The Essay: New Generation Thinkers

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The Essay: New Generation Thinkers: A Social History of Soup

A Social History of Soup

New Generation Thinkers

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Tom Scott-Smith uses four recipes to track social reforms and changes in what we value.

From boiled bullock heads to a concentrated beef extract, New Generation Thinker Tom Scott-Smith looks at the different ways we have approached feeding at times of shortage.

The potato famine saw a Dublin barracks turned into place where starving people were given six minutes to eat their soup in silence. Tom Scott-Smith researches humanitarian relief and his Essay 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. What lessons about society's values can we take from their different recipes for soup? 

Producer: Torquil MacLeod 

Tom Scott-Smith is Associate Professor of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford.  He has published a book called On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief, and taken part in a film project Shelter without Shelter which was the winner of one of the 2020 AHRC Research in Film Awards. This research was featured in an exhibition staged by the Imperial War Museum which you can hear about in the Free Thinking episode called Refugees.. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to choose ten academics each year who use their research to make radio programmes.

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Ten academics make and present radio programmes for Radio 3 based on their research.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Council to select ten academics each year to make radio programmes based on their research.

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