Gastropod looks at food through the lens of science and history.
Co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley serve up a brand new episode every two weeks.
Co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley serve up a brand new episode every two weeks.
Fruit of the oil palm
Jonathan Robins is a professor of history at Michigan Technology University, where he studies the history of globalization, imperialism and colonialism, and capitalism and industry. His first book, Cotton and Race across the Atlantic, is about the failure of British colonial cotton growing projects in sub-Saharan Africa. Oil Palm: A Global History tells the story of oil palm told over centuries and continents.
Jocelyn Zuckerman is a James Beard Award-winning journalist and former editor at Gourmet. Her first book, Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World, is an account of palm oil’s destructive impact on the planet.
Finished product, orange palm oil in Heve, Grand-Popo, Benin. Photo by Kulttuurinavigaattori, CC by 4.0-SA
You might remember Simi Adebajo from our episode on bouillon. Simi is the head chef and owner of Eko Kitchen, a restaurant and catering operation in San Francisco and Los Angeles that serves Nigerian comfort food. She’s been featured in Bon Appetit, Eater, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Aerial view of a rainforest fragment amidst a large expanse of oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Photo by T. R. Shankar Raman, CC by 4.0-SA
Pujo Semedi is a professor of anthropology at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where his research focuses on fishing, agriculture, and plantation communities, and tourism. With Tanya Murray Li, he is co-author of the recent book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone.
Our friends at Eater published an excellent long-form reported piece on the disastrous effects of the palm oil industry on Thailand's peasant farmers, and how the Southern Peasants’ Federation of Thailand is fighting back.
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