

- Diamond Grill by Fred Wah

- Canadian Literary Fare edited by Nathalie Cooke & Shelley Boyd

- The Canlit Food Book edited by Margaret Atwood

- Kitchen Talk edited by Edna Alford & Claire Harris

- The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard & Pierre Mayol

- Kitchen Stories directed by Bent Hamer

Dawn Lee is an artist and designer at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. She has been delighting museum-goers for nearly 40 years with her work creating interactive exhibits and spaces that invite learning, discovery, and reflection.

Host/Producer: David Szanto Music: Story Mode

additional music: Aya Higuchi via Musopen

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This episode focuses on food media, digital technology in agriculture, and some of the ways in which artificial intelligence might have an impact on cooking, eating, and nutrition. We also get into a few related themes, including food porn, celebrity chefs, data sensors, and the promises and warnings of science fiction. David talks with food scholars Signe Rousseau and Maaz Gardezi to find out where we’ve been and where we’re going when it comes to media and tech, exploring the blurry line between the digital and analog worlds of food. During the ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’ segment, Maxime offers up his opinions on futurist meals, and closing things off, we hear from ChatGPT during the Food Questionnaire.

Guests:

Dr. Signe Rousseau teaches critical and digital literacy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Her PhD focused on the rise of celebrity chefs before “food media” was a commonly used term, and she is the author of Food and Social Media and Food Media. She is currently Co-Chair of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. During the podcast, she mentioned the following food folks:

- José Andres and the World Central Kitchen

- Heston Blumenthal and his restaurant The Fat Duck

- early food TV host Keith Floyd and his show, Floyd Cooks

Dr. Maaz Gardezi is a faculty member in the department of sociology at Virginia Tech. His research focused on two interrelated issues in the US and South Asia—climate change adaptation and mitigation, and the social implications of emerging digital technologies in agriculture. For more on digital and precision agriculture, as well as the effects of Big Data in food production, take a look at the articles listed on the Making a Meal of It website.

ChatGPT is an AI language model designed to assist users with a wide range of tasks and inquiries, created by OpenAI. Check out what it has to say about how AI might affect the ways people grow and eat food on the Making a Meal of It website.

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

additional sound: William Termini via FreeSound

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We talk a lot about THE food system, but in reality, our world comprises multiple food systems, along with a lot of other kinds of systems, each of them overlapping with, interacting with, and often conflicting with each other. This episode looks at how those interacting systems of systems often produce really challenging types of conflict, whether it’s between colonialism and Indigenous foodways, corporate-exploitative capitalism and nature, or technological systems and sustainability. Guests include food educator Jane Clause, artist-activist Zack Denfeld, and the incomparable systems thinker, astrophysicist, and former Green Party of Canada leader, Amita Kuttner. And oh, yeah—Maxime and David eat a piece of Christmas cake, quite a few months after the festive season.

Guests:

(Courtney) Jane Clause is the projects coordinator for the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and the UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity, and Sustainability Studies. She is also the creator and professor of the Indigenous Food Systems course in the Bachelor of Food Studies program at George Brown College in Toronto. Jane is a registered band member of Six Nations of the Grand River.

And take a look at the Haudenosaunee food projects Jane mentions in the podcast:

• Kayanase (greenhouse and native plant propagation business)
• Chef Tawnya Brant
• Yawékon (catering by Tawnya Brant)
• the Healthy Roots and Our Sustenance initiatives (article in Canadian Food Studies)

Zack Denfeld and Cathrine Kramer founded the Center for Genomic Gastronomy in 2010 and continue to lead many of the research projects the Center undertakes. They are artists, writers, speakers, and prototypers of alternative culinary futures. Their projects, blog posts, and images can be found on the Center’s website, along with the Genomic Gastronomy Lexicon, a mind-expanding collection of terms and definitions that the Center’s team have compiled in the course of their investigations into food, art, and the life sciences.

Dr. Amita Kuttner (they/he) is co-founder of moonlight institute, a non-profit organization that seeks to create frameworks for an equitable and just future. Amita has a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, ran for Canadian parliament in 2019, and served as interim leader of the Green Party of Canada between 2021 and 2022.

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

additional audio: Maxime Giroux

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This episode is all about fat—both eating it and being it—and some of the many ways in which fat and fatness have highly complex effects on our psyches, our well-being, and our societies in general. The visibility (and invisibility) of fat in our worlds is a starting point, followed up with conversations with critical nutrition scholar Dr. Jennifer Brady, fat activist and educator Virgie Tovar, and naturopathic health consultant Deb Oleynik. (Yep, this is a longer-than-usual episode…) David and Maxime taste some unctuous hors d’oeuvres in the aperitivo edition of the ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’ segment, and medical physicist John Schreiner responds rapid-fire style to the Food Questionnaire.

Guests:

Dr. Jennifer Brady is a professor of nutrition and dietetics at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Her research focuses on the ways in which science and society come together to produce various effects in and on our bodies, including such themes as health justice, weight-neutral approaches to practice, and the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. She has written and edited many scholarly articles and books, including Conversations in Food Studies and Feminist Food Studies.

