Science Friday - How Gamification Has Taken Over, Brewing An Ancient Beer Again. Oct 14, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Scientists Are Trying To Study Human Neurons… In Rat Brains? Scientists have a tricky time studying neurons, partially because they are remarkably difficult to grow in a lab. They need other cells around them, and they don’t replicate or reproduce like other cells do. In a new study in Nature, researchers figured out that they can take a ball of human brain tissue and frankenstein it into a rat’s brain, and the rat can respond to it. This exciting discovery could offer scientists a new way to study the human brain. This week’s co-host Kathleen Davis talks with Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, about this story and other science news of the week. They chat about neurons that can play ping pong, COVID updates, a disturbing uptick in STI cases, how deep sea mining could destroy an underappreciated ecosystem, and how a mummified dinosaur named Dakota is challenging what paleontologists knew about dino preservation.   How Gamification Has Crept Into School, Work, And Fitness Gamers often spend hours embarking on quests, unlocking new levels, and collecting badges. But what about when aspects of games start popping up in other parts of life—like work, school, and exercise? Adrian Hon created the fitness app “Zombies, Run!” and has thought a lot about how the principles of gaming have crept into so many different corners of our lives, and why it may not always be as innocent as it seems. Ira and co-host Kathleen Davis talk with Adrian Hon, author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. Hon is also the CEO and founder of the game developer, Six to Start, based in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.   A Taste Of New York In A Hyper-Local Beer If you’re a person who enjoys beer, you’ve likely been aware of the craft beer boom of the last couple of decades. India Pale Ales, or IPAs, have become some of the most popular types of beer brewed in local breweries. But it doesn’t get more local than a type of beer that most people have never heard of: the gruit. The gruit traces its origins back to the 11th century. Historically, instead of hops, brewers used herbs and spices native to wherever they lived. This results in a flavorful beer that changes taste depending on the plant life in the region. Fast forward a few hundred years to now, and you’ll find brewers getting back to this hyper-local brewing tradition. Those brewers include Isaac Patient, head brewer of Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn, New York. His team partnered with Saara Nafici and Brendan Parker at Red Hook Farms to procure four key herbs for the brew: rosemary, tarragon, lemongrass, and mugwort.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. And I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Kathleen is co-hosting the show with me this week. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about how gamification, playing games, is infiltrating corporate America and our day-to-day lives. And we'll talk about the history behind a drink you've probably never heard of the Gruet. But first, a new study from this week showed that human nerve cells can be coaxed to grow, not in a petri dish, not in a test tube, but.

in a rat brain. And these little Frankenstein rat brains may offer researchers a more accessible way to study our brains. Here to fill us in on this story and other science news of the week is my guest, Umair Irfan, staff writer for Vox based in Washington, D.C. Umar, welcome back to Science Friday. Hello, Kathleen. So before we get into the rat brains, why is it so hard to grow nerve cells in the first place. Nerve cells, as you may know, don't reproduce very much in the human body or in an animal after they've been born. Basically, the nerve cells that you have as a baby are most of the ones that you're going to

be having throughout the rest of your life. And because of that, it's really hard to regenerate them and grow them in an artificial environment. And most often when people do try to do that, they use stem cells. And when they do that in a petri dish, they often don't get good results that can actually mimic the human brain or an actual organism in a realistic way. So in this experiment, how did researchers actually go about growing the cells? What they did was they developed these three-dimensional clusters.

They call them organoids of human neurons. And rather than putting them in a petri dish, what they did was they implanted these stem cells of neurons in rat brains. And they found that the rat brains actually provided a very nurturing environment for human cells. There was plenty of nutrients and flow, but also that the rap brains provided signals that encourage these neurons to grow and develop. Human neurons were actually interacting with the rat neurons in the brain and actually sending signals back and forth. So it shows that not only that can you grow these cells,

but you can actually get them to function in a limited way. I mean, this sounds fascinating. It sounds like something right out of a science fiction novel. But how big of a deal is this, actually? It could be a pretty big deal because it's really hard to do brain research in situ, right? You don't want to be doing experiments in a real human subject. But if you can start from the individual cells and scale up, you can learn a lot more about the fundamentals. And that gives you a lot more room to experiment and maybe potentially find out new treatments for illnesses or just uncover better understanding of how our brains actually work. Neurons are really the stars of the week because our next story, another study showed that neuron cells can play ping pong.

