Science Friday - NFTs and Art, Neuralink, Preserving Endangered Foods. May 14, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

What’s Behind The Blockchain-Based Art Boom? From multi-million dollar art sales to short NBA video clips, non-fungible tokens have taken off as a way to license media in the digital realm. The blockchain-based tokens, which function as a certificate of ownership for purchasers, produce a dramatic amount of carbon emissions and aren’t actually new—but in the first quarter of 2021, buyers spent $2 billion dollars purchasing NFTs on online marketplaces. Writers, musicians, and artists are all now experimenting with them, and big brands are also jumping on the bandwagon. Ira talks to Decrypt Media editor-in-chief Dan Roberts, and LA-based artist Vakseen about the appeal, and how NFTs are bringing new audiences both to the blockchain economy, and artists themselves. How Novel Is Neuralink? Last month, the company Neuralink, co-founded by Elon Musk, released a video update of their technology. The company makes brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs—implants in the brain that detect signals and send them to a computer. In the video, a macaque named Pager sits in front of a screen, while a narrator explains Pager had two Neuralinks implanted in both sides of his brain six weeks before. Pager is playing Pong. Not with a joystick or controller, but with his brain, according to the narrator. As with any Elon Musk venture, this Neuralink video got a lot of buzz. But brain-computer interfaces themselves are not a new concept. Where does this fit into the realm of neurotechnology research? Joining Ira to talk about this Neuralink update is Dr. Paul Nuyujukian, director of Stanford University’s Brain Interfacing Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Ira also turns to Nathan Copeland, a neurotechnology consultant and brain-computer interface participant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Six years ago, Copeland had four BCI devices implanted, and is one of just a handful of people to have BCI implants in his brain. Decolonizing And Diversifying The Future Of Food The Science Friday Book Club has been talking about food all spring while reading Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. We discussed the impacts of meat consumption, the extinction of beloved birds and plants, and the declining variety of fruit and vegetable varieties available in stores—and even about the flow of pollinator-produced crops in global food systems.  Producer Christie Taylor shares highlights from our off-radio Zoom event series, which asked, “What is the future of food, and who can help influence it for the better?” At this April 20th panel, Lost Feast author and food geographer Lenore Newman joined farmer and former chef Mimi Edelman to talk about the future of food and flavor—from preserving heirloom seeds to the stories behind beloved flavors, and how policy changes and individual actions might contribute to a sustainable future. At this May 4th panel, food researchers Katie Kamelamela, Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, and Melissa K. Nelson talked about their work researching and restoring Indigenous foods to Hawaii and the mainland United States. They explained how these foods were disrupted by colonization, and how food relationships fit into a future vision of sustainable food worldwide. 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 Ira Flato. Last month, the company Neurrelink, co-founded by Elon Musk, released a video update of its technology. The company makes brain computer interfaces. These are implants in the head that detect signals and send them to a computer. In the video, a macaque named Pager sits in front of a screen, while a narrator explains that Pager has two Neurilinks implanted six weeks before. Carefully, you can see that the fur on his head hasn't quite fully grown back yet.

He's learned to interact with a computer for a tasty banana smoothie delivered through a straw. While he sucks down his smoothie, Pager is playing Pong, not with his hand on a joystick or controller, but with his brain. To control his paddle on the right side of the screen, Pager simply thinks about moving his hand up or down. We've removed a joystick altogether. With any Elon Musk venture, this Neurlink video got a lot of buzz. But where does it fit in the realm of brain-computer interface, BCI Research? Joining me to think this through is Dr. Paul Niujukean, Director of Stanford University's Brain Interfacing Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you very much, Ira. It's great to be here. Paul, when you look at the video, seeing a monkey controlling a video game just by thinking about moving the paddles. It really does look amazing. But what do you, as someone in this field, take away from this video? A really good question, Ira. And part of me, I think, will always feel that sense of amazement every time I see it, because it is amazing, right, to think about something, whether it's a cursor or robotic arm being controlled by thoughts from the brain directly. What we're seeing, though, is something that isn't novel necessarily to the field of neuroengineering and neuroprosthetics. This is something that the academic sphere has been working on for decades at this

point. And what we're seeing is now Neurrelink stepping up and showing off what they can do, what they developed, what their hardware looks like, and a demonstration, a proof of concept in a non-human primate, which is the last step, right, in a monkey, before you go into and get approved for a clinical trial in people. What is the hardware innovation then that you see here? So the video they put out represents a significant advancement in, at least in my opinion, of the hardware that exists in the field. Their device is about an order of magnitude higher in channel count. It records from about a thousand channels, whereas the current state of the research fields for human implantation in the space reports from about 100. On top of that, it's fully implanted.

