Woman's Hour - Homemade sourdough with Vanessa Kimbell

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Jane got into hot water this week about Arctic Roll. So, let’s see what she makes of Sourdough! One of our producers was given what’s called a “starter, and now thinks she has the basics of bread forever - because it's a live culture, which does however need care and attention. Could it be useful in times of lockdown? What’s the truth and how do we make it? Vanessa Kimbell is an expert.Will Elizabeth Warren be Joe Biden’s running mate now he’s committed to a female vice-president? Why are there a record number of Republican women candidates running in primary elections? What impact is Coronavirus having on women even being able to campaign? Jane talks to Dr. Kelly Dittmar from the Centre for American Women and Politics. MPs and campaigners are calling for urgent action to create stricter regulation around tube porn sites amidst a worldwide Covid-19 lockdown. Pornhub, one of the most popular online pornography websites, has seen traffic to its website boom as a result of forced isolation. What do parents need to be aware of when it comes to young people accessing online porn whilst being quarantined? Maria Miller MP is the chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. Girl On The Net is a sex blogger and author. Kate Isaacs is the founder of ‘Not Your Porn’ – a campaign urging stronger rules around sharing and uploading revenge porn. Plus material scientist Ainissa Ramirez talks about her book " The Alchemy of Us". She says as a black woman she often found that her “reflection in textbooks was hiding, missing, overshadowed.” Presenter Jane Garvey Producer: Kirsty Starkey Interviewed Guest: Maria Miller Interviewed Guest: Kate Isaacs Interviewed Guest: Girl on the Net Interviewed Guest: Ainissa Ramirez Interviewed Guest: Kelly Dittmar Interviewed Guest: Vanessa Kimbell

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Woman's Hour podcast. It's the 17th of April, 2020. Good morning to you. Quite difficult to follow Captain Tom, isn't it? But our congratulations to him. Brilliant effort. On the programme today, who will Joe Biden pick as his female running mate?

We'll also have a word with Anissa Ramirez, very impressive American scientist, a material scientist who's written a book called The Alchemy of Us. Very, very interesting stuff. And yes, I will be exploring sourdough in more detail with the very successful baker, Vanessa Kimball, who's going to win me over to the sourdough side.

That's a little bit later on the programme today. First of all, more people than ever are looking at porn in the lockdown, which is probably the least surprising thing you've heard for quite some time. But MPs and campaigners want stricter regulation around porn sites. The Online Harms Bill is at the consultation stage in Parliament. But the government's attempts to start id checks to stop under 18s accessing porn were abandoned last year you might well remember that porn hub is the most popular free porn site but it's been accused of hosting videos

of rape and incest revenge porn and images of child abuse. We should say that Pornhub says content uploaded to Pornhub that directly violates our terms of service is removed as soon as we are made aware of it. Let's talk to Girl on the Net, who's a sex blogger and author. Kate Isaacs is the founder of Not Your Porn. That's a campaign urging stronger rules around sharing and uploading revenge porn. And the Tory MP Maria Miller, who is the chair of the Women and Equalities Committee.

Maria Miller, first of all, good morning to you. What happened to that government attempt to restrict access to porn for the under 18s? Doesn't look as though or sound as though Maria Miller can hear me. Can you hear me, Maria? can you hear me maria can you hear me now i can yes did you hear the question i i did yes uh just to say that um i'm the former chair of the women and equality select committee it's now caroline notes oh apologies job um the reason why that uh age verification didn't go ahead um is for reasons for the government to answer i mean i as a backbencher i would say it's a shame it didn't go ahead is for reasons for the government to answer.

I mean, as a backbencher, I would say it's a shame it didn't go ahead. But I think there's an opportunity through the online harms bill, which is currently, as you said, being finalized, for that age verification to work much better than it ever would under the previous proposals, because it would include social media. And as you've said from the outset, people's exposure to pornography has increased significantly and my concern is children's exposure to pornography which is unlawful and shouldn't happen is already high and this lockdown will have made that situation even worse. Kate Isaacs, you're not anti-porn but you obviously are very concerned about some of the harm it can do. What do you think about the whole ID thing?

Yeah, exactly. So the age verification was an initiative that the government were trying to put through, like you mentioned, to prevent under 18s from accessing porn. The issue that we had as a campaign is that actually the government were working with a company called MindGeek, who actually own Pornhub themselves. They own about 80% of the commercialized porn industry globally. And sort of involving them in that process was incredibly dangerous because it was just giving them more data to work with. And they already have a dangerous monopoly and they've already proven themselves to be really irresponsible in their moderation processes. Just a second. I mean, I'm sure they're not here to defend themselves and I'm sure they would say otherwise, but that figure you mentioned of 80%, that's extraordinary, isn't it?