Umair, how did this even happen? Yeah, so like imagine sort of a petri dish. And at the bottom of the petri dish is a network of sensors, basically these little dots that can both send and receive signals, electronic signals. And on top of those sensors in this petri dish are a network of neurons, of human brain cells basically grown on top of these. And what they found was by using an appropriate level of stimuli and interfacing it with this computer program, they could actually coax these cells to play the game. Pong. You may know this game as the game where you have this giant sliding paddle and like a small ball that bounces off the wall and off from different angles. By interpreting signals, they were able to essentially respond to the stimuli of positive and negative reinforcement to

move this paddle. So not to brag, but I am pretty good at Pong. How good are these neurons at this game? Like, could I take on a cell in a game of Pong? You probably could because these cells were only playing against themselves. But the researchers found that these cells actually learned to play the game faster than they could have done that with an AI. So it was actually learning in a real time in about five minutes to actually move the slider around and bounce the ball around. So it shows that these biological and electronic networks had this capacity to learn and could potentially have an advantage over just computer programs alone. So let's move on to some health news. This is sadly not the most positive

news of the week. And it's about COVID. So, Umair, where do COVID cases stand right now? We're seeing about 300 deaths per day from COVID-19, and that's been holding at that level for a few weeks now. But health officials from the White House this week warned that as people head back indoors during the winter, and as holiday travel picks up, we're going to likely see another wave of COVID-19 infections, but also another rise with other respiratory viruses like RSV and influenza. And the combination. of these things may become another public health threat this winter. There is a new booster out, one that targets both the original COVID strain and

Omicron. How big of a difference could this booster make in the grand scheme of the pandemic? It all depends on how many people actually get the booster. There was a study by this group called the Commonwealth Fund, and they studied what it would happen if people actually got boosters at the current rates compared to what would happen. People were boosted at the same rate as people get the flu vaccine. So roughly about 50%.

If 50% of U.S. adults got the COVID-19 boosters, these bivalent boosters that target both the original and the latest variants of the COVID-19 virus, they found that by next spring we could avoid 75,000 deaths. If we got the booster uptake rate to about 80%, you could get up to 90% avoided deaths. However, the current booster rate is less than 4% of eligible Americans, and these boosters have been out for more than a month right now. 4% is very low. Do we know why more people haven't gotten their boosters yet? Part of it is that people have largely checked out from COVID. We've seen basically a rollback of every other kind of public health measure like mask wearing and social distancing. Testing rates have dropped as well. But a big thing is that people just don't know about them. There was another

poll that looked at awareness of these bivalent COVID-19 boosters and the Kaiser Family Foundation, they found that half of Americans have either heard very little or nothing. about these new bivalent vaccines. So there seems to be this big information gap as far as who is aware of these boosters and what they can actually do for them. So our next health story is about STIs or sexually transmitted infections, which are also on the rise. Umer, what is going on here?

Right. Health officials have been raising the alarm recently that there's the big rise in sexually transmitted infections and diseases. And these include diseases like chlamydia, gonorrhea. but one of the largest spikes is in syphilis, and that increased almost threefold, particularly among women, between 2017 and 2021. And as a consequence of that, the number of infants that have been born with syphilis, prenatally infected with syphilis, has increased. And that is also a major public health threat. It can be very dangerous and lethal to a baby or an infant.

And about 40% of pregnancies in people with syphilis end up with the death of the fetus or the newborn. That's why health officials are really concerned about screening and testing this because syphilis is treatable if you detected early on, but you have to actually administer treatment in time. And that's difficult if people aren't being screened. So my colleague Karen Landman just wrote about this this week, and she highlighted the fact that this is partially a due to decline in maternal health care, that basically mothers are having a harder time getting prenatal treatment, but also things like screening and other kinds of health access that would potentially. potentially catch these illnesses early on and have the resources potentially to prevent them in the future as well. Unfortunately, many of the same patterns we see with health care in the U.S. are playing out here. The people that are most at risk are going to be people with less mean, so people who are poor, but also people of color who have less access to health care to begin with across the board.

So let's shift gears a little bit and head to our next story, which takes us all the way to the sea floor where deep sea mining is happening. Umair has deep sea mining in. increased in recent years and why? It hasn't really taken off just yet, but there's a lot of interest that's been increasing in recent years because we've seen this rise in a lot of electronic devices and also particularly with electric vehicles need minerals like manganese, nickel, lithium. And increasingly we're finding it harder to extract them on land and we find that we can see a lot of the environmental consequences of mining on land.