It is battery powered. It is wireless and rechargeable. And it works, you know, over long periods of time, at least over the span of weeks, as far as they've been able to share with us in monkeys, which all of these represent novel significant advancements for the field of neuroprosthetics, which is, you know, all very exciting new developments to see. As you say, BCIs are not a new thing. How long has research into this existed? Well, it really depends on how you define, you know, the field. Because if you reach back to just the amount of time that these devices have been implanted in people, then you're maybe talking about the 15, 20 years. If you reach a little further back and say, well, how long has the animal work in the space been going back?

Well, then it's another decade or two before that. And if you reach even further back and say, well, how long has neuroscientists recording from the brain of animals and or people? and that reaches back even further, dating back to you in almost 100 years or so. And so really what this is is, you know, a slow evolution and development of scientific progress on top of scientific progress, building and building and building to see the compelling results that you see now. All of this would not be possible without decades and decades of consistent scientific advancement.

You know, we've reached out to NeurLink to talk about it, but they keep things very close to the chest. Do you know what Neurrelink's goals for this product are? You know, Elon was one of the founders and the company, has said that he has a couple main goals for the project. His short-term goal, which is one that I think is shared among many in the scientific community, which was a tweet that he put out on April 16, said that he's to address brain and spine problems. So to sort of rephrase that,

it's to address people who have various forms of paralysis and restore some form of function. through either a computer interface or some type of interface to something that's controlled. I want to introduce our second guest. He's one of just a few people on the world who have an implanted brain computer interface. Nathan Copeland, Neurotechnology consultant and brain computer interface participant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to Science Friday, Nathan. Thanks for having me. Can you tell us a bit about your journey to getting your BCI implanted?

Yeah, well, in 2004, I was 18 and I was in a car accident that left me a C5 quadriplegic. So while I was in the rehab hospital there, they asked if I wanted to be put on a research registry. I said, yeah, because, you know, it was many years ago now and you never know what's going to come up in the future. So, yeah, I just said, yeah, and probably been about eight years ago, I got a call. They asked if I wanted to join a BCI study involving implants in the motor cortex to control robotic arm or computer interface cursors and keyboards and that kind of stuff. It also involved implants in the sensory cortex that they could use to stimulate my brain directly to elicit sensations that felt like they were coming from my actual hand. And I kind of felt like since I qualified to do it and I knew the criteria was so specific, I couldn't really say no.

It just helped that I thought it was really cool. So just to be clear, you don't have a neuralink because they're not approved for use in people yet. So what do your implants look like? How big are they? Where are they? Can you give us an idea? So I have four Utah arrays implanted. They're really small.

They're like the size of one of your fingernails, so about 100 electrodes. I have two in sensor cortex and two in motor cortex. And the way they're wired, there's actually 256 channels that they can record from. There's a video of you from a few years back. fist-pumping President Obama with a mechanical arm that you're controlling with your brain. It's really so cool. Aside from fist-pumping the president, what kind of stuff can you do with your BCI? Yeah, getting to me, President Obama and that fist-pump was still to this day,

probably one of the coolest things I've been able to do through this study. You know, aside from, you know, I'm actually the first human in the world to have implants, in sensory cortex. Through all these implants, I'm able to control a robotic arm, interact with computers using like a cursor or a keyboard. So with using the computer, what I like to do is draw.

I've drawn a cat. I've actually made it into an NFT and dreaming big on maybe selling that one day. And then the other thing I really like to do is play games. I have not played Pong. but I'd be willing to practice up if there was ever going to be a interspecies pong match over Twitter or something one day. That is, that's cool.

Nathan, I know you've been keeping up with NeuroLink and what they promise. What was your impression of this latest demonstration? What do you see, because it has so many more channels that you said a thousand or more, what are the possibilities of having that kind of power available? Yeah, so that's really the main thing of interest that I pick up on while watching the video because I know monkeys have played Pong or other 2D and 3D tasks, and they've controlled robotic limbs because that's how we got to the point that I'm at today. But the games that play are pretty basic.

