Tired of staring at a computer or cell phone screen? Give your eyes a break and listen to 10 recent podcast episodes the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center has gathered over the last month. The podcast episodes dig into how COVID-19 is impacting our food system and tackle issues concerning the future of restaurants, the morality of food app delivery fees, pandemic gardens, survival of farmworkers and more.
Cooking In The Time Of COVID-19
Organized By: Fresh Air, NPR
What It Is About: Former New York Times food editor (and founder of NYT Cooking) Sam Sifton talks about how to make meals that stretch, improvising with less-than-ideal ingredients, and the best vegetable for quarantine cooking. Sifton says that the resurgence of family meals is one of the “precious few good things” that’s come from the pandemic.
Length: 47 minutes
Air Date: April 7, 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Coronavirus, Farmworkers and America’s Food Supply
Organized By: The Indicator; Planet Money
What It Is About: Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute talks about what coronavirus means for the nation’s farmworkers and our food supply.
Length: 9 minutes
Air Date: May 13, 2020
Where To Listen: Here
From Farm-to-Table: Is the Food Supply Chain Breaking?
Organized By: CNN Health
What It Is About: CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, turns to CNN National Correspondent, Dianne Gallagher, and Julie Niederhoff, associate professor of supply chain management at Syracuse University, to walk us through the food supply chain, link by link, and explain why there’s no need to panic just yet.
Length: 16 minutes
Air Date: April 30th, 2020
Where To Listen: Here
The Food Delivery App Dilemma
Organized By: WAMU by NPR
What It Is About: What is the real relationship between delivery apps and local restaurants? What’s the right balance between customer convenience and responsibility? This podcast tackles these questions by speaking with a food delivery worker, a food retailer reporter, and the co-founder of a delivery app.
Length: 48 minutes
Air Date: May 18th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Frances Moore Lappe on Using Living Democracy to Build a Sustainable Food System
Organized By: Food Tank
What It Is About: In this episode of “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani interviews author Frances Moore Lappe, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, a nonprofit organization that aims to use communication tools to spread living democracy. They discuss how the food system has changed in the 50 years since Lappe’s book, Diet for a Small Planet, was published and what it takes to build a living democracy.
Length: 51 minutes
Air Date: May 12th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
How Does Your Pandemic Garden Grow
Organized By: The Bite on Mother Jones
What It Is About: Quarantine has prompted a burst of gardening activity around the country, which some people have likened it to the 1940s Victory Garden movement. This podcast talks with a pair of roommates who have figured out how to grow a whole host of vegetables without a backyard and with Doria Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth in Richmond, California, to try and understand what it will take to make disaster gardens last beyond times of crisis.
Length: 23 minutes
Air Date: May 19th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Patrick Holden on Sustainable Agriculture
Organized By: Food Tank
What It Is About: In this episode of “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani interviews Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust, who is a British farmer and a food activist. The two discuss recent trends in the sustainable food and agriculture sectors.
Length: 52 minutes
Air Date: May 14th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Supply Chain Woes
Organized By: Eating Matters, Heritage Radio Network
What It Is About: Host Jenna Liut speaks with Washington Post journalist Laura Reiley about her ongoing coverage of the effects that COVID-19 is having on the food supply chain, including why we have seen a paradoxical rise in both food waste and food insecurity, why the meat industry is being hit particularly hard, and the likelihood of an impending food shortages in the U.S.
Length: 54 minutes
Air Date: May 10th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
3 Chefs – 3 Perspectives on the COVID-19 Shutdown
Organized By: The Table Underground
What It Is About: Three chefs speak to a number of issues, including what it’s like to be a restaurant owner struggling to stay afloat and support his workers, being a culinary educator/mentor for many black and brown food entrepreneurs, and being a unionized university chef still getting paid while sheltering at home and finding joy experimenting in the kitchen.
Length: 60 minutes
Air Date: May 15th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Save Yesterday’s Restaurant Industry—Or “Let It Die”?
Organized By: The Bite on Mother Jones
What It Is About: Restaurants run on social contact and razor-thin profit margins. So COVID-19 stopped them cold, and brought them to the brink of financial ruin. In today’s episode, Tom Colicchio—owner of Manhattan restaurant empire Crafted Hospitality and judge on Top Chef—makes the case that the government’s stimulus efforts are a recipe for mass restaurant extinction, and calls for a program targeted directly at saving independent eateries. Then Nigerian-born, New Orleans-based chef and activist Tunde Wey pushes back, arguing that restaurants as we know them aren’t worth saving without major reforms.
Length: 31-minutes
Air Date: May 12th 2020
Where To Listen: Here
Have a favorite podcast that we left out? Email us at info@nycfoodpolicy.org to add it.
