Claudia Roden explains the role of meat in the middle Eastern diet. Important, but rare. Favas and molokhia remain the main subsistence foods in Egypt.
Sri Owen asks whether they have tempeh in China. Fuchsia Dunlop has never seen it, but will look out for it.
Buddhist monasteries avoid the five pungent foods (alliums) possibly because they are smelly and could disturb meditation. Hindus and Jains strictly ban them, Jains because they do not eat anything that grows under the ground. Now the spectre of the “raised sexual energies” of monks is brought up.
Raymond Blanc asks about food and health in China. Fuchsia replies that food fades into medicine, and all foods are medicinal. There are also foods that are more medicine than sustenance.
Eliabeth Luard says that when chillies came to Europe it was associated with protection against malaria. She says that Hungarian workers on the Panama Canal, who ate lots of chillies, did not get malaria. ???
Someone’s mother, when she bought her first pressure cooker, decided to cook spinach in it, “and it all came out through the hole”. Are there cultural differences in the way different cultures cook the same vegetable?
A woman warns that chillies will not protect against malaria, because it is transmitted by mosquitoes. Then she bangs on about sickle cell, not very accurately.
Coffee!