You know, I can control like a couple dimensions of translation and maybe do a button or two. Now, if I had a thousand electrodes and the computer was receiving signals from 10 times as many neurons, I could probably play a lot more games with a lot more complexity. And if I could do that wirelessly and to any device I wanted, that would be really cool. Paul, I want to ask you if, you know, there are a lot of critics out there, naysayers who say, well, this is an Elon Musk company. He must be doing his bravado. I'm not sure I believe what I see on that screen. Paul, how do you answer that? It's pretty easy. I know a bunch of the people that work in Nerling. They're my friends and colleagues, and they do good work. I was, you know, I knew what they were doing when they were in the university setting. And I have no doubt that they're maintaining that thing. integrity in the NeurLink company itself. Seeing what NeurLink has developed, it really is a step forward in the hardware. And it is very exciting to see these developments unfold.

How close are they, do you think, to getting a clinical trial approval for this device? It's a really good question. It's hard to know for certain, but what they would need to show to get a clinical trial approval, what's called an IDE, and an investigative device exemption from the FDA, is that this device has been tested and evaluated in multiple monkeys, is safe, is effective, and is reliable. And what they're showing us here isn't necessarily that. They're just showing us a single example. But I would not be surprised if they're very close.

It would not surprise me if they are a year or two away from getting that approval to do their first clinical trials and people. Nathan, would you consider getting a neural link in the future? So as part of the study I'm currently in, the FDA has approved my usage up to 10 years from the start of my implant. And I just hit my six-year implant anniversary on May 4th. I absolutely would get one, but I'm going to use mine until they're broke. Even if I was offered in Neurrelink, I don't think it does. The research, any good, you know, to jump shit.

so to say, because as it is right now, no one really knows how long these arrays that I have in really last. Like they have some ideas based on monkey stuff, but, you know, I might take care of my head a bit more delicately than a monkey and, you know, maybe my stuff will last beyond 10 years. Well, we wish you the best of luck and hope for your success, Nathan. Nathan Copeland, Neurotechnology consultant, and BCI participant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Dr. Paul Niu Jukian, Director of Stanford University's Brain Interfacing Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure. You're welcome. Let me come back, what the dream of a decentralized Internet has to do with digital art. Yes, we're talking about NFTs. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. There's a new acronym in town this year,

NFTs or non-fundgible tokens, which offer an electronic certificate of ownership for digital artworks, music, videos, even the New York Times finance columns. For some artists, the NFTs are paying huge dividends. Digital artist Beeple sold one of his works as an NFT for $69 million. And now eBay,

will allow sales of NFTs on its online auction site. The NFT world is a mix-up gimmickery and creativity, and there are dozens of marketplaces designed to showcase both serious digital artists and more whimsical seeming offerings, like a token of the venerable 2011 meme known as Nyancat, which sold for, wait for it, over $500,000. So what role do NFTs play in the art world moving forward? Here to help unpack where NFTs came from and how they're making waves in art and elsewhere is Dan Roberts, editor-in-chief of Decrypt Media, a new site dedicated to cryptocurrency. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on, Ira.

For people trying to get their head around, just what an NFT is, what is this non-fungible business all about? Well, first of all, we can start with the non-fungible part. And the easiest way to describe it is, if I pull a dollar bill out of my wallet and I hand it to you, when you hand me one from your wallet, we each still have the same thing. We each have a dollar. That is a fungible asset. The non-fungibility of these tokens is the idea that they are provably, verifiably unique. Can't be duplicated, copied, stolen, parked on blockchain, which of course you have to step back and understand blockchain, this immutable,

peer-to-peer decentralized ledger that has no middleman, no one governing, controlling party, or person. And in terms of the tech, these are digital tokens. that exist on the Ethereum blockchain, but they're not cryptocurrencies. They represent deeds to an asset. And although we mostly right now discuss them as being digital assets, they can also represent deeds to a physical asset. You can tie an NFT to a physical artwork that is sitting somewhere in a museum or in a gallery. So really think of them as digital, provably scarce, certificates of authenticity.

I mean, the analogy I like Iris, I remember years ago, I would go to the physical sports collectibles store, you know, and you would look at Ted Williams' jerseys and autograph balls. And if you were going to buy something from that store, you would expect a certificate of authenticity guaranteeing that the autograph is right. And this just puts that concept on blockchain. And the amazing amounts of money that people are asking for it, I guess the value of any item, even if it's a token, is what people are willing to pay for it. Well, that's exactly right. And, you know, a lot of people just can't quite wrap their heads around the sky high sums that some of these are fetching, it's hard to understand paying $69 million

for a digital only image. I mean, people used to the old art world say, well, can I display it on my wall? And hypothetically you could, but that would kind of defeat the purpose. But you nailed it. I mean, value is whatever the group says. And even though so many people look at the NFT art boom and they say, well, this just seems stupid. Well, enough people think that there is value here. Let's go back to the art world, which is where so many of these NFTs are being sold now. We talked about how an NFT, and you showed us, is a proof of ownership, but not ownership the same way. Someone might own a Picasso, right? Yeah, what you're getting, I guess it's fair to think of it as a URL.