It is, absolutely. And that's what happens when you have an unregulated industry and that sort of monopoly is incredibly powerful. Okay. Let's just bring in Girl on the Net, because I wonder what your take on that is. What do you think about what Kate just said? So I agree with Kate completely. Like, I think one of the difficult things about the government's previous attempts to introduce age verification is that a company called Age ID, which, as Kate says, is owned by MindGeek, which also owns a huge number of the larger, I would say, often quite unethical porn sites like Pornhub, would have essentially been able to consolidate their dominance in the industry by also owning the tools by which we age verify, which sort of makes it all a much more complicated mess than just saying,

well, are you over 18 and therefore can you see porn? Just for the benefit of our listeners who may not be completely up to speed with the technology, it sounds relatively simple, the age verification thing. But in fact, for it to work effectively, certain companies, in this case MindGeek, would then be in possession of an enormous amount of extremely personal and lucrative information, wouldn't it? That's true, yes.

And on top of that, what you do is you'd make it so that smaller porn companies, often the ones who do have much more ethical practices, but don't have the kind of huge budget to build tools themselves, would have to pay license fees to larger companies in order to age verify their users. And then again, what you're doing is you're kind of feeding into that monopoly. So personally, I don't think that the government's proposals were in any way useful, and probably weren't actually going to really tackle the problem that they were trying to solve. Okay, Maria Miller, what do you think of that? So ineffective and unworkable,

essentially, is the accusation? Well, I think she's absolutely right. It wouldn't have really achieved what people would want it to achieve, which is to make sure that people under the age of 18 had to, well, people had to prove their age before they could access pornography. And that's why the new online harms bill is a much better way of dealing with it. My concern is that this will take at least 12 to 18 months to get through the parliamentary process. And in the meantime, we don't have the cover there that we could have had if the previous legislation had been enacted. But this new bill would put a duty of care on

all providers, including social media, which would mean that they would have to make sure that people accessing pornography on their website were over the age of 18. But that they would have to make sure that people accessing pornography on their website were over the age of 18. But I think we have to look at this in far more detail, because we're never going to stop children from accessing pornography. That is a fact of life. The problem we've got is that the pornography they can access now is far more extreme than I think many adults realise. And that's why alongside regulation, which I believe is long overdue, we also have to make sure that there's clear education in place for children. And that's why I was very pleased that the government accepted

the need to introduce compulsory sex and relationship education. And that comes into effect in September after almost 20 years of debate. Right. Of course, at the moment, we're in this extraordinary situation. We can't be absolutely certain that the schools will even be back in September after almost 20 years of debate. Right. Of course, at the moment, we're in this extraordinary situation. We can't be absolutely certain that the schools will even be back in September, can we? But I know nobody was expecting us to be where we are right now. We do have a statement from Pornhub, which says it has state of the art comprehensive safeguards in place, including a robust system for flagging, reviewing and removing all illegal material. Can I just put it to you, Kate? Is it actually possible?

What is this state of the art safeguarding that Pornhub says it has? It doesn't exist. I've known from multiple conversations that I've had with Pornhub and MindGeek that that is very much a press line that they like to push. They have very few human moderators. We think they have a few dozen across their entire platform of tube sites. To put that in context, I think Facebook has about 18,000. The systems that they do have in place, they say they have fingerprinting technology, which essentially means that you can digitally fingerprint a video so it could flag up on a system to stop it from being re-uploaded. They don't. They use a third party verbal system. And actually, victims are required to fingerprint that content themselves.

And a lot of the time they don't have access to it. We're talking about people who are being filmed without them even knowing so. So they really do shift that responsibility onto the victims. And we know it doesn't work. I mean, I think we did a different piece for the BBC recently, and it took us about five minutes to find a child in uniform being used as content on Pornhub. And they just do not have the systems in place to effectively moderate this content. Their statement continues, we use automated detection technologies such as YouTube's CSAI Match and Microsoft's PhotoDNA as added layers of protection. These products were created specifically with the goal of detecting

and eradicating child exploitation content. Just let me finish, I think for all our sakes, we better finish the statement. With PhotoDNA Match in particular, having been designed in partnership with the NCMEC and are employed by several leading technology companies, we also use Vobile, a state-of-the-art fingerprinting software to scan new uploads for potential matches to unauthorised materials. Quick word from you, Kate. I mean, we know that that's completely false, just because it's already on the site. There are so many different investigations that have been done

in the last two months, even by independent bodies, which have found the Internet Watch Foundation is finding images of children on Pornhub every day. And if they do have this state of the art technology that they have, that they say they have in place, there wouldn't be videos of children still on Pornhub right now with millions and millions of views and have been on there for months. It's just the evidence really speaks for itself. Again, Pornhub say we work around the clock to immediately remove any content that violates our content compliance rules.