Virgie Tovar is a writer, podcaster, Instagrammer, and public speaker who has a master’s degree in sexuality studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race, and gender. For more than a decade, she has been non-judgmentally teaching people about the harmful effects of weight-based discrimination and the benefits of celebrating body diversity. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.

Deb Oleynik is a naturopathic health and wellness consultant who helps clients find and adjust the lifestyle factors that contribute to chronic disease. She is committed to the reality that the food we eat and the environments that surround us contribute greatly to our wellbeing. Deb has a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University and a master’s degree in Food Culture and Communication from the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

John Schreiner is a medical physicist who served the Canadian medical physics community in many roles including as newsletter editor for the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists and president of as Canadian College of Physicists in Medicine. In 2019, he retired as Chief of Medical Physics at the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario in 2019, and he is now Professor Emeritus of Oncology and Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Host/Producer: David Szanto Music:

Story Mode

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This episode focuses on the relationships that underlie the buying and selling of food (and wine), including the ways in which trust is built up through exchange and communication. We start off with some sounds of feedback—but not the awful screechy kind. That’s followed by conversations with Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet of the Montreal Public Markets and Tania Perreault, from the wine bar L’aPéro Buvette. (This conversation is in French—see transcript for English translation.) Both talk about the relationships, cycles, and feedback that make their businesses thrive, while also keeping the commercial aspect as humanistic as possible. The ‘Stick This in Your Mouth’ segment gets pretty cheesy, as David and Maxime do some dances with dairy, and this episode’s Food Questionnaire respondent is politician and environmental champion, the Honorable Sheila Malcolmson.

Guests:

Nicolas Fabien-Ouellet is the Director General of the Marchés publics de Montréal, a network that includes the Jean-Talon, Atwater, and Maisonneuve food markets, as well as six neighbourhood markets and three Solidarity markets in Montreal. He earned his master degree in Food Systems from the University of Vermont in 2017, and is the author of several articles, including “Poutine Dynamics,” a socio-political examination of the iconic québécois dish.

Tania Perreault is an interior designer and co-owner/operator, with her partner Melisande Lefebvre, of l’aPéro Buvette, a natural wine bar in Montreal. During the day, the space doubles as Tania’s design studio and office, Pero studio.

Sheila Malcolmson was first elected as a Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, Canada (for Nanaimo, BC) in 2019. Her work has included improving mental-health services and addressing the ongoing toxic drug crisis, as well as protecting the environment and clean up coastal waters. Previously, she served as a federal member of the Canadian parliament for Nanaimo-Ladysmith in BC. As an MP, she was a leading advocate for solutions to vessel abandonment, oil spill prevention and women’s equality. Sheila lives on Gabriola Island with her partner, Howard.

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

Stock media: soundsvisual / Pond5

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In this inaugural episode, we set the stage for a season of deep dives into some big food themes, starting with relationality and how the multiple, overlapping ways in which we interact with food make it the most complex and delightful relationship that any of us participates in. The show kicks off with a couple of examples of complexity, one musical, one edible. That leads into a conversation with the philosopher of food, Lisa Heldke, who explains why philosophy is like plumbing—an infrastructure that sits behind the walls of our day-to-day experiences, provides critical services to keep things going, and hopefully doesn’t spring a leak at crucial moments. We then hear from Taylor Cocalis Suarez, a food entrepreneur who blends theory and practice to slowly but surely change the culture of labour. The show wraps up with David and his partner, Maxime, tasting something really awful (a bit of banana), and a poetic and multilingual response to the MMI Food Questionnaire by composer-conductor, Sandeep Bhagwati.

Guests:

Lisa Heldke is a pragmatist feminist philosopher of food who teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts college in St. Peter, Minnesota. She's the author or co-editor of several books on food, including Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human, and Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. In her dreams, she is a world-class bread baker, while in reality she's merely decent. In the summer she lives in a yurt on the coast of Maine. In the winter, she skijors with her husky every chance she gets.

Taylor Cocalis lives near Hudson, NY where she spends her time connecting with humans and the natural world. She divides her time among the Suarez Family Brewery (which she runs with her significant other Dan Suarez), the job search community Good Food Jobs (which she shapes with her partner and friend Dorothy Neagle), cooking with her kids Mira and Enzo, and tending to the garden. 

Sandeep Bhagwati is a professor in the Department of Music at Concordia University in Montreal. He is an award-winning composer, theatre director, and media artist, and his compositions and comprovisations in all genres (including six operas) have been performed by leading performers at leading venues and festivals worldwide. He founded and currently directs matralab, a research/creation center for intercultural and interdisciplinary arts.

Host/Producer: David Szanto

Music: Story Mode

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Making a Meal of It is the podcast for eaters of all appetites who want to re-imagine and reinvigorate their relationships with food, food culture, and food systems. This trailer is a kind of “How To” for the show, an introduction to the ways it is conceived and produced. Not that you really need an instruction manual for listing to a podcast... Full episodes will be released starting March 12, 2024.