How did the original tin can come about and what happened next to make it such an important part of our everyday ingredients? In this week's The Hungry Historians, Matt and Kelly chat with John Coupland, professor of Food Science at Penn State. Earlier this year, he published Containing Nature: The Ongoing Invention of Canned Food with Springer Nature. In our discussion we examine the history of canning, the micro inventions that made the cans that we know today, and challenges around make tin cans safe.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

In this episode of The Hungry Historians Matt and Kelly interview Angela Ki Che Leung and Hallam Stevens about their edited book Crafting everyday food: technology, tradition, and transformation in East Asia, published through the University of Hawaii Press in 2025. This exploration of foodways across the east Asian region brings in discussions around new foods, trade, and traditional foods in a variety of contexts.

You can find Hallam Stevens on his website and Angela Ki Che Leung on her website. For more about the project that the book developed out of check out the Making Modernity in East Asia website.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.

This week we discuss the long-durée of food in Ireland, touching on linguistics, archaeology, and history, and discussing topics such as Irish cattle and dairy, honey, bog butter, and potatoes. We were very happy to chat with Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman on this subject, following the publication of their edited collection Irish Food History: A Companion, published in 2024 by the Royal Irish Academy.

This episode is sponsored by ⁠⁠Bloomsbury Food Library⁠⁠, an essential resource for students, researchers, and scholars studying food, offering the widest-ranging existing collection of food studies content.