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Professor Tom Scott-Smith

This week, Tom Scott-Smith (Associate Professor and New Generation Thinker) has been exploring ‘A Social History of Soup’ in The Essay on BBC Radio 3. In his essay, he takes us from the father of the modern soup kitchen in 1790 Bavaria and the meaning of ‘to rumfordize’, to Boston, America a hundred years later and a recipe developed by an MIT Professor, Ellen Swallow Richards, which dunked meat in condensed milk and flour. He highlights the lessons about society’s values that we can take from their different recipes for soup. It is an interesting entry point into thinking about issues of humanitarianism, refugees, nutrition, poverty, and history.

The essay draws on Tom's book ‘On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief’ published by Cornell University Press.

Listen to the essay on BBC Sounds.

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