But at the bottom of the sea, it turns out that these minerals can actually form in these aggregates called nodules, and they just sit on the bottom of the sea floor, and the thinking is that if you could go down there and just scoop them up, you could actually have access to a vast reservoir of minerals that you could potentially use to build electric cars and phones and all sorts of other devices. So have there been advancements in trying to access those nodules? Just this week, a company began testing a crawler, a device that's going to scrape across the bottom of the ocean and scoop up these nodules. The issue, though, is that we don't know very much about the bottom of the ocean.

It's very, very unfamiliar territory to us because light doesn't even penetrate down there. And researchers have found that, you know, there's actually a fair amount of biodiversity on the seafloor. And that area, this abyssal zone has all sorts of creatures like, you know, sea cucumbers and sea stars and other things that maybe we haven't even found yet. And so the concern is we might be interfering with a delicate ecosystem in ways that we don't fully understand. and that could potentially have consequences that ripple throughout the whole ocean. So a lot of folks are saying now that we should probably put a pause on this until we can figure out just exactly what would happen if this mining actually did take off. Well, we have time for one more story, and this one is about one of my favorite topics, which is dinosaurs. But this story in particular is about a mummified dinosaur.

I mean, when I think about dinosaur remains, I think about bones in a museum. This is the first time that I'm actually hearing of a dino mummy. I mean, what do they look like and how common are they? Right. You're right that, you know, our conception of dinosaurs often comes from their hard tissue, their bones and nails and things like that. And very rarely do we see things like intact skin and muscle. Well, recently scientists were reporting their findings of this dinosaur that they found in North Dakota that they called Dakota.

It's a duck-billed herbivore. And they found that a big chunk of its skin was actually, left intact on its tail, on its forelimb, on its foot. And these things are actually fairly rare because, you know, soft tissue tends to decay very quickly. But by examining this dinosaur, these dinosaur remains, they found that, you know, in some circumstances, you could actually get the soft tissue to be preserved. And it turns out that these conditions might actually be more common than they realized. And there might actually be many more dinosaur mummies out there that we may have yet to discover. So does Dakota shed some light on what might

be the key to dino mummification? Yeah, you know, when we talk about fossils, we typically have, you know, dinosaurs that are preserved in a dry, arid environment and mummification tends to take place in those environments as well. What they found with Dakota was that it actually died in a very wet and humid environment and its remains were actually right next to the water and some teeth marks on the corpse showed that it was probably scavenged. And it turns out that might have actually been the key. basically when these scavengers started taking bites out of its corpse, it created opportunities for fluids and gases to escape that allowed its skin to desiccate and dry out. And by drying out, that actually ended up serving a sort of way to preserve it, you know, essentially kind of turning its skin into beef jerky and letting it, you know, withstand these millions of years of, you know, erosion and sediment accumulation and for us to eventually look at. Well, that was quite an end for Dakota. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Umara Fon, staff writer for Vox based in Washington, D.C.

Thanks so much for joining me. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. We have to take a break. And when we come back, a new book looks at how companies are turning our daily lives into games from office to the gym. But at what costs? This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And I'm Kathleen Davis.

Ira, I have to ask you, do you have a favorite game? You know, if I think about it, my favorite game, my favorite. computer game would be Zelda. Why are you asking this? Well, I'm asking because most of us at this point have a game or two downloaded on our smartphones. I personally am a partial to Candy Crush, which is a classic. Oh, yeah.

Some of us even have spent hours lost in game worlds. I personally really like Zelda as well. I also like Stardue Valley, where you are a little farmer in a town. and I'll spend hours going on quests, unlocking new levels, collecting badges. But what about when aspects of games start popping up in other parts of our lives, like work, school, or exercise? You know, I get this. I have this happening to me. I try to make a game out of driving my electric car,

seeing how I can max out the driving mileage before having to charge it. Well, our next guest has thought a lot about how the principles of gaming have crept into so many different corners of our lives. Adrian Hahn is the author of You've Been Played, how corporations, governments, and schools use games to control us all. He's also the CEO and founder of the game developer Six to Start. He's based in Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Adrian, welcome to Science Friday.

Yeah, welcome. Great to be here. Nice to have you. Let me begin by asking you, throughout the book, you've used gamification to describe how game elements, have worked their way into other places, like what we're talking about at work or at the gym or in your car. What is the history of the word?

