Instant Genius - Endangered foods, with Dan Saladino

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

Food journalist Dan Saladino tells us all about endangered foods, and what we could stand to lose if these foods disappear. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, managing editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. In this episode, I talked to Dan Saladino, a food journalist, presenter and producer for BBC Radio 4.

He's the author of the new book, Eating to Extinction. And he tells me everything I need to know about why certain foods are dying out and why we should save them. So just to start off, do you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to write this book? Well, I've been making radio programs about food and farming around the world for more than a decade now. And there was one particular theme that came up quite early on in my radio career.

And that was about endangered foods. And I collected lots and lots of stories. I became obsessed with finding these stories of endangered foods in different parts of the world. and it first became a series of radio program, so little features. And then a few years ago, I was asked to write a book. And it was then that I was able to do a deep dive, not only into the stories, but what connected them. And that has become eating to extinction. So what are the rarest foods then?

Well, Alice, I am holding in my hand. I know you can see this, but the listeners can't, so I'll describe it. This is a ear of wheat that was given to me in eastern Anatolia, so in eastern Turkey. And this is just north of the Fertile Crescent, a small village in which this emma wheat, it's called, and the local name for it is Cavaljar. Now, this is the wheat that was one of the first to be domesticated by the earliest farmers. It was the wheat that allowed the first civilizations to flourish, including ancient Rome, The people who built Stonehenge would have been eating Emma wheat.

Now, it's difficult to mill, but this for the villages in Eastern Anatolia, is really attractive. They live in a cold, mountainous area. This particular wheat is adapted to those conditions, so it's disease-resistant. But they also love the flavors that this wheat produces in some of the dishes. So they have this wheat as grains with duck. and they love the look of this particular wheat in their fields as well. So, but it's only grown now by a handful of farmers. And so it's become endangered.

It's a rare form of wheat, but it might have properties that we need for the future. So that's the kind of foods that I've travelled the world trying to find. And the kind of attraction that people around the world still have for these foods. And we'll get on to the reasons why they've become endangered in a moment. but they're valuable, genetically, economically, culturally. And to me, that's what a rare food is. And in eating to extinction, I've collected nearly 40 of these stories, which also helps to tell the story of our story, the human story,

and our relationship with food. And looking at that piece of wheat there, it does really look quite different to the wheat that we're used to seeing in fields. It's sort of bristlier, isn't it, and almost longer looking? Yeah, it has these long orns. A wheat ex, but will instantly recognize. that this isn't a modern wheat because it has these husks, these hulls, that are the protective, this is the protective coating of the grains, which is why I mentioned that it's harder to mill.

And in the field as well, this wheat will grow much taller than modern wheat as well. So this was almost shoulder high when I was standing in this Turkish field. So absolutely right. It looks different. It tastes different to other wheat as well. and it has adapted over thousands of years in that particular region. You say that's quite a rare wheat now. Why are foods becoming endangered in the first place?

I mean, we think we live in a modern country. We can go and get Chinese food when we want. We can get Japanese food when we want. We think we've got a really diverse, interesting diet. But is that really not the case? These foods are becoming endangered? Yeah, well, on one level, you're right that it appears that our food has become. incredibly diverse and we're lucky enough in the UK where we are an example of a country that

does now import a huge amount of food from all over the world. And so we do have a huge amount of choice. But if you just scratch the surface beneath what we're eating and you will find that perhaps it's not as diverse as we think, but also that that same choice that you've described is spreading around the world. So more of the world is eating the same kinds of foods. And the Wheat again is a really good example because, you know, clearly we, you know, a lot of bread or other wheat products. What many of us do not realize is the diversity that underpins wheat all over the world because it has spread out of the fertile crescent when the first farm was domesticated wheat 10,000 years ago, started to travel and take those grains with them. And they adapted and created huge amounts of diverse wheat. So in Spolbard, the seed vault in the Arctic Circle, which is, where many endangered seeds are stored for safekeeping,

there are more than 200,000 different samples of wheat held there. A British farmer will now have a choice from a so-called recommended list of fewer than 10. So that's the hidden diversity. Why have they become endangered? Well, in the book, I take a long sweep of history beyond 10,000 years. In fact, the story starts billions of years ago when we talk about the arrival of multicellular life forms on Earth right through to the arrival of grasses 60 million years ago and then on to farming and so on.

