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Season 5 of Red to Green:

Food history
for the future of food

What can we learn from the past on food lobbying, food culture, and change?

Relevant for

Anyone interested in stories about our food system, alternative proteins and consumer psychology.

structure

The stories start far back in time and reach the present day.

Interested in how people change their minds about foods? Listen to the episode on the potato, fork, lobster, tomato, or dairy in China.

Interested in lobbying? Check out margarine and the pink slime episode.

Interested in branding? The Coca-Cola episode is right down your alley.

Interested in faulty science? Food history is your charm.

Interested in pests and monoculture? The banana episode will serve you.

Scope

This season does not feature guests, it is based on the team’s own research.

Relevance

Thie season is an evergreen season.

Red to Green Podcast on Foot History for the future of food

#Really need to know

How potatoes 🥔 changed millions of lives and went from pig’s food to world wide staple 🍟

Mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried potatoes are a beloved staple worldwide, but this has not always been the case. The humble potato had a tough time. It has been hailed as an aphrodisiac, banned for causing leprosy, entangled in the rise of empires, and the death of at least a million people.

Episode 1

#Hashtags

The struggle of the (devil’s) fork to become your cutlery of choice

While the knife and the spoon have been around for a bit longer, the fork had a tough journey. Being accused of the death of a queen, associated with prostitution, and being the star of a 1-year celebrity tour in France.

Episode 2

#intro #foodwaste #solutions

Lobster: A poor man’s meal🦞. How a sea insect made it from cat food to president’s dinner plate.

Up into the 1800s, lobster was considered trash food in the U.S., fit only to feed prisoners, the poor, and cats. Surprising, huh? How did lobster rise from the dirty bottom of the food preference list to float at the very top amongst the high society? Find out how lobsters were entangled in protests and revolts of servants, snuck into passengers’ foods on train rides, and were even caught up in World War II.

Episode 3

#OneDayI’llBeCreative

How the butter lobby 🧈 made margarine pink and illegal and spread smear campaigns 🕵️‍♀️

How politicians were buttered up to make margarine selling illegal, how the spread ended up in some dirty smear campaigns and how Margarine changed colors from white to bright pink to our known buttery yellow.

Episode 4

#oooSquirle!

Why Italians feared the🍅 tomato and how Heinz with Margherita pizza🍕 changed that

Tomatoes used to be something scary; many Italians feared tomatoes believing they were poisonous. People were killed because they ate tomatoes, especially women. Yes. It sounds absurd nowadays. But the success of the tomato was a turbulent journey that took over 300 years.

Episode 5

#fullfillingHopesAndDreams

Too fast, too cheap, too explosive – how tin cans 🥫 caused scandals and a revolution in preservation

Even something as useful as a tin can – a revolution in food preservation – was not safe from the repercussions of safety scandals. The problem of food preservation is at least as old as agriculture. Humans have been very creative at finding ways to salt, dry, smoke, pickle, freeze, and ferment foods to keep them edible after the harvest ends – many of these traditions date back millennia and remain alive today.

Episode 6

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#CopyPasta!

The global supply of bananas 🍌 is threatened – again. Lessons from monocultures and pesticide resistance.

Before 1960, the main export banana was called the Gros Michel. Why can’t we eat the Gros Michel anymore today? Because it has become virtually extinct due to Panama disease affecting it over many decades, driving it to its eventual near-extinction. The fungi infection ravaged banana plants across the globe, from Asia to Africa, exterminating plant after plant. The fact that the fungi spread worldwide at a relatively rapid pace highlights a severe problem with our current agricultural practices.

Episode 7

#Only5MoreSeasonsToGo!

How microwaves and freezers changed food culture forever 🥡

Microwave is hard to beat for sheer convenience. But the most significant food tech innovation of the 1940s wasn’t welcomed with open arms. It took decades of struggles before it rocketed to success in the 1980s.

Episode 8

#Progress

How faulty science destroyed an industry: 💣 The boom, bust and rise of bubble tea 🧋

Bubble tea used to be a popular drink with shops popping up throughout the beginning of the century. But in 2012 a study sealed the fate of bubble tea in Germany: scientists from RWTH Aachen found the sweet bubbles to contain carcinogenic substances. While the study was retracted, the damage was done, sealing the fate of many immigrant and family-owned businesses. But now bubble tea is coming back, why? And what can we learn from this?

Episode 9

#FoodBaby

The failure of the New Coke – Coca Cola’s flop in a race to better taste

In April 1985, the Coca-Cola Company decided to discontinue its most popular soft drink and replace it with a sweeter formula it would market as “New Coke.” As soon as the decision was announced, a large percentage of the US population boycotted the drink and made sales plummet for the company. Outrage over pulling the original coke recipe was high, and after only 79 days of introducing New Coke, the product was pulled from shelves and the original Coke returned. So what went wrong?

Episode 10

#Thinking

How China overcame a lactose intolerant population to become the second largest dairy nation 🧀

Since 2020 China is the second largest dairy market globally and it’s right on track to exceed the US and become Nr 1. How did milk go from the image of being barbarian to being seen as a valuable necessity for strong, healthy babies? How is the communist party of China using milk as a political tool? And insights into how small cultural changes can have massive repercussions if your culture is freaking 1,4 billion people large. Oh man, get ready for this one.

Episode 11

#NotThinkingTyping

Season Final ☢️ The Pink Slime Scandal – ammonia in ground beef 🥩

Here’s one of the wildest stories of (lacking) food regulation in the US: In 2008 over 70% of all ground beef sold in the US contained “pink slime,” – ammonia-treated scraps.

These trimmings would usually be processed into pet food and cooking oil due to higher levels of fecal contamination.

Well, the company Beef Products Inc found a way to kill the E.Coli and Salmonella bacteria by spraying the scraps with ammonia and increasing the PH to 9.5.

After all, the human food market is more profitable than pet food.

Grrreat….

Episode 12

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