GREECE – Trapped in an inner-city apartment during isolation, away from the smallholding I travelled to each spring to plant the summer’s bounty, I didn’t agonise over when I’d next go to the pub. My inner turmoil was, in fact, over tomatoes. Good, home-grown tomatoes.

The pandemic shone a light on how disconnected we had become from food. But according to writer Anastasia Miari, the rise of gastrophysics – combining psychology, cognition and gastronomy – will bring us closer to the sensuality of consumption.

Located between Houston and Austin in the expanse of cattle pastures and springtime bluebonnet wildflowers, The Inn at Dos Brisas is more than just a place to “relax and be at one with nature.”

Montenegro might not be the first place that comes to mind for the wine lover looking to do a vineyard tour, but this country is a prime spot for wine production owing to its fertile land and unique microclimate, which makes it one of the sunniest year-round spots on the Adriatic.

“Kerin doesn’t turn her pots on a wheel, and her raw and sometimes heavy plates carry her fingerprints, left behind to mark every object in its own distinct way.”

“Appetite, hunger, satiated, starved; all can be applied to both our relationship with food and with sex. In fact, humans have forever whipped up the two to form one great gateaux of food-related sexual innuendos, rituals, and fetishist foreplay.”

The worlds in Khan’s books are both beautiful and deeply troubled. Rather than delivering hyper-­saturated, Instagram-worthy messages of unerring delight, Khan instead highlights the political situations of the places she finds so fascinating, as well as celebrating the glorious dishes that are seasoned with the history and politics of those countries. 

I have never attempted to make a vegan dessert in my life, but am adamant that I will be making the conversion to veganism over the next 12 months. So I set about conquering a vegan meringue after tuning in to see contestants whisking up a replacement for egg whites out of chickpea juice.

Robo-chefs, meatless burgers that bleed, grubs, bugs and 3D-printed dinners may sound like the culinary imaginings of a Ridley Scott film set in the future but, as it transpires, we may well be on the way to cooking, dining and eating in a dramatically different fashion sooner than expected.

It originates from the foothills of the Himalayas and north-western India, North Africa and South East Asia, but moringa is now grown in tropical and subtropical climates all over the world, and it’s very much in demand.

“You’re going for a cookie being like ‘I know this cookie isn’t going to round out my diet, but it’s what’s going to bring me joy’,” extols New York chef Christina Tosi in the trailer for the latest series of Chef’s Table. Judging from the upbeat montage of gelato scooping, precision pastry shaping and saccharine sauce dripping against a head bobbing I Want Candy soundtrack, she’s probably right.

The microgreen, as it is now better (and more fashionably) known, has likely been served to you as part of an elegant plate on a multi-course serving menu in a fancy restaurant. It is those tiny leaves delicately handled with tweezers that you see chefs use on programmes such as Netflix’s Chef’s Table or MasterChef, adding a final note of decoration to an expertly composed dish.

For thousands of years, salt – originally sourced from the mineral remains of lakes and seas, and more recently chemically composed from sodium and chloride – has been a main fixture in our diets. The Romans coined the word “salary” from the Latin word “sal”, for salt, because a soldier’s salary was the amount he was allotted to buy the seasoning. In an ode to salt written in 1912, psychoanalyst Ernest Jones explored the human obsession with salt – apparently, Plato described it as “dear to the Gods”, and Homer called it “divine”.

Rich in flavour, with a thick, deep-brown crust that locks in moisture for days, sourdough bread is fast becoming a sought-after dietary staple for those in the know.