Tell me about that. The idea behind gamification has been around for a long time using kind of principles from games or board games or video games for, you know, decades, if not centuries. But the word gamification really only started being used about 15 years ago in its modern term to describe the way in which, you know, apps and websites, for Square or LinkedIn or social media, use game design elements for non-game purposes. But you make a distinction in your book. You talk about the difference between generic and coercive gamification.

What is coercive gamification? So coercive gamification is where you have no choice but to play the game that is being put in front of you. So a lot of gamification, like the ones you have in health of fitness, in an app like Strava or an app like Duolingo, you are choosing to use the app and you can choose not to use the app. But if you work, if you drive for Uber, if you work a lot of companies, then you have no choice but to undergo the gamification of the workplace that these employers have put in. And that's what I call coercive. to ask a little bit about your background because you are a game designer. You created this incredibly popular smartphone fitness game, which is called Zombies Run. And it turns running into a game and you are running to escape pursuit of zombies. So it makes me wonder what made you,

as a game designer, decide to look more critically at this role of gamification in society? Yeah. You know, it's funny because I never really wanted to write this book. I, I hoped that the sort of generic gamification and coercive gamification would eventually just go out of fashion after people realized it didn't work that well. And it seemed like that might happen in the early 2010s. But then in the last few years, after I started seeing it crop up in so many places, especially in the workplace and in schools and governments, I started thinking, wow, this is not going away. I think people are aware of it where they encounter it in their own lives, but maybe that they aren't aware of how pervasive it has become in other parts of the world. And that's not just in the U.S. or the UK or Canada. I mean, in India, Indonesia, China, I mean, gamification is huge. I think one of the most obvious examples of gamification in our lives is with fitness apps.

I personally, every time I go for a run or go for a bike ride, I use Strava, which tracks your mileage. And it gives me a congratulations if I beat an old personal record or if I've gone farther than I have before. I mean, why do you think fitness was so ripe to be gamified? Well, fitness is a really good example because it's something that people are highly motivated to want to do themselves, right? I think people, everyone sort of understands that it's better to do more walking than no walking. But it's also one of these activities, which is just often extremely boring and quite hard to motivate yourself to do. And so while people really want to become a runner or they want to become a walker, you know, getting up on that rainy Sunday morning and putting in your shoes, I mean, it's really hard. And so anything that can give you those training wheels to get going is a bit of.

big help. And so I think that's why gamification has become a big part of fitness. Let's talk about some of the negatives because, you know, every time you have some positives, there are negatives to balance it out. It seems like it couldn't really hurt to encourage people to walk a few more steps. Isn't that what the gamification 10,000 steps was all about? Yeah. So, you know, the issue is where it's not able to make distinctions for individuals. So, for example, my Apple Watch just a couple of days ago said, hey, do you want to go and complete this October challenge where you can win the shiny badge if you do more exercise than you did last month? And I did a lot of exercise last month. So it probably wouldn't be healthy for me to

do more this month, you know? And you see this a lot in health and fitness apps, the concept of streaks where you get an award or recognition if you work out for 10 days in a row, 50 days in a row, 100 days in a row. And of course, if you know about exercise and fitness, you know that that's not a good idea, really. I mean, you should be taking rest days, but people can get really compelled into earning those badges and hurting themselves in the process. Yeah, yeah, I get, my Apple watch tells me in the middle of the night, time to stand up, right?

Yes, I get that as well. So I'm wondering if there's actually scientific evidence to back up that playing games, gamifying activities makes us more likely to do things that maybe are a little boring or that we just flat out don't want to do. It's really quite mixed because there's so many different kinds of gamification. When we look at the studies and sort of meta studies that have been done on gamification, it does seem like there can be a positive effect on people's behavior, at least in the short term. And that's because people are just excited about the change.

But I think that an issue that we see, especially with generic gamification, is that eventually people just get bored and they might even get a little bit less motivated. If you imagine giving people 10 points for picking up a box and putting it into a tray at Amazon and you just, give them a sticker every time they get a thousand points. That might seem interesting for the first week or the first month, but after a few months, you might realize nothing's actually changed about my job. And so that thin layering of gamification is not really going to change anything. Tell me a bit more about how games are used in the workplace. You brought up Amazon.

How are companies like Amazon using gamification to squeeze even more productivity from their workers? Amazon is a really interesting case. They don't make people play these games, but they basically put these screens as far as we know, because Amazon don't let reporters inside their warehouses, really. But they put these screens by people stations, and if you turn them on, then they'll show a game. And the game, basically, it tracks how much work you're doing, whether that's picking boxes or packing boxes or that sort of thing. and it might let you collect monsters, or it might let you fly your dragon faster.