Any claim suggesting otherwise is baseless and false. But Maria Miller, I wonder what you think about all of that. Well, I think very clearly there's no such thing as a child exploitation image. It's child abuse. And if there are child abuse images, images of children under the age of 18 online, which are sexualized, then there are already clear takedown protocols that can be used, including blocking pages. But often people don't know where to go when they see these things and certainly don't know where to go if they see an image of

themselves, which has been used, a non-consensual sexual image has been used of themselves online. So that's why, again, going back to the online harms white paper, one of the provisions in there is for the first time to actually regulate what is going on online, again, long overdue. But it will mean that an organisation like Ofcom will be able to be a place that people can go to to get action on these images. And I think the other thing that's really important is that the law at the moment in this area is so complicated and so fragmented. And I'm really pleased that the Law Commission are doing a review of law, particularly around the distribution of non-consensual images online. And I hope from that we can get clarity for people so that they can actually get images removed if they shouldn't be there in the first place. Girl on the Net, I know that you are someone who you write pornography, you make it.

And there are many who use it regularly, many, many millions who use it regularly. And interestingly, we've got an email here from a listener who says, why does porn always have to be demonised? There are positives to using it. And as long as we educate people about consuming it safely, there is no reason to discuss it negatively. And Maria Miller is very keen as well to make the point that education around porn is key. What would you say about that? I completely agree. And I think one of the difficult things is so porn is not this sort of monolith. There are lots of different types of porn. There are ways to create porn which are ethical and consensual. And obviously there are also like horrifically abusive practices so for me I think the key really is to examine the industry

and give the industry the same kind of scrutiny that we would give any other industry and say look here is how you can do this ethically if you are I mean Pornhub i think is an excellent example i genuinely don't believe that you can run a free porn tube site in an ethical manner where you're allowing user uploads because you will always always run into the kind of problems that kate is highlighting here well presumably you would have to employ what hundreds of thousands of staff how could you do it? I think even with hundreds of thousands of staff, you still won't be able to prevent people from uploading child abuse. I just I don't think it's possible. All the while you have that kind of model. What is possible is... In spite of all the state of the art technology Pornhub say they are using? Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, I mean, again, as Kate says, you know, the evidence shows that there is still abusive content on the platform

and that, you know, they can't be psychic. They can't know what people are uploading as they're uploading it or before they upload it. Personally, I think that companies need to be held accountable for the kind of content that they're making. And I think there's also another thread that needs to be pulled into this, which is consumers need to care about this and need to be responsible about how they are finding porn.

So if you are using free tube sites, you need to ask yourself, OK, well, who's paying for this and what's happening here? But honestly, what 15-year-old is able to ask themselves those questions? Well, I mean, I wouldn't want 15 year olds accessing porn sites anyway. But we know they do. That's the point. We know they do. We do. But since we're on lockdown, I think it's really worth highlighting for parents who are concerned about this.

Your Internet service provider offers you tools that you can use as an individual, as a household to block adult sites. And it's not actually just porn sites either. You can block gambling sites. You can go in and manually list sites that you don't want your children to see. So you can go in and tell it, I don't want my children to look at girlonthenet.com, which would be completely understandable. And I would love for you all to do that. So now that you're on lockdown, you have that control over what your children are seeing. I would urge all parents to explore the tools they have available before we start looking at, well, what is the government going to do and thus infringing on the liberties of all adults

rather than just trying to do, as Maria says, protect your children and educate your children and have these conversations with your children. Maria Miller, that conversation with our children is still a pretty tough one to have isn't it it is a difficult one to have but uh she's absolutely right there are things we can all do as parents um and i think we've got to be very careful here there is very clear evidence about the very harmful impact that viewing pornography can have not only on children's views of what a good relationship looks like and what sex looks like and in the evidence we took in the Women and Equalities Select Committee it was really alarming at how pornography was being used as almost like

a handbook for what a relationship should look like and that is obviously not the way it should be but it's also important to acknowledge the very negative impact that pornography can have on the attitudes and behaviors amongst adults as well not just towards women but obviously considerably towards women and I was really pleased to see as a result of the the report we did last summer on sexual harassment in public places in the Parliamentary Select Committee that the government has publicly said that it is going to look at what it is looking at gathering more evidence on those harmful attitudes and behaviours

that can come out of pornography. So I think there is a more fundamental argument to be had here as to what role pornography has in our society. Thank you very much. That's the former chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, the Tory MP Maria Miller. You also heard from Kate Isaacs and from Girl on the Net and Pornhub, not here this morning, but they do emphasise they do everything they can in the present circumstances. What is it, the statement, just to make it absolutely clear? We work around the clock to immediately remove any content that violates our content compliance rules, they say. This is Woman's Art. Now, Anissa Ramirez is an American material scientist and the author of a book about everyday inventions and the impact on our lives. It is called The Alchemy