But there are several reasons why only in the last couple of hundred years that the acceleration has taken place of the extinction or these foods becoming endangered, The book is in ten parts. It starts with wild foods, so stories of hunter-gatherers. It goes on to cereals and domestication, but also vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, and so on. Each part actually helps to provide a piece of the jigsaw to why these foods have become endangered and why we should care. But just to sum them up, there's science and technology. So, for example, the arrival of modern plant breeding at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the early 20th, century. There's transportation, the arrival of container ships, so the ability to move apples from one

continent to be sold in another, which explains why we've lost so many apple varieties. There's the role of corporations who have been extremely successful in food production. So brewing, for example, there's been a huge amount of consolidation. So the world has lost many small breweries, and now one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. There's colonialism and conflict. So I tell the story of Mernong or Yam Daisy, which was a root that Aboriginal people depended on in Australia before the arrival of the colonists. But when the colonists did arrive in the 18th century, particularly, and brought with them sheep and cattle, those animals went spread through the landscape and ate up or damaged a lot of the wild Mernong field. And so that's another example.

Climate change and the spread of disease are really important issues to understand now in terms of the future of our food. Famously, the Cavendish banana. It is the world's globally traded banana, but it's now susceptible to TR4, so-called Panama disease, which is wiping out the banana all over the world. So that, in a sense, it's a commodity crop, but it's becoming endangered. And there's Arabica coffee as well, which, again, is it's in our daily cup, but climate change, according to experts in Q, will lead to Arabica becoming less productive and the quality declining. And finally, Alice, there's also knowledge. Skills and knowledge are also in decline, so I do tell the story of the Hadza and the conversations they have with a bird indicator indicator, the honey guide, which leads them to wild honey, hidden away.

way in Beirab trees. Now, that is a skill, the ability to attract the bird, to follow the bird, to have this mutual relationship with the bird. That is now in the hands of just, or in the heads, of just a few hundred hands are now, the last of Africa's hunter-gatherers. So that's the main reason why it matters that these foods are becoming endangered. We're going to be losing a lot of cultural benefits and we're going to be, you know, with climate change coming, maybe these crops are going to be more vulnerable to diseases and things like that. Absolutely right. And I think that's the really important thing to it, to understand that it isn't, you're absolutely right, that it is about genetic resources. I mentioned Svalbard, the seed vault.

That's a storage place in the, deep in the ice, down a tunnel where a million seeds are kept. increasingly we know we need crop diversity to keep our options open as our world changes. And I think science is just catching up as well in terms of why these foods matter. So I tell the story of an endangered type of maize or corn in a mountain village in Wahaka, which was discovered a few decades ago by scientists, spotanists coming into the village and taking a look at this incredible, intriguing, beautiful, strange maze, because it was 16 feet tall, but it also had aerial roots, roots that came out of the actual main part of the corn, and these oozed a mucus. It sounds strange, but it's oddly beautiful, and I encourage people to go online and take a look at this maze, this rare maze in Wahaka.

It intrigued scientists for many decades. It's only recently that we have the resources and the scientific analysis that now reveals that this is a self-fertilizing maze. People couldn't understand how this maze was growing because fertilizers couldn't reach the village. It was so remote. And also the soil wasn't great. What this mucus was doing, it was actually feeding the plant by taking nitrogen out of the air. And that's an example of what we're losing. are losing things we don't even understand yet, but actually could be important for the future.

But you also mentioned that cultural story as well. So what does it mean to be human? I mean, do we really want to consider a world in the future where everyone is growing the same types of food, eating the same kinds of food? Over thousands of years, our species, our ancestors have been ingenious in what they have produced to eat and how they have farmed. And there's a beauty. in that diversity as well. And I think culture and identity, along with those genetic reasons, the reasons of genetic resources, are important for all of us to understand. So when did this uniformity become the norm? You mentioned that one in four beers is from the same, is the product of one brewer. I know that pork production is based around the

genetics of a single pig breed. So when did this happen, all this uniformity? It starts really with the Industrial Revolution, with the arrival of technologies and transportation, meant, for example, the Caval Jar Wheat that I showed you, there would have been a huge amount of weak diversity in Britain at the time. The invention or the arrival of technologies such as the roller mill meant that we could refine flour, it could be stored for longer, and therefore it could be transported further. What that means is the disappearance of a lot of small mills and a smaller number of farmers as well, growing the same types of wheat. In the early 20th century, there started to be a huge wave of discoveries in terms of genetics and plant breeding. And so, for example, in America, with maize again, there was the arrival of F1 hybrid maze, which is a breeding technique, which it allows you to,

have highly productive varieties of maize, which also means that a farmer needs to buy those seeds because they won't grow through the following year as well. So you had this huge boom in productivity and science. That was an extremely attractive thing for farmers. Food became cheaper as well. Another good thing. And then in the 1960s, the Green Revolution happened. So we had a post-war situation where there was food insecurity, there were concerns over famine. around the world. There was a concerted push, this effort, particularly with using American crop breeding science and also funding from American foundations as well to try and create crops that could provide us with a huge amount of calories and that we could then share that