That puts it in terms that everyone knows, although it's not quite exactly right. But you are getting an address to the digital asset that is parked on blockchain. But it's really just an address that is linked to the item, which in many cases on certain NFT art marketplaces, websites, is being stored somewhere else. And that's a problem some people have with it. That is, many of these marketplaces are not actually storing the artwork on chain, so to speak. Basically, because you have the address and it's in your digital wallet, you are the only one

who can move it. So when we talk about ownership, it just means that you're the only one with the keys to actually sell that object again. Now, I know that your media platform, DeCrypt, has written about using NFTs for everything, from music sales to publishing novels and short stories. What do creators like about this way of selling their work? It depends whom you ask, but I think the pie in the sky proposition that artists right now love, especially musicians, is the idea that with most NFT marketplaces, every time the

NFT is resold, or every time copies are minted, which you can allow when you create the original if you wish, a cut goes back to the original creator. And artists on Spotify really do not earn much per stream. It's like less than one penny. So if you're a musician and you find out, say, you're Kings of Leon, or say your Weezer, who's about to also do NFTs, you find out that you could, when you create your next album, create NFT versions. Now you are doing a number of things at once. You're boosting engagement with your hardcore fans who really love you and want to collect all the different things you're offering. You're selling more copies and you're getting more of a cut of the revenue because when you create the NFT, you can say, we'll also allow

100 other versions to be sold. But every time someone sells it, we get 10% of that cut because we're the creator. The pie in the sky goal here is get more money to the original creators and who wouldn't be on board with that. I want to take a minute to talk to one of those creators of NFT art. Otha Davis, the third, also known as Vaccine. He's a painter and now NFT artists. Incredible stuff, and he's based in Los Angeles. Earlier this year, an NFT of his portrait of basketball player Michael Jordan sold for $16,000, and it's just one addition of several that have been valued that high. Welcome to Science Friday vaccine. Thank you for having me. Nice to have you. Tell us a bit more, first of all, about the

art you make. I look and I see these gorgely colorful portraits of Billy Holiday, Kamala Harris, George Floyd, and Moore. Believe me, I'm not an artist here. How would you describe what your paintings look like? I mean, vibrant is definitely the first word I would use. Colorful, fun, very energetic. There's a lot of feeling and emotion in my work. My work celebrates pop culture. It celebrates black pop culture more specifically. I celebrate moments that kind of connect us all and bring us all together. What made you decide to enter the NFT world in the first place? I work pretty exclusively with Maker's Place, one of the premier NFT platforms.

And they came to me before the site was live. For me, it just made sense. I've always kind of considered myself a future. as it pertains to the things that I love and that I'm passionate about. I had no clue what I was doing, but it just sounded like something that was cool that could be beneficial in the future. I've been a part of the crypto arts scene since 2018. It's just now becoming hot and popular,

but I've been a part of it before it was something that you could actually see. And what do you find different about this art space, about selling, about being part of it, the advantages, the disadvantages? is it opens the playing field you know it's removing that third party traditionally in the art world you need a third party to help you you know a gallery that's going to help you get your work sold most artists don't have a business mind they don't understand you know the importance of marketing and those type of things so they partner up with a third party and that third party ends up taking 50% of the sales you know i can tell you as a working fine artist the 50%

commission model is something that never really sat with me that well. It just didn't make sense to give away 50% when someone did not invest that much time in the creation. NFTs are totally changing the field. You know, you can sit in the comfort of your home and sell your work to somebody on the other side of the world. Yes, a platform is going to get a cut, but it's a much smaller percentage. You know, the world can be pretentious at times. It can make people feel, you know, like they're not Welcome and the NFT community, the NFT space. It's unlike any community I've ever experienced. The people involved, the passion, it feels very artist-centric,

and there's just a lot of love and community, people celebrating and uplifting each other. And that's a beautiful thing. You were featured in an article recently about how black creators, specifically, are finding NFTs better for them than other ways of selling. their art. Can you speak more about that? There are just so many barriers in place within a traditional art world. We've been omitted from art history. Even as a successful working artist, I'm almost always the only black in a show and a physical show. I live in Los Angeles. This is a very diverse city, an incredibly diverse city. It's just, it speaks tremendously to the ways of the art world.