of Us. Now, as a black woman, Anissa says she rarely saw herself in textbooks, and she wanted to do something to change this, highlighting the work of women and people of colour. First, though, I asked her to define her job. What is a material scientist? Material science is interested in how atoms bond. And so that's the chemistry part. And then how they bond gives rise to different ways that materials can behave. And that's the physics part. And so if you can figure out how atoms interact with each other, this will translate into properties behaving different ways. Yeah. And all too often, we inhabit the world and we use stuff, bits of kit in our everyday life from cooking to washing to, I don't know, everything. And we never think about where it comes from or even what it is.

Well, I mean, we come into the world and we just think that it's always been that way. And someone worked hard to make something that we kind of take for granted. Even the most simple thing, someone came up with the idea of a paper clip. Someone went through many iterations of design to get to the thing that we know as well, of course, a paper clip. So in The Alchemy of Us, what I do is I just try and peel back and look a little bit at simple inventions and tell their origin story, but most importantly, talk about how those inventions shaped us. Can we just briefly mention one such invention, which is the Pyrex dish, which is one of those kitchen staples. Pretty much everyone's got one. You might make it in the UK, a cottage pie or something, bung it in the oven,

never even think about it. But what's the history of the Pyrex dish? Well, the thing about glass is that for centuries, no one thought it was a good idea to put it in the oven as a way to cook because glass would break. So the origin story is there was this woman named Bessie Littleton, and she broke her casserole dish. And she just complained to her husband and said, you know, you smart, Alex, because he worked at Corning. You ought to figure out a way to make some kind of baking dish that doesn't break. You talk about all these fantastic materials, but, you know, I could really use to make some kind of baking dish that doesn't break. You talk about all these fantastic materials, but you know, I could really use one. I just broke my new dish. And so she may not have known, but he was working on a new type of glass called borosilicate

glass that we know as Pyrex. And this glass was going to be used for lots of scientific devices and for headlights and for batteries. But he never thought about a pie dish until his wife said this. And so he came home and took one of these pie dishes from work, brought it home, and she cooked a beautiful cake with it. He brought the cake to work and people were like, well, thanks. This is really lovely. His name was JT. JT, this is a lovely cake. He's like, by the way, this was baked with glass. And I'm sure that they just opened their mouths and just said, what? You don't bake with glass. Glass is a bad idea. And he's like, well, my wife had this idea. We baked a cake with this. And it was a cake that was actually more appealing to the eye

than with a metal pan. And so the origin story is that this woman had an idea. Her husband happened to be working at Corning. And this became a big business for Corning many, many years later. What about your own place in the scientific world? Because I think it's fair to say it's been hard won, hasn't it? Well, I always say there's two types of luck. The type of luck that I had was the one that you make. I'm an African-American woman and I was a scientist and my path into science started off initially in a beautiful way because I fell in love with science at a very young age. It wasn't until many, many years later where I found that the type of science that I love is material science. But there were many things that could have pulled me away. The introductory classes that I took were designed to weed people out.

Even though I went to very good schools where I grew up, when I went to Ivy League institutions, it was very clear that my training was not as good as the other folks that were around me. So it was just about making my own luck. And what that required was putting my behind in a seat and working really hard and getting tutors and making up for any kind of deficiencies. Deficiencies where? Not in yourself, but in the institutions that perhaps made you feel that you didn't belong? Well, sometimes that, but I went to school in New Jersey. I went to one of the top high schools in Jersey City, St. Dominic's Academy. When I went to Brown, I was just behind.

Sorry, that's the university, Brown. Yeah. Yeah. So when I went from my small parochial Catholic all-girls school in New Jersey, which was the pinnacle for education in my region, when I went to Brown University, now I was on the world stage and was already behind. And so that required working extremely hard to catch up. And did that dent your confidence at all? Because that can be quite a difficult time when a clever, and it often is, a clever girl leaves a relatively small establishment, enters the real world and comes up against lots of other clever people and finds it

really tough. Yeah, well, I think that my origin story kind of mimics the book because I keep mentioning New Jersey. And if you're from the States, you know that New Jersey is just considered the armpit of the United States. And so we're very scrappy people. When I went to Brown, and it was very clear that I might not do very well, it emboldened me. I said, well, look, I'm going to prove you wrong. So it's that scrappiness that I inherited from where I lived that I employed when I was at Brown. Obviously, this is going out to a UK audience, although we have plenty of people elsewhere in the world. I just really want you to tell the story of the young woman from Maidenhead, which was something I just knew nothing about this. And this is just a wonderful illustration of all the points you make so well.