There's many different games that you can do. And often you're competing against other people in the warehouse or in other warehouses. And so you might get bonuses if you return from break earlier, you know, and of course you do better in the game, the faster you work or the harder you work. So it's directly related to your performance. of course you could say, well, isn't that a good thing?

You know, why not make the game more interesting? And I think that's an interesting question because there probably are some people who are motivated by these games. At the same time, in interviews with Amazon workers, some people say it just makes a tedium even worse because you just realize how point the work is. There was a TikTok video that went around a month or two ago, and it basically showed someone saying,

I feel really guilty about leaving my Amazon warehouse job because of all the monsters I collected. And then you see their collection of monsters that they are earned by working. And obviously, the funny thing with that is that they go and say in the comments, I realize that this is just, they're just manipulating me to work harder and get attached to these monsters. And yet I still did it. So people can be aware of the effect of these games and still be manipulated.

So we talked a little bit about how in exercise apps, the gamification aspect can really push people past their physical abilities or push them past what they should be doing. Does say what Amazon is doing have physical repercussions? I mean, it's hard to know because only really Amazon has that data. We do know about rates of injuries, Amazon warehouse, and I believe they're quite high compared to the industry. But there are other examples where people have talked more openly about this.

So, for example, at Uber, they have a whole gamified system of compensation where basically, I think, each week or every two weeks, drivers can choose a quest to sign up to. And if they complete the quest, which might be driving 50 trips or 60 trips, then they earn a bonus. And it's funny. when I mentioned I was writing this book to an Uber driver, they actually told me all about this.

And I said, well, don't you like getting the bonus? He was like, you know, I just feel like I have no control over how this really works because they're giving you this mission, but it's not really entirely within the driver's control to fulfill that mission. And what's interesting, of course, is they also call it a quest. And so they're using the language of video games to essentially obfuscate compensation. And I think that has obviously a big problem for people just trying to understand how much they're being paid, but also I think people associate ideas of video games with fun and with

choice. And so when you see those words at work, it's hard not to think, oh yeah, I should go and complete this quest because quests are good things and I enjoy them when I play quests in a video game. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking to Adrian Hahn, author of You've Been Played, how corporations, governments, and schools use games to control us all. You know, I was a surprise to learn as I was reading your book is how gamification has been integrated into schools. I mean, you talk about an app that's used to monitor classroom behavior. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, this is one of the most surprising things I learned, researching the book. There's an app called Class Dojo, which is used in apparently

95% of US schools and schools throughout the world. And it really does two things. The first thing is pretty unobjectionable. It's basically a private social network for teachers, parents, and students to share homework and that sort of thing. But the second part of it is a behavior management app. and the way it works is that teachers will go and set up their class and they'll set up a grid of their students and then they can go and reward or deduct points to students based on their behavior. So you can set up any list of rewards or punishments. So maybe it might be that if a student has been working hard and being quiet, then you give them 20 points.

If they have been disruptive, minus 10 points, if they go to the, the toilet too much, minus 50 points, which has actually happened. It's not as if we haven't had gold stars or marbles or whatever in schools before. That's not a new thing. But when you digitise these things, when you add them to apps and when you give them unlimited memory, it changes the way in which people respond to rewards and punishments. And if you look at interviews with the students and with parents, you know, actually some parents like this. They think that it helps control the kids more. And there's one kid who said,

oh, I really like it, because it's like when you give a dog a treat for good behavior, you know. And so I think what it comes down to is, is this how we want to motivate children through points? I understand why teachers use it because they just have a classroom of a lot of kids and they'll use any tool they can get. At the same time, you do see students saying, I just feel incredibly anxious because I'm just trying to go and, you know, keep my points. There was one blog post on the Class Dojo website, which they deleted. But it said teachers should consider adding a fake student in the app that they can deduct points from.