old ways, these old traditions. The NFT scene is just breaking these barriers down. I've seen people be able to pay off their debts by homes for their parents. I've seen life-changing things happen and we're still in the early stages. Even myself have been able to open an art gallery behind NFTs and I don't think that's going to happen in that same space within the art world, within the traditional art world. It's just not set up for us to succeed. that fashion. So then would you recommend people struggling in the traditional art world to make the switch and go to NFTs? I don't think it's about a switch because I think any intelligent artists will make sure that they have a presence in the physical space as well as the NFT space.

And that's myself. That's the model that I've created. So I don't think it's a matter of switching. I think you should continue doing what you're doing in the real world, but you need a presence in this new NFT space. Absolutely. It's the future. And any artists that I know, I've been, you know, I've been screaming this for the past few years. It's pop now.

It's everywhere. It's hot. It's the thing to do. So now, you know, everybody's trying to get into it. And rightfully so. Artists should be tapped in, but in both spaces. Vaccine, thank you for this. side of art artistry that we have never seen before. This, as you say, so new and giving us a

glimpse of what NFTs are like and what it's like to be involved with them. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Oh, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. That was L.A. based artist Otha Davis, the third, known as vaccine. You can find links to his work on our website at sciencefrily.com slash NFT. Getting back now to Dan Roberts, editor-in-chief of decrypt media. Let me play a clip from a longtime digital artist Rebecca Allen who has a concern about the direction NFTs are taking. NFTs feels like a financial product so much that art is the product, is one product that people are investing in. And I just, for me, that's, that's never a vision of art that I wanted. And so I'm hoping it doesn't expand in that way,

because it doesn't have to, if there's enough force from a side of just, you know, let's release the art. I mean, she's talking about her fear here, right, that NFTs are going the way that much of global art trade already has. That means art as an investment and another kind of stock for rich people, as opposed to allowing more access as more middle class prices. Do you think she's right? Well, let's remember, Ira, this has been a concern in the traditional art. world too, that fancy art and art collecting is just for the ultra rich. Right? So in some ways, we're just going in a full circle when we talk about these concerns. Now, in the NFT space in general, yes, some of the people paying the biggest prices.

For example, the Bipol's $69 million sale. Well, the buyer was Medicovan, who is in the NFT world and has made crypto riches. So it's a bit of a misleading example, right? And my point being, yes, some of the biggest NFT sales have just been to rich venture capitalists or billionaires like Mark Cuban. But that said, that's why I think Top Shot is interesting. That's a place where you can get a pack of those NFT moments, they call them, video clips that really are just highlights for as little as $9.

And some of the collectors aren't rich people. They're just young kids who like the NBA and they think it's cool to own one of them. Galleries of museums have been finding ways to display other kinds of digital art for decades. Are they going to adapt to NFTs? Well, it's a fascinating question. I think yes, they will. And in fact, we at D. Cripson, one of our reporters, to a physical art gallery displaying NFTs that already popped up.

And he wrote a very funny review about how it just was like any other art gallery. And maybe that's fine, although does it defeat the purpose? I mean, the whole value proposition of NFTs is you're trying to get people to wrap their minds around, not being able to hold and touch the physical object and accept that value has gone digital. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about non-fungible tokens and the art world. You know, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies also have an environmental impact. Some like Bitcoin take lots of energy to manage. Elon Musk said just this week that Tesla would stop accepting Bitcoin for this reason. NFTs use a different system, right?

Ethereum. But could a high carbon footprint still sink them? Well, it's a good question right now, Ira. And a lot of people in the mainstream have simply seen headlines. And thus they are dismissing NFTs entirely. You're now even seeing some artists shame other artists for mid-exam. an NFT because people say, well, aren't they killing the environment? And like most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. There's been a lot of hyperbole. What they're really talking

about when they talk about the environmental impact is the electricity usage of Ethereum mining. And when you mint an NFT that first time as a token on Ethereum, it involves the mining process, which uses a lot of electricity. But as you alluded to, Ethereum, the network is in the process of shifting to a new mining method called proof of state that without getting too technical, will use dramatically less electricity. I guess the real answer is Ethereum uses a lot less electricity than Bitcoin currently, and soon Ethereum will use even less once it shifts over. But you're not wrong, you know, I'd say to the critics,

