Hungry Ghosts

The boys travel home this week (not literally) to their beloved West Country, discussing scrumpy & western music, the Moonrakers of Devizes, Dorset knob and spoon races, men who eat roadkill, and other strange tales from Bodmin Moor. This is the last one of series 2, and it's a humdinger! If you're enjoying the podcast, please remember to leave us a review and spread the good word, and we'll see you again very soon.

Livers of pike, brains of pheasant and peacock, tongues of flamingoes and entrails of lampreys, anyone?  Just some of the delights on offer at some of Ancient Rome's finest feasts. The appetites of the emperors pale in comparison to some of history's other great gluttons, though: the King of Rock 'n' Roll, Charles Darwin's Glutton Club, and the strange and terrible tale of Tarrare – perhaps the closest thing in history to a real-life hungry ghost.

Welsh coal burns hotter. So hot, in fact, that the mistress of Welsh dandy Beau Nash was so distraught upon his leaving her that she elected to spend the rest of her life living in a hollowed-out tree. This kind of passion is characteristic of the world of Welsh food and drink, the stranger corners of which we explore in this week's episode. Follow the link in our bio to learn about the Welsh origins of Guinness, the sin-eaters of the Welsh Marches, and the Mari Lwyd (pictured), which in an extremely crowded field may be the creepiest of British folk traditions.  Iechyd Da! 

It would be remiss of such a ghoulishly named podcast not to jump on the Halloween bandwagon, so we've put together a seasonal special for you this week. We discuss the curious tale of Stingy Jack, the pagan origins of Halloween,  real-life zombies, and what happened when Dan visited a vampirologist in that scariest of places: France.Keep it spooky!

Where else would a nativity scene include a man with his trousers down, pooping while making direct eye contact with the Baby Jesus? That’s right – we’re in Spain! La Piel del Toro is a land rich in cultural oddities relating to food and drink, from El Puig’s Festival of Dead Rats to the ‘goose pulling’ of Lekeitio – less rude than it sounds, but just as weird.Apologies for the sound quality in the last 20 minutes – we had some technical difficulties. Hooray for backup recordings.

For this week's episode we travelled to America and ate the world's hottest chilli. So never let our commitment to stupid content be questioned.The Carolina Reaper clocks in at around 2.2 million units on the Scoville scale, which measures the spiciness of chilli peppers – that's about ten times the heat of a Scotch bonnet. It's the creation of Smokin' Ed Currie, the mastermind behind Puckerbutt Pepper Co., who was kind enough to sit down with us for an interview in his shop in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Ed talked us through how he came to produce the world's hottest peppers, the role that chillis have played in his recovery from addiction, and his plans for an even spicier future. And, of course, we couldn't leave without trying a Reaper for ourselves...

Deep-fried butter! Jello salad! State soils! The subject of this week's episode is the land of the free, home of the brave,  domain of erotic corn-dog eating contests – I refer, of course, to the United States of America. Please enjoy the show, and remember: cooking at home and eating vegetables are unAmerican, unless you’re baking salmon in a dishwasher.

This week it's our pleasure to be joined by Anne Osborne, who talks us through her experience of 30 years as a fruitarian. Anne gives us an insight into the rewards and risks of a fruit-based diet and the reasons that people decide to follow one, from perceived health benefits to the moral imperative of those melon-headed, banana-brandishing ideologues of the dietary world: the ethical fruitarians.Disclaimer: we're not recommending anyone follow a fruit-based diet. But if you were planning on taking any kind of medical advice from this podcast, what you eat is probably the least of your worries.Enjoy! 

Raw egg nationalists! Alternative milks! Breatharians! This week's episode is all about the weird eaters of the world, from self-described 'right-wing bodybuilders' to melon-bellied fruitarians, starving saints, and Monsieur Mange-Tout himself, Michel Lotito, a.k.a. the man who ate a plane.