In this kitchen cupboard is my rather eclectic collection of crockery.
Some fine china plates of Swedish design.
Unfortunately some chipped.
A set of two English mugs given to me by my mum.
A couple of pretty old bowls given away by someone in a nearby street.
Basically all sorts.
And every piece here is part of a story that stretches back thousands of years.
In this episode of The Food Chain from the BBC World Service with me,
Ruth Alexander, we're going to tell that story of my plates and yours.
You'll hear about the so-called precious white gold of China,
the medieval scramble to discover its secret ingredients and the mass market business opportunities that that unlocked.
I have a beautiful tableware set that I inherited from my aunt and it's a tableware set from the 1950s produced by the porcelain factory in Germany,
Artsberg.
And it was a tableware set that even won a prize in 1957 at the Triennale in Milan in Italy.
And so it won a golden medal at that time.
So my aunt was very proud of this beautiful porcelain tableware set.
So I'm also still very happy to use it in her honor, I have to say.
This is Johanita Fromm and her appreciation of old pots reaches back much further than the 1950s.
She's a professor of archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands and specialises in pottery.
Pottery was used by all classes in society and it's a daily life product that we find a lot in archaeological excavations.