mining Bitcoin and mining eth has an electricity usage. And I guess people have to decide long term whether it's worth it. But I would add that a lot of the comparisons drawn are a little bit misleading. There's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. One of the main reasons people like the ecosystem of blockchain-based technologies, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and so on, is the idea of a worldwide decentralized system. It's less reliant on single companies like Facebook. How are we doing on achieving that kind of decentralization? Yeah, that is the big value proposition of the entire crypto space. You're right. And a lot of the people

who got into it in the first place loved that cryptocurrency cuts out the middleman. There's no one bank or governing party. Most of it hasn't happened yet. It's a lot of talk. Now, NFTs might end up being the first great example of that. And a lot of people are now painting NFTs as the newest doorway that might bring new entrance into the crypto space who've previously not been interested because it really is decentralized. That is, in theory. Now, that said, like a lot in the crypto world, there's a caveat already. And that is that if you go buy an NFT artwork, you're probably buying it through an NFT marketplace.

Well, now you're using a middleman and People Pleaser, who is one of the most prominent NFT artists. She said she'd like to see the NFT space evolve to a point where you don't have to buy the NFT through an art marketplace. You can even decentralize that process, but we're not quite there yet. Yeah, and when we are there, we'll have you back. Sounds good to me, Iro. Thank you, Dan.

Dan Roberts, editor-in-chief of Decrypt Media. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we had a delicious spring book club feasting on long-lost biodiversity and the future of foods we love what our experts had to say about extinct megafauna, slow foods, and restoring indigenous people's crops to the landscape. All coming up, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

We are, as many have noted before on this show, an extinction crisis. But what happens when that ripples out to plants and animals we rely on for food? This was the topic of our Spring Book Club, which centered on Lenore Newman's Lost Feast, Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. And as we close the book, so to speak, on another robust month of contemplation and discussion, sci-fi producer and book club captain Christy Taylor is here to present some highlights. Hey, Christy. Okay, what have we learned since we started this adventure? Well, Ira, it has been an eventful few weeks, though most of it did happen out of earshot of the radio show.

We've been having Zoom discussion meetings, guest experts all over the place. So I want to take you back in time to three weeks ago, where we explored what the future of food might look like if we're really serious about saving biodiversity in food systems. Our guests were Lenore Newman herself and a farmer and former chef named Mimi Edelman, who works to help preserve threatened food cross. and animals. We rehashed this problem of losing biodiversity, and I ended up asking Lenore, where could things really start to turn around? And she brought up one of the things she talks about in detail in the book, which is reducing our dairy and meat footprint. For the last 60 years or so, one of the driving forces in agriculture is to make meat really cheap. And that's it. That's the only variable that was stressed. And the environmental

impact of that one part of the chain is massive. So, for example, we look at dairy. It covers massive areas that used to be primal forests, that were rainforest. And it's about 3% of the climate change piece just on its own, just for dairy. And you have to ask yourself, do we really need that? To me, it's sort of the number one easy, low-hanging fruit. Mimi, I think we have a question that you might enjoy tackling. And it's from Sarah, our listener, and it's about,

food commercialization overall. Yeah. So my question is, do you think the commercialization of place-based plants is positive for our world? For example, the relatively recent commercialization of the grain quinoa outside of its native Peru, or should communities be focused on supporting these plants where they are native? I have a small farm, and I think small farms are real farms. There are places where not only we can embrace biodiversity,

but we're also in the position to educate and reach out to our communities and begin our seed-saving practices. When you grow a plant and you save that most vital seed from the mother plants, that seed is going to be most adaptable for most regions in New York. So when you close the cycle and create a very robust resource for seed and harvest, I think you play a very important role in introducing these foods that are at risk. Lenore, you're really optimistic about replacing a lot of our meat consumption by basically growing it in the lab. An anonymous listener wants to know if you could talk a bit more about why you think

that's important. And then Rebecca has a question about genome editing. Go ahead, Rebecca. Thank you so much. So I kind of want to know what you think about the generation of new species through genetic engineering and genome editing, keeping up with the rate of culinary extinction and what factors kind of help determine the rate of change on both sides of that equation. To me, pretty well everything we do in agriculture is a technology. And I often use the example of a cow. because cows are not natural. They're bred out of a creature called the Orock, which went extinct in Poland a few hundred years ago.