Well, I was spending time in the library trying to find an interesting story about timekeeping. And timekeeping is an old, old field. And sometimes it can be a little dull. And so I was really trying to find something that would pull me in so I could pull readers in to show them how important timekeeping was. So I'm reading a thick book and I see one sentence. It says, in the 19th century, there was a woman who sold time. And I said, what? What are you talking about? So I delved and I found that there was a woman named Ruth Belville.

She lived in Maidenhead. And once a week, she would make her way to London and then to Greenwich to the Royal Observatory, go up that steep hill. She carried a pocket watch with her, which was a very accurate chronometer. And she would show her pocket watch to the attendants there, and they would compare her watch to their main clocks and tell her what the precise time was. And then she'd make her way back to London, and she would go to various businesses, train stations, banks, newspapers, navigators for ships so that they can know longitude, and give them the precise time. Because they didn't have a way to get the accurate time. Right now, you and I can get the accurate time. We just look at our cell phones, which the information comes from cell phone towers, which comes from atomic clocks. But in Ruth's day, the precise time was located at the Royal Observatory, and no one had the luxury to go and get it. So she had this time distribution service

where she would go to various businesses to show her watch. So she would show up at a watchmaker, show her watch. He would note the time, change all of his clocks, and then she would leave. And that was her business. I just find this remarkable. And this was actually a family business, wasn't it? I think her dad had-

This was a family business. So she was the third member of the family. Her father had started this work. Her mother had done this work. Her mother had done this work. The Belvilles had done this work for over a century. What's happened to them? Where are they now? Ruth Belville passed away in about 1943. And her business had been shrinking because when her father started the business, there were no other options to get the time except for his time distribution service. And then when her mother came into that work, the telegraph started to be popular. But when Ruth was in the business,

her business shrunk even more because radio also provided the time. So the business was no longer needed at that point. And it's worth saying that life before this sort of precise time, what did you do? I mean, if someone said they were coming to see you tomorrow, did you just hang around waiting for them with absolutely no idea? That's right. They would say tomorrow and you would just wait. I mean, if you look at old movies with Jane Eyre, they're like, we're having a visitor and people would just prepare and then they would just wait. No one said, I'll see you at 2.30, something like that. Maybe they'll say, I'll see you after noon. We had to be very

broad. It could be when the sun rises, it could be at noon, or it could be when the sun sets. But when we had watches and clocks, we could be a little bit more precise about when we were going to meet each other and when we were going to interact. And with that, we had a new appreciation of time, but also we wouldn't wait for people very long once we had clocks in our lives. In the United States, they've done studies that if I say I'm going to meet you at three o'clock and I'm late more than 20 minutes, you're going to leave. Yeah. Oh, I would. Yeah. But many, many decades ago, if I said I'll meet you afternoon, you would just wait. You would

hang out, have some tea, talk to people. And then I would show up and you'd be like, okay. And it wouldn't be like I was late. It was just like we said we were going to meet. I just find that stuff about time so fascinating, not least because I work in an environment where I'm surrounded by any number of different devices telling me to the nanosecond what the time is. It's 10, 29, 08, as I speak, 09. That was Anissa Ramirez, and it's such a good book, it's called The Alchemy of Us. Now, on Tuesday, and I've thought long and hard about how I was going to say this,

on Tuesday, on the programme, we are talking about death. There is no better way of saying it, because that is what we're going to talk about on Tuesday. Death at the moment is all around us but still it seems most of us are not willing to engage with it as a topic of conversation. There is no doubt it is still very very tough but on Tuesday we are going to attempt to have a long and I hope helpful conversation about death, dying and how we should talk about it. So that is on Tuesday's programme. Your thoughts are welcome. You can email the programme via our website, bbc.co.uk forward slash Woman's Hour.

So that's Tuesday morning, death on Woman's Hour. Now, who's going to be Joe Biden's Democratic running mate? And it could end up being the vice president, of course, will be the vice president if he wins the American election in November. Could it be Elizabeth Warren? It's certainly going to be a woman because he said it will be a woman. Kelly Dittmar, Dr. Kelly Dittmar is from the Center for American Women and Politics. Kelly, what's your best guess? Will it be Elizabeth Warren? I don't know. I think we have a lot of other potential choices, many qualified women, including the women who did run for president this time. We

had a record number of women run for the Democratic nomination, six, including Elizabeth Warren. So she's on the list. There are some political complications to include her because if she loses her seat in our US Senate, a Republican governor would then nominate her replacement. And so there are some downsides for the Democrats to have her on the ticket, not substantive, but political reasons. And so there are other women, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, certainly whose names are being floated as potential nominees. And Joe Biden himself has said that, you know, he has a running list, meaning he has many women that he's vetting and his team are vetting as potential VP candidates. But there is no doubt it will be a woman. He has