Wow. Because when you deduct points, it makes this sort of negative, you know, sad noise. And when students hear the sad noise, they all, get quiet because they don't want to get punished. So, you know, that's what's happening. So finally, after listening to all of this, I'm wondering, who is winning when we gamify so many aspects of our lives? I mean, who's benefiting when we share this personal data? Is it the company? You know, it depends on the gamification. I think that generally speaking, it's a company that's doing the gamifying. And what are they gaining? Well, usually they're gaining.

a way to control their workers and to save costs. And that sounds incredibly dystopian. You know, one of the things that is a problem in a lot of gig economy jobs is it's very difficult to talk to a manager or talk to a human, full stop at the company. And instead, the interface that you have with the company is essentially through the app or through the game. And so by presenting feedback and objectives as a game, the company is able to basically deflect criticism and save money by having fewer managers. And it's also able to save money potentially by obfuscating compensation. So it's not always the case that this is how it happens, but it does seem to be the case in a lot of companies. Well, Adrian, we have run out of time. I want

to thank you for taking to have to be with us today. It's a wonderful book. Thank you. You've been played how corporations, governments, and schools use games to control us all. Adrian CEO and founder of the game developer, 6 to start. If you want to read an excerpt from the book, go to sciencefriday.com slash gamification. That is sciencefriiday.com slash gamification. And one last thing before we go, have you started reading October's SciFri book club pick?

It's not too late to pick up a copy of braiding sweetgrass and read along with us. And on Friday, October 21st at noon Eastern time, I will be interviewing the book's author Robin Wall Kimmerer. Join me for a virtual lunchtime conversation about indigenous science and the interconnectedness of the natural world. Get your free tickets at Science Friday.com slash sweetgrass. We have to take a break and when we come back, it is five o'clock somewhere. We're going to taste test an old school beer you probably have never heard of. The Gruet. We'll talk about the science behind this alcoholic brew after the short break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Ira Flato. If you're a person who like me enjoys beer, you've likely been aware of the craft beer boom of the last couple of decades, right? Like your India Pail Ails or your IPAs, they have become the most popular type of craft beer brooding your local neighborhood. But I'll bet it doesn't get more local than a type of beer you probably haven't heard of. The Gruet. This beer traces its origins back to the 11th century. Yeah. And historically, instead of hops, it used herbs and spices native to wherever it was made. This results in a flavorful beer that changes taste depending on the brewer.

Now, fast forward a few hundred years to now, and you find brewers trying to get back to this hyperlocal brewing tradition. So we're going to take you on a journey to Brooklyn, New York, where a community farm and local brewery came together with a radio show, yes, that's us, to make a gruet. The hope is that the community will get to enjoy this beer made with ingredients grown right in the neighborhood. I got the fun assignment. I got to go to the brewery. And I got to go to the farm right at the start of fall. Fall is a beautiful time in New York. The leaves are starting to change. The air is crisp. And people, myself included, are pulling out their favorite sweat. fall also means its harvest season for farmers like Brendan Parker.

So welcome to Red Hook Farms, the Columbia Street Farm. We're a 2.75 acre youth center urban farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn. We operate this farm on New York City Parks Department land, and we grow intensely diverse range of crops with youth at the center. Brendan is the senior farm manager here. He works with local kids to go to grow. local kids to grow a whole bunch of things, from collard greens to root vegetables. On site, there's also a beehive and chickens. The farm grows more than 15,000 pounds of produce each year,

most of which goes right back into the community. Red Hook Farms feels like an oasis in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood. The area is industrial, and you can see a whole bunch of warehouses right from the farm. That includes three Amazon facilities and an IKEA. There's a long, history of processing and manufacturing in Red Hook, which has left it with a contaminated legacy. So the history of this site, it was operated as a large baseball and tennis field that was entirely on asphalt, and we put soil directly on top of the asphalt because Red Hook is a community that is dealing with a lot of soil contamination. There's a legacy of processing lead in Red Hook. And I think we've proven that it's a huge opportunity.

You can take an asphalt lot, turn it into a vibrant urban farm that hosts youth and community members and all of this wildlife within it. When you step into the farm, it really doesn't feel like you are directly on top of the asphalt, which we are. Red Hook is geographically separated from the rest of Brooklyn. Sarah Nafisi, director of Red Hook Farms, says that's contributing. to a history of disinvestment in this area. She says that's why it's so important that Red Hook Farms exists to be a green pocket in this industrial underserved area. And then you can see floating around us, our monarch butterflies,

we are still part of a larger ecosystem, that migration is happening. They are stopping here. They're drinking nectar from the flowers we have planted for them. And hopefully they'll make it all the way to Mexico or their next generation will. Red Hook Farms champions its local produce, from those big leafy greens to the smaller herbs. So, when a local brewery reached out asking if they'd like to help make a grew it, it seemed like a great fit. Yeah, that takes us, me, to the brewery.