If we look at the cow as a piece of technology, it wasn't great for mass production. Now it's fine if you have a few cows, but it's a megafauna. There were never supposed to be this many cows. So I'm a true believer. There's no such thing as a bad technology, but where you must, must work is on the policy side. That policy is what puts a ring around the technologies you're using. And that goes for everything, from an iron plow to, you know, the first time we bred, interbred two species,

like a strawberry is both a North American and a European crossbreed. But you need the policy. And the problem is our policy environment has been about profit for a very long time now. It has not been about environment. It's not been about animal ethics. It's certainly not been about health. And the trick is making sure we're living in a world where the hurting animals and the genetics can't end up with us all sitting in a smoking wasteland. Mimi, it feels like it can be very fashionable right now to eat sustainably. We're eating locally from small farms, organic. The food industry is using these terms as selling points for food. But is it enough for us as consumers to just look for those words and buy accordingly? I found just within my short career that words like

organic or free range, grass fed, they had a truth to them. But now they've become a trend that I'm afraid that the consumer can't fully trust. And I feel the only way, and this is how I eat, and navigate my local food shed is I meet the growers. And that is the best way to make your choices, not necessarily by the language that is on the package, but in the relationship with the farmer. Because the consumer plays a very vital role in all of the issues that we're talking about today.

Listener Casey has a question, which gets more to what individuals can do to help preserve biodiversity, even if we can't go meet our farmer directly. Go ahead, Casey. It seems like with people, there's two things that are going on. One, we want to be comfortable, right? We want to eat food that we feel comfortable with. But on the other hand, we also want variety.

And so I guess I was wondering if the desire to have this variety could somewhat be filled by expanding just the food that we have at our local region. Yeah, support farmers that are working outside the box. Go to the restaurants that you may pay an extra dollar to for the strange variety. Go to the farmers who are producing because ultimately they need us. And number two, I really do tell everyone to eat less meat. It is the single biggest thing you can do for climate change, bar none. The last thing I do like to tell people is we need the bees.

Don't use chemicals that kill bees. And if you have any kind of land or balcony, put out flowers, bees like. If you've ever wanted a hive of bees, for crying out loud, start one. It's a really good idea. It's like having thousands of small friends. It's wonderful. I think that the consumer should open their palates. There may be foods that they have savored in the past that were disappointing.

You know, revisiting them when they're truly seasonal to revisit those foods. begin to wander into food history and indigenous foods, wild foods. So that was it for that chat. Thanks so much to Dr. Lenore Newman and Mimi Edelman and all our listeners for that really great conversation. Truly was, Christy. And you know, I really liked what Mimi said right there at the end about revisiting indigenous foods and their history. Yeah, absolutely, Ira. And actually, we had a lot more to dig in on that topic.

a lot that wasn't even touched on in Lenore's book. So we pulled together another live event with some indigenous food experts to talk about their food specifically. Doctors Noah Kikouiva-Lincoln, Katie Kamala-Mella, and Melissa Nelson joined us to talk about the work being done to restore indigenous crops to Hawaii and mainland North America.

And I asked Katie, who is Native Hawaiian, to describe some of the foods that Hawaiians cultivated prior to colonization. Native, there wasn't too many things that were able to be eaten, popolo berries and leaves, oh hello berries, similar to a raspberry, and some fern shoots, roots, and stems. But then Polynesians came in migrations and brought agricultural systems, social systems to tend to those, which include like breadfruit, sweet potato, taro, sugar cane. So those caloric, rich tubers and fruits that pollinations brought were stored

through different ways of packaging or fermentation or underground baking, which is what I did my research on. So different relishes were made from seaweed and kukwina, which people still use today. What Polynesians brought with them was the bulk of their sustenance. Melissa, you come from several mainland tribes and are doing restoration work in California in unseated Coast Miwok and southern Pomo territories. What would you add about traditional foods where you're working? I'll just give maybe a few other examples and really reinforce a couple of points about the geophytes, about the underground tubers, which were so important also here in California and still are

with the coastal prairie ecosystems and the oak savannas with this time of year with the Yampa and the yellow calicordis and the wild onions, the alliums, and how important those underground tubers and corms were and are for traditional native foods. One thing really powerful is that there used to be seven species of abalone off of the California coast. And sadly, we're down to one species now off the coast of California, the red abalone, and it's off limits to any harvesting. And that is considered such an important sacred food source to many of the coastal tribes. There's stories about abalone women that are part of their creation stories and times. And, you know, of course, it wasn't due to their over-harvesting that caused their extinction or