made that clear. Yes, absolutely. Which honestly should have been a given. But of course, in US history is pretty rare. We've only had two women ever as vice presidential nominees. But certainly in 2020, the idea that we should have gender parity on the presidential ticket should be less of a surprise or less news. But certainly he's getting some credit for that. Right. And I suppose what we should be thinking of is that this woman could be a potential future president because Joe Biden is of a certain vintage. He's unlikely to do two terms if he wins the first one. Is that right? Yeah, I definitely think that he's even alluded to that due to largely his age. There's a real chance that whoever is the vice president would go on to either run for the next four years or have to replace him if something happened. And so he has said repeatedly that among his top concerns will be somebody who really shares his vision and his policy positions, who is basically like him. Sometimes in the past, we've seen somebody who compliments him, but certainly has different positions when we've looked at a VP choice. But

in this case, I think he really does want somebody that's pretty in line with him, because he sees the prospect that they may end up being the next president in four years if he is successful this time. Yeah, there were allegations in the past of Joe Biden and inappropriate behavior, and they've resurfaced again, haven't they? That stuff has not entirely gone away. No, and I think he will have to continue to answer for that. His campaign has put out some statements on recent allegations. He has repeatedly talked about his work historically on violence against women and other issues to try to advance women's equity in the United States, both in his time in the U.S. Senate and when he was formerly vice president. But I do think these questions will continue to

come up and they're important to voters. This should be part of the slate of issues that voters are thinking about when they determine who they want to vote for in November. Now, when I mentioned Elizabeth Warren to you, you were very, very careful to say that she wasn't nailed on. It may very well not be her. Who is your best bet, in fact? I'm really reluctant at this point to give a name because I think there are so many qualified women that are still being floated and that, honestly, the Biden campaign should be looking at. So as I mentioned, there are the women who ran for president who are all quite qualified. You have 17 Democratic women in the U.S. Senate who would be

often natural fits just due to their federal experience. We have six Democratic women governors who bring that executive experience. And most recently, Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor and is a prominent black woman in American politics right now who's doing a lot of great work. She's been floated. And actually, this week was very open in an interview with Elle magazine that she would be the best qualified person to be vice president, in effect, touting herself as a potential candidate. And I think she would bring a lot of energy. And she's younger than many of the women who are being floated. And that could be a real

positive as well. Now, Donald Trump, in terms of his popularity, it's waning at the moment, but there is no doubt he will be a formidable opponent come the election in November, depending, I guess, on how the economy plays out. And of course, on what impact the coronavirus continues to have on the American public. And those of us across the pond this week have watched the president's confrontation with Paula Reid of CBS. How is all that playing out? Yeah, so I, you know, at first, there was a bit of a bump in Donald Trump's approval rating in a crisis, as there is often with executives during a moment of crisis in a country. But that approval has really started to decline. And folks are not very content with his response, nor his administration's response. And what you saw

this week with Paula Reid is just a pattern of behavior. We know that Trump doesn't handle criticism well, and he doesn't handle that criticism, especially when it comes from women journalists, and even more so, I should add, from women of color. Women like Yamiche Alcindor of our PBS NewsHour have repeatedly been attacked by him, called names, dismissed in these press conferences. And I think what we're seeing, at least in the U.S., is that because every day he's holding an average of two-hour press conference, there's a lot more instances where we see him both being confronted with the criticism of his administration's handling of this crisis crisis and then him fighting back.

And again, oftentimes those who are sort of attacked most by him or dismissed most by him have been women journalists. We should say, actually, that a record number of Republican women are running in the primary elections in the States, aren't they? Is that because they are Donald Trump's supporters or because they've been energised by him? How do you explain that? Yeah, part of it, I think, is that in 2018, we had a record number of women running for the US House. And in fact, a record number of women running for office across levels of office. But that story was really unique to Democratic women. So a record number of Democratic women ran, a record number of them won and now hold office. For Republican women, their numbers declined in 2018 at every level of office. In fact, in the U.S. House, they went from

23 members to just 13. And remember, we have 435 members of the U.S. House. So it's a huge decline in a really small number. So part of the motivation by organizations to support Republican women and recruit them this cycle has been to really counter that decline we saw in 2018. And they've been successful. We have about 166 Republican women House candidates, which is the largest ever. And so the question will be, can they be successful, of course, both in winning their party's nominations, that will be hard, and also in winning in November if they do win those nominations. So it's not a sure bet that we'll see a record number of Republican women in office after this election. But at least there are more in the candidate pool. That's a point of

progress, at least. Thank you. The thoughts of Dr. Kelly Dittmar from the Center for American Women and Politics. Now, last week, it seems like a long time ago now, I was quite dismissive of sourdough bread, and I've been paying the penalty ever since I've been inundated. Well, okay, I've had two emails about my views on sourdough. We thought we'd bring on Vanessa Kimball, who is a sourdough expert and a brilliant baker and been on the programme before. Vanessa, good morning to you. Good morning. I've had a lovely...