around the world. And that's exactly what happened. Norman Borlaug and other scientists were able to deliver to the world high yielding, disease resistant, wheats that. could be grown around the world. But we now realize that that was a short-term fix because they are extremely dependent on fertilizer, which, as you and I are speaking, is in the news today because we realize that the supply of fertilizer is extremely fragile in itself. There are a very small number of companies who are capable of producing it on a volume. It was also water dependent, so it needed a huge amount of irrigation as well. So we need to understand the Green Revolution was a moment of huge innovation at a particular time. And what it produced, both in terms

of wheat and then later rice, did spread around the world. And it was seen as a good thing. And many farmers abandoned their local varieties of crops and embraced these Green Revolution crops. And that's a really important part of this history. Now, early in the 20th century, there were people who were already ringing alarm bells or expressing concern about the loss of diversity. Nikolai Vavlov, a Russian botanist, traveled the world saving seeds, and he understood that the crop diversity around the world was going to be important for our future. Later on, there was an American botanist called Jack Harlan, who in the 1970s, as he was seeing this green revolution unfold, wrote a paper called The Genetics of Disaster.

And he was already saying that this is a problem, that we are losing diversity, we are losing our options for the future. Think back to the Irish potato famine. He would point to an example there of how over many, many years, the same type of potato was grown on the same land and it became extremely vulnerable to a fungal disease, blight and a million people died. And there have been other diseases that have spread through more monocultural crops in recent decades. So that's how it happened, but we're now just waking up to the fact that it matters. And in the book you talk about the arc of taste that was developed in the 90s to help save these endangered foods. So can you tell us a little more about that and how it's trying to help save these foods? Yep, you're right. That was my way into this world of endangered foods.

It is a – where it started as an online catalogue, which was created by a group of people in North. than Italy in a small town called Bra, Piedmont. And they, the story goes that Carlo Petrini, the founder of slow food, was with friends, went to a restaurant and were looking forward to a particular Piedmontese dish. It arrived and something tasted different. And they asked the chef why that might be. And he said, well, Carlo, the pepper that I used to use in the dish, I can't, I can no longer buy the pepper because the farmer stopped growing the pepper. Instead, he's switched to growing flowers,

which he's selling to the Netherlands. And it turns out that they were importing peppers from the Netherlands to be sold in Piedmont. And so what he realized in one dish was the disappearance of a bit of local food history, that there was a farming story there and a story of economics. And it was part of their culture, part of their identity. So they started to ask other people around Italy, what else was disappearing and becoming lost, that grew. And so this Noah's arc of taste was created. And since then, it's become a catalogue that is involving now people in more than 100 countries. And the number of products on that list are around 5,300. Yeah. Covering everything from grains to cheeses, to animal breeds, to drinks. It's all there. And it,

back in 2007, when I made my very first radio program about food for Radio 4, I was very lucky enough to go to Sicily for my first program to record the citrus harvest. Sicily, I knew well because my father comes from Sicily, but I was with these farmers and they invited me to a meal after the harvest. I sat down at a table, and I was then offered this meal, five courses. Every course had an ingredient. blood orange. And the blood orange was there from the starter right through to the dessert course. And the reason being they were trying to raise the profile of the blood oranges that grew around the, that grew around the volcano, Etna. Spain and North African farmers had been brilliant at producing more and more citrus, including some blood oranges as well.

And they were being sold to Italian supermarkets and elsewhere around the world. The Sicilian farmers were struggling. And so this meal I'd been invited to was a story basically saying this is what we have and this is what's being lost. Let's celebrate it and share the knowledge of what's disappearing. And sitting next to me was somebody from Slow Food who then said, this is on the arc of taste. And I thought, what is the arc of taste? And that was 2007. And as I mentioned, I've spent the next 10 years collecting some of the thousands of stories and I selected 40 to be in the book. Is any food potentially at risk of becoming endangered then, or is it a very set set of circumstances that would mean that something could be at risk?

Well, I think the answer is yes, that anything could be at risk in that some of our most widely grown and consumed foods are at risk. So I've mentioned arabica coffee, for example. That is currently, you know, available widely, but there are reasons why in this century it could come under extreme pressure for reasons of climate change and also disease. Wheat, I mentioned. Now, there are a couple of fungal diseases that are currently spreading around the world that are impacting on wheat yields. And now crop breeders are having to move faster and faster to try and outpace the diseases. And so, you know, there are more types of wheat that no doubt will become endangered as well. But what I really wanted to do was highlight those.

