Our inboxes have been filled to the brim with advice from people peddling vitamins, herbs, and diets—all claiming that the product that they were hawking would help supercharge the body’s defenses to ward off the coronavirus. Is there any truth to these pitches? Can certain foods—like elderberries, garlic, and zinc—really help strengthen your immune system? How about a good night’s sleep, or getting enough exercise? We take a hard look at these claims, with help from Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta and the research director of its Health Law Institute. He s ..read more

Dominique Crenn famously nabbed her first cooking job, at the legendary San Francisco restaurant Stars, without ever having gone to culinary school. She went on to become the first female chef in North America to hold three Michelin stars for her restaurant Atelier Crenn, and she has a reputation as a vocal activist for environmental and social causes—from ditching meat on her menus to championing equality in the workplace. Her new memoir is called Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters. This episode was a collaboration with the Commonwealth Club’s Inforum Series ..read more

Supermarket cashiers, meal delivery folks, fast-food cooks, and farmworkers—all help keep society together. While that’s always been true, the COVID-19 crisis has put them in the spotlight. On this episode, we talk to food workers who are putting their lives on the line to feed the nation. You’ll hear about how their work has changed in big and small ways, from a Door Dasher’s elaborate cleaning routine to a small farm’s struggle to keep up with the surging demand for CSA boxes ..read more

Get ready to master your pantry, no matter what you've stockpiled. Tamar Adler, author of the book An Everlasting Meal, has tons of tips for home cooking with economy and grace: What to prioritize on your grocery list, how to stretch ingredients across meals and make use of your scraps, and how to keep your sanity while cooking with kids. Plus: The founder of Rancho Gordo talks about how the coronavirus has made everyone desperate for beans, and Tamar offers some tasty recipes that will give you courage to finally cook those dried beans you've been avoiding ..read more

Today we bring you a bonus episode from our sister show, The Mother Jones Podcast. The coronavirus pandemic is devastating the hospitality industry. Millions of Americans are in lockdown. Events are being cancelled. The day before the release of this podcast episode, New York City's restaurants and bars have been forced to stop sit-down service. In the midst of a crisis, the worst thing that could happen to the restaurant industry has happened. This week, we talked to restaurant owners in the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. This is a thriving immigrant community, and food-lover’s paradise, that ..read more

“Getting people to trust fast-food is a process,” says Marcia Chatelain, author of the new book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. For many Black communities, that process started at a precise moment in history: The resulting chaos following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination created the perfect opening for McDonald’s to step in and promise progress in the form of Black-owned businesses. But the resulting relationship has been complex; fast-food has been a source of both power and despair in Black America. “Businesses’ job is to maximize profits,” Marcia tells Bite&nb ..read more

The new documentary Honeyland is getting rave reviews. Set in North Macedonia, it seems at first to be about the process of hunting for wild bees. And bees do fill the film—flitting in and out of the frame, stinging neighbors, and turning the harsh landscape into molten gold. But the real focus of the film is on a captivating woman named Hatizde. Maddie talks to the Honeyland filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov about their remarkable experience following this highly unusual protagonist ..read more

There's a new power broker in national politics, but it's not a politician. Art Cullen, editor of the tiny Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his op-eds on Big Ag meddling in local communities. Now, presidential candidates make sure to visit him while on the campaign trail. Ahead of the Iowa caucus, Cullen talks to legendary food writer Michael Pollan about rural economics, climate change, and the presidential election. This interview comes to us thanks to the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism and the Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship ..read more

Bite’s special 100th episode is all about young farmers. You’ll hear from all kinds of folks—from a fourth generation Japanese American fruit grower in California to a “party farmer” in Brooklyn—about what’s keeping them up at night, and what’s giving them hope. Plus, Leah Penniman, farmer and author of the book Farming While Black, weighs in on how young farmers are fighting the legacy of racism in American agriculture, and Bite listeners chime in with stories of the farmers in their lives ..read more

Chef Tanya Holland is the owner of Brown Sugar Kitchen, a soul food restaurant in Oakland. She has written cookbooks, appeared on Top Chef, and recently became the first black chef to run a restaurant in San Francisco’s foodie epicenter, the Ferry Building. Tanya talks to Tom about breaking into a white-male-dominated industry and preserving food culture amid the rising tide of tech cafeterias.  ..read more