No, can you not laugh, please? This is very serious, very serious stuff, this. I've had a lovely email today, actually, from a lady called Jane, who says that I'm in good company because Elizabeth David wasn't that keen on sourdough either. And apparently wrote once that she found the whole process of making it unrewarding. So you're here, Vanessa, to put the case for sourdough. Away you go. I think, Jane, I'm not really sure you've been eating the right kind of sourdough because there's lots of different kinds of sourdough and the way in which you ferment it really changes the flavor

the texture so when I make sourdough oh my god they're so and it's um it's soft voluptuous and it has a light tang to it the whole thing is just an absolute pleasure to eat and you can see that on some of the photographs I post and if you talk to anyone who's hung out with me they'll tell you that it's just so good it really is delicious I mean there's it's a sort of, we were talking about porn earlier. This is kind of audio bread porn, quite frankly. I'll just press on a bit with Jane's email because she's gone to a lot of trouble with this one. She says that she's been making sourdough bread for over two decades. And my current brew, she says, has been going for several.

The previous gave up the ghost because I ignored it too long when we moved house. OK, how do we start? What is a sourdough brew? Well, let me just first start by saying I do actually offer sourdough counselling bereavement services. Please. For those people who have lost sourdough starters before, it's tricky sometimes to learn that they have they like a rhythm and a routine yes carry on I've been baking with mine since I was 11 years old so a little bit longer than Jane um you you learn what your sourdough starter likes and and and really it's about understanding and in understanding it you you

get to be a good baker and there's that connection and the connection to the microbial world because what you're doing is you're capturing wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria and they're all around you right now i mean they're in the air they're on your hands it's part of your microbiome and that's my specialist area is actually the gut microbiome and my i'm studying for a doctorate in in in bread and the gut microbiome but we evolved with fermentation and we there is evidence that we've been baking sourdough for over a hundred thousand years and the modern way that we make bread is only about 120 years old jane and what we did was we separated lactic acid bacteria and yeast and the fleshman brothers were actually the guys that did it and at that point that magic that those microbes bring to the sourdough changes the bread and so it's it's the transformation

and connection that makes sourdough so really so so special and yes you can have a starter that goes on generation after generation if people pass the starter and the knowledge down i guess i do feel totally out of my depth here. Let's say I was going to start tomorrow something that one day my great, great grandchildren will be able to use. What do I do? Let's say I've got up at my usual time, 6.15 on a Saturday morning, raring to go. What do I do? Well, let's start with the first very basic thing. You need to capture those microbes, okay, and the wild yeast. So it's very simple and what i love about it it's so inexpensive because what you need is an organic stone ground flour and

water and that is it and they're your only three ingredients actually to the bread is is is flour water and salt and i'm not being a snob when i talk about organic stone ground flour it's just where you've got the most microbial load where where there's going to be the most microbes in that natural environment. I know I'm just waiting for everyone to pounce into the email inbox saying we can't get any kind of flour at the moment. So what are you talking about? And I have actually been posting on Instagram ways to refresh your starter. And I did an experiment with carrot and parsnip and lentils and beans. So there are other ways you can refresh your starter. What do you mean refresh? I don't get it. Refresh is feeding

it. So it's a process. So let's go back to capturing it first. So you simply put your flour and your water in your jam jar. It's really important to hold your temperature. You want it warm, about 22, 23 degrees or even slightly warmer. And the reason being is because you are a microbial farmer at that point. You've got 30 seconds. Twice a day, you need to refresh it until it doubles in size and then you're ready to bake. That's it. OK. And this will keep you going for generations to come yeah absolutely and there's a lot of information you can find if you just google i've got free recipes loads of information just go and and and and create your sourdough and start baking bread that nourishes you

we'd love that was the sourdough expert and wonderful baker vanessa kimball on sourdough and you know well if you're a regular listener to the podcast you'll know we talk about all sorts of stuff on Woman's Hour honestly from the really really serious to the utterly trivial and from the weighty to the frankly relatively frivolous but nothing gets people going as much as sourdough so it's just it's just unbelievable. Anyway, I'll try and do justice to the reaction we've had to the conversation we had with Vanessa. Judy, Jane, I still think sourdough bread is overrated.

I'm not convinced. There, I've said it. Oh, Judy, you'll be on the naughty step with me for outing yourself as a sourdough refusenik. From another listener, this is for those of your readers who just cannot love sourdough. Whilst camping in Alaska 40 years ago, we had breakfast in the cabin in the wilds.