their endangerment, but it was, you know, a lot of climate change, water pollution and over-harvesting. because of the black market of Abiloni. I want to touch on one thing from the book we've been reading that relates to this concept of over-harvesting. Lenora writes about how indigenous peoples in North America may have hunted mammoths and other megafauna to extinction. Noah, as someone who looks back in time where food is concerned, do you think that's true? So in the case of the megafauna in North America, that whole line of thought and discussion originates from a single anthropologist in the 1950s who said, this is probably true because there's these 12 mammists who found that show evidence of hunting. And that's really the only evidence he had. There was,

there was evidence that mammoths were hunted. And then in his mind, it was like, well, the mammoths went extinct, they hunted them to extinction. Like it was a huge lethal logic. Subsequently, there's been a lot of evidence that have come up against that. You know, these megafauna extinctions happen simultaneously on three different continents. You know, there is a parallel decline in small mammals that weren't hunted. But yeah, to me, the really important part is, you know, pretty universally in indigenous cultures. It's a very strong notion of kinship with environment. Pacific island groups, there is a very acute awareness of resource limitation and the need.

to appropriately manage it. So in Hawaii, even on a bad season, if the fish seem less plentiful, there were immediate copies put on, right? Nobody can touch this fish. We need to let it recover. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Christy Taylor. And we have a question from Anore in Minnesota about wild rice.

Go ahead. I was very privileged to be able to get hand-arched wild rice from netlays. It's a Boys Fort Reservation. This is very, very different from patty rice. And I think it's important to tell people there is a big difference between patty rice and wild rice that is hand-parched. My question is, how do we promote this? How do we keep the natural hand-parched wild rice known and respected? Thank you.

Ah, Miigwitch, thank you for your attention. to detail. And yes, wild rice is not paddy grown, cultivated, genetically modified rice. It comes out of an agribusiness farm in Northern California. And yet, that's what's often sold as wild rice in grocery stores. And they have even tried to, you know, get away with calling it Native American wild rice. And there's been some lawsuits against that because it's, you know, not truth in advertising. We need to be supporting Native American food gatherers, wild rice harvesters from the Great Lakes, Net Lake, Red Lake, White Earth. Also, the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance has a good network of Native food producers, including wild rice producers, that you can purchase from.

Looking to the future, we're in a climate crisis right now, which is exacerbating an existing extinction crisis. What is your vision for the future of indigenous foods? Indigenous agriculture, food systems, ways of life are very hyper-visible in our society, but are also very invisible. And it would be really great for viewers to evaluate their relationship with indigenous peoples historically in their own family and how they want to develop those relationships today, whether it be. volunteering or reading these books to listen to another site or generating a palette for the food to be a part of that movement. And Melissa? Well, first of all, I'm very hopeful about the whole

sustainable food movement that seems to have caught on in every sector of society, urban, rural, rich, poor, black, white, red, yellow. We see restaurants popping up now that you can have Native American cuisine and other indigenous heirloom seed varieties and foods on your palate and on your plate. Very exciting. And I think lastly, I'll say there's been a historic treaty, the Buffalo Treaty, signed between dozens of Native American tribes on both sides of the U.S. Canadian border, opening up tribal lands and working with protected areas to open up space for

the Buffalo to Rome again. both for ecological reasons and cultural reasons and for food sovereignty and cultural health and well-being. So I think that is a wonderful example of intertribal and intercultural cooperation to bring back a sacred food source for Native America. Thanks so much to Dr. Noah Kakuova Lincoln, Dr. Katie Kamala Mela, and Dr. Melissa Kna Nelson for that amazing dive into indigenous foods. And you can learn more about them and the work they've been doing on our website. So much to get your head around, Christy. That's such an optimistic point that Melissa made about how these systems are coming together to bring culturally valuable foods into the forefront.

Yeah, Ira, it's really actually kind of amazing to me. There are so many people ready to work together to make good changes stick and preserve biodiversity. And I really feel like I know where to plug myself in to contribute to that. And on top of that, we had a lot more to talk about that wasn't in what you just heard. If your eyes feel bigger than your stomach and you want to do. feast on either of those two events in full. The video is up on our website, sciencefriiday.com slash book club. Another great book club. Thank you, Christy Taylor. Thank you, Ira. And if you want to catch up on anything you missed from this Springs book club,

we'll be keeping everything up on our website at science friday.com slash book club. Plus, we are wrapping up with a cooking class this weekend. Yeah. And there are still a few tickets left. check it out on our website, ScienceFriday.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.