foods that have often been dismissed as being old-fashioned or traditional. But actually, when you start to look at the stories, as I mentioned with the Mexican maze, with its secret mysterious mucus, or cavilger wheat which can grow in cold, damp, mountain areas, these endangered foods are the ones that we really need to save because who knows what's coming in the next 10 years? We know some of the risks we now face, but I think because they have been adapted, and treasured and grown over thousands of years. Farmers for generations cared about these foods, and I think so should we. So did you have a favourite food that you discovered while you were writing

the book? Well, they are, after so many years of collecting these stories and then writing the book, they are, I would say, like my children, and it's hard to say there's a favourite. But for the purposes of this podcast, let me talk about a type of meat that is produced on the Faroe Islands. So a bit further north from where we are. And it's called Shershpichot. And it's a fermented meat. Now, the Faroe Islands, which is remote, harsh conditions, they don't have trees, really,

so you can't burn wood to smoke and preserve meat. Because of that, you can't really boil away seawater to produce salt to preserve meat either. So they came up with this ingenious solution. There are these sheds dotted across the Faroe Islands called Chatler, and they are wooden sheds with very thin gaps in the walls. And that allows sea air to come in to the chatler, which then bays what we call mutton, so a mature sheep meat. It hangs there, and the sea air comes in, and slowly, slowly it ferments this sheep meat. So it starts to decay, become a bit rotten.

gets a very funky flavor, and it looks like something that has, you know, looks like a bit of roadkill that's just been left abandoned and you wouldn't want to eat it. But actually, once it's washed and sliced, it's like the most delicious, exquisite, charcutory, like a cured meat. And for me, I love that story because it's a story of survival, of how people arrived on the island and found a way to preserve food. It is, again, ingenious but also delicious. It is lovely tasting meat.

But also, I think it's a really important idea about what meat is, how precious and how valuable, how much of a lifesaver that sheep meat was hanging in these sheds. And I think as we are all thinking about future diets and what role meat, for me it was a real reminder of the complete respect they had for the animals because they were life giving to the farmers, but also how much care was given to produce this meat as well. So for me, that story has everything. What does it actually taste like? Is it familiar to something else you've eaten?

Somebody told me on the Faroe Islands, and I think if you are from the pharaohs, this probably does work. It's almost like wine in that wherever you travel around the island, and, you know, different altitudes and different parts of the island close to the sea or not, each shushbichut will have its own particular distinctive taste because, you know, the amount of salt air it gets and that kind of thing. But I think when it's thinly sliced, it's like, let me try and think, somebody described it as, and this isn't a really attractive description, as somewhere between death and parmesan.

I think that's unkind because for me it was like prosciutto. You know, it was like a wonderful, you know, delicious, kind of, it's quite pungent, cured meat from Italy, for example. But it's true to say that the Faroese themselves were made to feel ashamed of this food for hundreds of years. They became part of the Danish Empire. And there were visitors who arrived from Denmark in the 18th century, 19th century. and said that the, you know, the Faroese eat rotten meat.

How wrong they were. I mean, well, how right they are in terms of it is decayed, fermented meat, but at the same time, how ingenious, how clever, how delicious, and how in harmony with nature as well. It's one thing that hasn't really caught on here, has it? Everyone's fermenting their own beer, maybe, or vegetables, or doing their own sourdough, but as opposed to fermenting meat hasn't really quite caught on in the same way, has it?

No, it hasn't. And actually, another thing that was said to me on the Ferrewe's, was that if you were to leave a big chunk of sheep meat in the same condition in another part of the world, things would go wrong very quickly. It wouldn't go well because these are very, very specific conditions that allow, this is why it's so appealing to me, how ingenious that they discovered that the architecture of the shed, the distance from the sea, everything meant that it fermented it's exactly the right pace for it to go rotten and ferment, but not to go so rotten that it was out of control

and there were maggots and everything else. So, yeah, we should stick to fermented cheese and beer, which we do very well. But what three things would you like people to know about endangered foods? Well, firstly, that we are part of the problem in terms of why these foods have become endangered. And I'm not finger-wagging or anything.

I'm just saying that every day, possibly three times a day, we are making decisions about what we eat. Now, we often think about the price of food, we think about welfare issues, we know we think about health. All of those are really important. I think we've been missing out on the another factor, diversity. So I think that we should be consumers, cooks, shoppers who are thinking about diversity as well as those other things. Secondly, there are things that we can do to make a difference, really modest things as well. So, for example, we're having this conversation in September. Apple season is upon us taking place around the country.

There will be Apple Day as a celebration of diversity. That's something that we could easily get involved in, which is not only a celebration, but also a way in which communities can help to save the Apple varieties that have been in there, and villages for centuries. And the third and final thing, be optimistic. You know, change can happen. I mentioned the Green Revolution. That was an example of how we fundamentally changed, how we produce food.

And that then led to dietary changes. That scale of change can happen again. We've got the UN COP26 happening. There are summits looking at food systems. This conversation, conversation I'm having with you now, wouldn't have been happening 10 years ago. So people are waking up to this idea. And behind the scenes, there are a huge, there's a huge amount of work taking place to help save diversity now. So be optimistic. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dan Saladino. If you want to

know even more about endangered foods, then check out his book, Eating to Extinction, which is out now. Or, to hear even more from him, head over to the Instant Genius Extra podcast now. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is now available. Pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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