Lisa Heldke on Chomping and Being Chomped

Thought About Food Podcast

In Episode 1, I said that conversations about food can turn into conversations about anything. That’s particularly true in this wide-ranging conversation with philosopher Dr. Lisa Heldke. We discuss how looking through the lens of food shows us that everything is always chomping and being chomped on, and that this has some profound implications on our diets, our bodies, and the world around us. We also discuss a lot of other things, including eating food from other cultures, baking, eating at a restaurant where you’re blindfolded, and many more topics besides!

Show Notes:

• Follow us on Twitter at @FoodThoughtPod, and you can drop us a line at ThoughtAboutFood on Gmail. Consider leaving us a review wherever you found us!
• Lisa Heldke was our guest today. You can find more of her work on her PhilPapers page.
• Her two books that we mentioned in our talk were Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human and Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer.
• I mentioned the book Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.
• Lisa mentioned the book Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy by Carolyn Korsmeyer, which has (among other things) a very interesting conversation on food as art.
• Lisa also mentioned a couple baking books, Tartine Bread and Bread : A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes.
• Here are the sourdough projects Lisa discussed happening at NC State: the Wild Sourdough Project, and Sourdough Project 2.0.
• You can take a virtual tour of the sourdough library in Belgium!
• As we mentioned, there are a lot of good recipes on King Arthur Flour's website.
• XKCD's (non-serious) theory that sourdough is in a complicated symbiosis with the Coronavirus
• The intro and outro music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" which is both a great traditional song and a good item to add to your weekend to-do list. It was performed and shared by The Dan River Ramblers under a Creative Commons license.
• In the podcast, we accidentally called Scott Gilbert a philosopher of biology. In actual fact he's a well known biologist (this is what happens when two philosophers get talking to each other!).
• Here's Lisa's recipe:
  "My challenge is that too many recipes mean things to me. So, I'll go with what's on my mind right now. I've been baking bread and giving it away (probably about 60 loaves since we went into Stay at Home). My sourdough has never been happier. I've also given away about six wads of my sourdough, to people across the baking spectrum. I'm using a recipe that Tartine Bakery put at the front of its book on bread. I just keep making it over and over, not like a prayer or a meditation or anythying. Like a Lutheran who believes that she is the only thing that stands between her friends and starvation or something. But I guess that's actually the way a Lutheran would meditate. Anyway, the recipe is probably deeply protected, but here's Martha's link to it."