Doesn't that sound romantic? My husband was fascinated when told that the sourdough starter was started in 1942, exactly his age. Naturally curious, he asked if it were possible to see it. He was taken to the kitchen and there was a grotty old jar full of what looked like greenish, dying snails. Beside it was an open pail of the current starter being kept warm by a fat, grubby cat sitting on top of it.

Oof! Thank you for that. That was from a listener whose name I think is Magdalene. So Magdalene, thank you very much for that. Sue says it's actually the easiest bread to make. It can be fitted around any work routine. It's just getting to know how. I've been making a bread from a book by Andrew Whiteley.

It's called Bread Matters. It's my bread bible and I've been making his French country bread at least once a week since 2006. I've started passing starters to a neighbour and my daughter so they could save the five days needed to make it themselves. It's the easiest of breads. It requires only flour, water and salt. It's also very flavoursome and shop bread bears no resemblance at all. From Jane, you're totally wrong about sourdough. I'm a convert after I undertook a bread making course last year for my birthday with Bread Share in Edinburgh. During lockdown, I'm making a two week for myself and my family. It's so much better for my gut than all that rubbish they put in commercially.

You can start your own starter in five days. You really do need to try it. It is therapeutic in these times, says Jane. Adrian said, Jane did a great job. Well, very few people say that, Adrian, so thank you. I'll do it, I'll say it again. Jane did a great job in trying to keep Vanessa Kimball on track. However, the task was impossible due to her verbosity.

Oh, come on, Adrian. It was what we call in show business a bit of fun. Vanessa came on, gave up her time to talk about sourdough and I was very grateful to her. Yes, she went on a bit, but hey, where would we be without people who don't go on a bit? Let's just do one more. Crispin, you don't need all these fancy flowers. My wife has been making fantastic sourdough using some chapati flour she found the other day in our local shop.

The sourdough culture seems to deal with the gluten lack very, very well. Yes, I mean, I think that is a word, I'll put a word in, I always will, for our local corner shop, the one I go into all the time. They've always got flour. Claire says, I'm like you, Jane, I don't like it. And I went to the bakeries in Paris

to learn about it and film it. I still don't like it, especially when you can make the best bread in the world, Irish soda bread. And actually, I'm glad you mentioned that, Claire, because you've decided me. I haven't got a lot to do this weekend in common with everyone else. I think I will go to my supermarket, do our weekly big shop, get some buttermilk, and I will make some soda bread over the weekend because I do absolutely love soda bread. Thanks to everybody who had something to say on the subject.

And I did mention during the course of today's programme that on Tuesday we're talking about death. And it isn't actually easy to talk about a programme on death beforehand because you do find yourself slipping into all those old clichés. And thanks to everybody who's already emailed us saying, whatever else you do on Tuesday, don't say things like passing away. So this is just one from Diane who says, please, please use the correct language. She died.

She wasn't lost. She didn't pass. And we don't want other euphemisms to make it seem less shocking. It is shocking. It's painful. Any other language just devalues our feelings. Another one from Francis. Avoid euphemisms. Stick with death.

I refuse to be a loved one resting in peace, lost and gone before and all that whatever. Yes. OK. And I just want to mention one email because I think this is an important thing actually to acknowledge that some people have a positive experience at the end of their life, at their death. Helen says, my father died recently. He was 83 and he'd been hale and hearty until a few days before he died. When people said to me in hushed and tragic tones, I'm so sorry to hear about your father. My overriding thought was, why? He lived well and he died fast at a good age. What's wrong with that?

Would they rather he'd made it to 93 after years of dementia? Also, I don't think our society will ever handle death while people continue to use that awful, simpering expression, passed away. We don't pass away, we die. When people are born, they're born. We don't pass away, we die. When people are born, they're born. They don't pass in, says Helen in Bristol. No, you're quite right.

Okay, one thing I will guarantee on Tuesday is that we will not use euphemisms. We will talk about death and we'll talk about dying. And we are still open to your thoughts on the matter. Email the programme via the website bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. I just saw a quick tweet there from a woman who's got to be the winner. Thank you very much, Kirsty. She's gone back to Twitter and Jennifer says,

my sourdough starter is 55 years old, but it still sulks like a toddler sometimes. There you go. There's a podcast that went from death to sourdough starters in just a couple of seconds. Thanks to everybody who's involved with the programme today. On the programme today, we've had help from John and from Kirsty and from Lucinda and from Di. We're the plucky soldiers who've come in today.

A Woman's Hour will be back with you tomorrow afternoon for the highlights of the week. And then again, live Monday morning, two minutes past ten. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.