Six Point is a block away from the farm. While Six Point has a big focus on IPAs, this location is focused on innovation brews, drinks that are sometimes off the beaten path. The day I came to visit, they were brewing the Gruet made from the ingredients grown at Red Hook Farms. Head Brewer, Isaac Patient, is a big fan of Gruitt-style brews, which have a long history, dating back to Western Europe in the 11th century. It contained hops, but it was more like a spice sachet that was originally picked out by a Gruet maker. And it was to balance the maltiness of the beer. So there was some bittering things you would add like lavender, a stem of lavender is almost just as bitter.

If you just add that like you were going to add an IPA, that's going to make it just as bitter, but it's going to have a more floral flavor than hops would. For a beer to go to market here in the U.S., it legally has to have some hops. But what sets grew it apart from the other beers is that these herbs and spices are the star of the show. How does that impact the flavor, you may ask? So it's a little bit more herbal. Obviously, you're going to have a lot more flavors in there. And they're more geared towards like a medieval kind of pairing to match food.

I like that. Yeah. Are there are lots of kinds of gruids? Yeah. So that is a little bit interesting because there is a traditional gruit that has very specific herbs in it, Yarrow, Rosemary, they were sort of like the foundation, right? But brewers were using all sorts of herbs and spices that they could find in their area.

There's even like wormwood that you can use, but some of those are a little bit controversial because there's certain psychotropic things that go along with them, so they're not usually included in today's gruettes. got to admit it, I have never heard of Gruet before I went to the brewery, even though it's an old-style beer with a ton of history, and I'm not alone. A lot of those styles during Prohibition fell way down off the radar and have taken a while to kind of peek back up. Isaac learned about this medieval style beer from a legendary Gruet Brewer in New Hampshire named Butch Haleshorn.

And he would hire foragers to just go out. out and pick whatever they could, and then he'd bring it back, and he would just pick random things and then make a beer out of those things. So when this opportunity came up, we started talking about, like, what herbs can we get the Red Hook Initiative farm to grow, and how can we make that into a beer? And it was just, it's been an awesome experience to be able to do it on such a large scale. The Six Point Groot has four key herbs, rosemary, tarragon, lemon grass, and mugwort. All of these were grown at the Red Hook Farms. Back at the farm, Director Sara Nefisi explained what makes these herbs so special.

We have rosemary. Probably the most familiar for the American cooking. We have rosemary. It's in the Salvia family or the mint family. So it has that square stem. Most things in the mint family are very pungent, fragrant, medicinal, flavorful. It's commonly used in meat flavorings. It's not something that people typically drink.

And then Rosemary has a deep literary tradition, you know, Shakespeare. Everyone's writing about Rosemary. And it is not from England, but it was brought there and became very, like, you know, seems very core to, like, English cuisine and English things. But, like, most things that are core to English.

English cuisine and tradition and culture. It is not actually from the island of England. Tarragon is another culinary herb. Like rosemary, it has long, thin leaves. But the flavor is a little more similar to anise. My family is Iranian. We eat this raw with food. We put this in one of the main flavors of stuffed grape leaves.

It's also a bitter, though. So all of these different herbs that we've collected are mostly on the bitter side. to provide flavoring. And it's such a unique smell that you really don't smell in other typical culinary herbs. Lemongrass may be the most pungent of the four herbs. Lemongrass is one of the power flavors.

You just, you barely have to rip it and smell it. And you get that citrus. This is in the grass family. Completely different part of the world. This is from, there's different varieties all across Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, mostly used medicinally as a flavoring, as an aromatic. This one is a beautiful variety. It has this like burgundy stem.

It grows out to be about two, three feet long, very dramatic, beautiful looking, and a very common flavor for a lot of East Asian, South Asian cooking. And finally, mugwort, which Sara calls the star of the gruit. Historically, mugwort is a central ingredient of the beverage. It's really good at being a plant. It's really good at being a weedy plant. It doesn't need a lot of love, doesn't need a lot of attention. It'll grow on the roadside.

