Save the games! Preserve the bread! Guard your rabbits!

The Europeans | European news, politics and culture

Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer

Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 274 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome back! We’re easing back into the swing of things after our summer holidays with a bit of “cucumber season” fare. It’s our regularly scheduled programming, just a little bit…sillier. This week, we take a peek into the world’s first “sourdough library” with Karl De Smedt, head of the Puratos Sourdough Institute. Karl gives us a taste of his unconventional career preserving breadmaking biodiversity and explains why the starters in his library are a little like Europeans themselves. Plus: we learn why the Aalborg Zoo in Denmark is encouraging people to bring in unwanted pets and how Dominic “gave” Daniel Radcliffe his career(!). You can take a virtual tour of the Puratos sourdough library here and check out Karl on Instagram here. And if you want to find out more about the Stop Killing Games campaign, watch this video. This podcast was brought to you in cooperation with Euranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news. But it’s contributions from listeners that truly make it all possible—we could not continue to make the show without you! If you like what we do, you can chip in to help us cover our production costs at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (in many different currencies), or you can gift a donation to a superfan. We'd also love it if you could tell two friends about this podcast. We think two feels like a reasonable number. This week's Inspiration Station recommendations are two books, Patrick Radden Keefe’s spellbinding history of the Troubles, “Say Nothing,” and the novel “Second Best” by French author David Foenkinos. 00:00:00 First things first: WTF is up with strawberry pasta in Poland?00:04:25 Good Week: The Stop Killing Games movement00:16:01 Bad Week: The pets of Aalborg, Denmark00:25:47 Interview: Karl De Smedt gives us permission to eat more bread00:41:50 The Inspiration Station: “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe and “Second Best” by David Foenkinos00:46:57 Happy Ending: Jellyfish believed extinct makes Scottish comeback Producers: Morgan Childs and Wojciech OleksiakMixing and mastering: Wojciech OleksiakMusic: Jim Barne and Mariska MartinaYouTube | Bluesky | Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | Mastodon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | [email protected]

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast has been produced in cooperation with Uranet Plus, the leading radio network for EU news.
0:11.4	But this podcast would not be possible without the incredibly generous support of our amazing listeners who donate a little bit each month at patreon.com forward slash Europeans podcast. We're back. Hello and welcome to the Europeans, the podcast that gives you a snapshot of the weird, the wonderful, the depressing and the delightful
0:55.5	news of this continent of Europe. The summer holidays may still be in full swing for many of you,
1:01.0	but we decided it was time for another episode of the Europeans already. My name is Dominic Kramer.
1:06.7	I'm in Amsterdam as usual, and I'm speaking to today's co-host, our wonderful producer,
1:11.3	Vojik Olegiak, in Warsaw.
1:13.1	Hi, Vojik.
1:14.1	Hi, hello.
1:14.9	How are you doing over there?
1:16.6	Fine, fine.
1:17.6	I had a very rainy holiday only to come back to a super hot sizzling Warsaw, which is kind of
1:23.7	how it always works when you go on holiday in Poland.
1:26.3	Oh, classic, yeah. I had a lovely
1:29.0	weathered holiday in the south of France, but was sick the entire time, so that's also classic,
1:34.9	right? I was sick too. Yay, snap. There is something I really wanted to talk to you about,
1:41.7	Vojik, though, before we get going with the rest of the show. There's something Polish that has crossed my timeline over the summer, some
1:50.7	big news. Actually, you could maybe describe it as a crisis. I've heard that there's this thing
1:56.8	called strawberry pasta that people apparently eat in Poland and it's setting the internet
2:03.2	alight. Yeah. What's going on? I'm not surprised strawberry pasta can set the internet on fire.
2:10.1	So basically there is this Polish tennis player, Igash Viontec, who's one of the best tennis players
2:16.1	in the world and she won Wimbledon,
2:17.8	which is a big thing, everybody celebrated, and then somebody asked her about her comfort food
	...

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