Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: Spilled Milk

Posted by Maximum Fun on 21st June 2010



Vital stats:
Format: ingredient-based food talk, with cooking
Duration: ~15m
Frequency: biweekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Could it really be that I’ve written this column for over two years, covering well over 100 podcasts, without once touching a show of the specifically culinary variety? I’ve reviewed comedycasts, I’ve reviewed gamecasts, I’ve reviewed filmcasts and I’ve reviewed bitchaboutHollywood’streatmentofBatmancasts, but it seems that no foodcast has yet gotten my attention. It’s not as if I’ve heard from any foodies about this, but the point is that I’d like to avoid hearing from any foodies about this — they just seem so unhappy on the inside. Here to launch the long, arduous task of rectification is Spilled Milk [RSS] [iTunes].

This is a foodcast where, every two weeks, two Seattle food critics chat about one sort of ingredient and usually cook a recipe using it. That sounds a little Iron Chef-esque, but the definition of “ingredient” seems to vary from episode to episode: rhubarb [MP3] and ham [MP3] you might expect, but I doubt Chairman Kaga ever unveiled “junk food” [MP3] or “mystery lunch” [MP3]. The hosts always have a number of experiences to share about the food of the day, usually have a variety of goofy jokes (often puns) to crack about it, and sometimes even offer a live segment where they cook with it or shop for it.

One of these hosts, Matthew Amster-Burton, wrote a book about getting his young daughter to eat foods other than the tremendously sucky ones (“chicken fingers”) society normally feeds its children, which sounds like no mean feat but a worthwile one indeed. (And though I wasn’t familiar with his written work, his name nonetheless drew me to the show because a favorite blogger type guy of mine has mentioned it a few times.) The other, Molly Wizenberg, wrote a memoir/cookbook and runs a pizza place. They’re pretty damned snappy on their mics — snappier than you’d expect from people doing a lot of ingredient-handling and, uh, ingredient-eating — but something tonal keeps me from being able to listen to their foodular discourse for too long in a sitting. I eventually get the phrase “this is Why They Hate Us” and that Katie Roiphe line about young male writers’ gelding by feminism running through my head.

But there’s only so much to listen to at a time. Clocking in around the vicinity of fifteen minutes, each episode rides the line between briskness and over-before-it-begins attenuation. Its crisp, minimalist production aesthetic manages to cram a lot into a short runtime, though, and I suspect the editor’s craft gets put to much more work than is obvious on the surface. Plus, Spilled Milk has gifted me with the image of a wad of ham being wedged into the center of a rice ball, and for that I am grateful.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also hosts the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas, which only a recent forum thread made it occur to him that he could link to here (because that’s just the kind of high-powered self-promoter he is). Reach him at colinjmarshall at gmail.]