It'll grow in the subway crack. And when I see it on the farm, I have a little heart palpitation because it spreads so aggressively by these amazing underground rhizomes, which I can dig up and show you. Sara pulls the mugwort out of the ground. revealing long stems that were hidden below the soil. So you see these long, these are underground stems called rhizomes, and they'll break off, as I pull this out and re-sprout,

it'll also spread and effectively colonize a whole area, which makes it such a really strong, powerful plant. And then if you flip it over, you have this beautiful underside that's white, and that can help you distinguish it from like, chrysanes or other things, But if you crush it and you smell it, you get that kind of anisey scent, and then if you taste it, it's the bitter, right? Mugwort is related to wormwood. That's the herb that's used to make absinthe. This family of plants, which is called Artemisia, has psychotropic qualities. Some people say mugwort gives them lucid dreams. But those effects disappear once the plant is cooked and processed.

So don't expect to grow it to get you trippy. If it sounds like Sara is the president of the mugwort fan club, it's because she might as well be. She has a mugwort plant tattooed on her upper arm, complete with ladybug larvae. I also love it because if you catch it at the right time, so like early summer, early spring, it's an entire universe. there are it's an entire universe of ladybugs at all different levels of development

you have the larvae you have the eggs you have the adults and just hundreds of them on a single one that's growing in between an auto body shop garage door and the pavement and they can't help but see the wonder and amazement of this plant that doesn't need anything

it's the crack of a sidewalk but providing an entire ecosystem to so many different animals. It's also a personal plant for Sara. As a child of immigrants to this land, that was not always welcoming to people like me and still is not always welcoming to people like me and finding a foothold in this country and seeing if I can also play a role that's positive that supports the ecosystem, supports that I have a place here. Mogort has a place. place here. And I, not to anthropomorphize a plant, but I identify with this plant for a reason.

It was brought here, and it made its way, and it's growing in the asphalt and the concrete, and it's beautiful, and it has so many, it has a story, it has a long story, we all do. So I love it. Just a quick note that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Back at the brewery, the mugwort, rosemary, tarragon, and lemon grass are coming together to make the gruit. We take the grain, depending on the grains, we crack them, basically mill them down, just barely crack them open, then we mash in. So we throw all the grain in, we have a very specific temperature of water that's going to help activate the specific enzymes that we're interested in activating. And then once that's done, sits for about an hour, we move that over into the boil. kettle and we boil it. That's where we add hops, or in this case we're talking about a

gruid today, so we're going to be adding herbs and spices. And then once that's done, we move it into one of these conical fermenters. We add the yeast. It ferments out. When it's ready, we then carbonate it and send it out. We headed upstairs for the most important business of the day, tasting the gruet we've been following throughout its journey. So the best way to taste a beer is, do a short sniff and just kind of recognize the smells and aromas that are coming on to that. Does have an aroma. Yeah. And then what I always tell people to do is to sip and hold it in your mouth, let it slowly warm up. And once it's all the way warm, do a slight chewing action because there's certain olfractories that are not activated until you're doing that action. And then to swallow,

as you swallow, breathe out through your nose and you'll get like the full, usually your first sip of a new beer should be that way, that way you get the full experience. Cheers. Cheers. Oh, that's good. Yeah. It's really different. Yeah.

It's really different. It feels like it wants to be an IPA, then it changes into something else. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, wow. You can really definitely tell their herbs in there, you know. So will there be a Gruet Revolution? Well, it's hard to say.

But Isaac says some craft breweries like Six Point are leaning into more local ingredients to make their beers. You do see a lot more breweries using a little bit more herbs and floral additives. Sometimes it's not their primary thing, but you might see a beer that's used dandelion flowers. You might see a beer that's used some hibiscus in it. So I think that, you know, craft brewers have really pushed the boundary of innovation and research and development in beers, and I think that you'll probably start seeing more and more of it. So what to call our brew? To come up with the name of the Gruet, the staffs of Science Friday, Six Point, and Red Hook Farms, wanted something that reflected just how local this collaboration was. From the herbs grown on the community land to the store you just heard on the radio.

So we settled on a field story. It's going to be available at stores and at the Six Point Tap Room in downtown Brooklyn. So if you're interested in trying it out, you can do so. And we're holding a special launch event for a field story for our listeners in the New York City area. If you want to learn more about that, you can do so at ScienceFriiday.com slash beer. Here's Dee Petershmidt with some of the folks who help make the show happen. John Dankosky is our Director of News and Audio. Diana Montano is our experiences manager. Beth Rami is our controller.

Jordan Smudjick and Jason Rosenberg are our grants managers. And I'm Digital Audio Producer Dee Petersmith. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Dee. BJ Leiderman compose our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Email us, sure, our address, SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. I'm Ira Flato.

And I'm Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.