The Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century was seen as an important solution to the problem of malnutrition in the developing world at the time.
And while it may have succeeded in staving off hunger, the industrialization of agriculture created a whole new set of problems, chief among them a lack of diversity in our food system.
Why does this matter? What is the food monoculture costing us? And what can we do to bring back some of the diverse foodways we’ve lost along the way?
Dan Saladino is the renowned food journalist behind BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme and author of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dan joins Ross to explain why we so desperately need biodiversity in our food system, exploring why diverse foods may taste better, and could be better for us.
Dan walks us through several examples of rare foods discussed in his book and offers insight on the people working to revive old foodways.
Listen in to understand how the war in Ukraine is causing a food crisis and learn what we can do to create a system that is more resilient, more robust, and healthier—both for people and the planet.
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Resources
Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino
Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew Research
Consider the Axe: Food, Farming and the Wonders of Stonehenge on The Food Programme
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor there. Today, I have the pleasure of having with me Dan Saladino, food journalist and author of Eating to Extinction, the world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them. Hey, Dan. Hi, Ross. Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure. A previous guest of mine who is now in pastry school in Paris, lucky her, told me about this book and I knew I had to invite you on.
It’s a lovely book. I really enjoyed it. I’m going to start with perhaps the biggest, most difficult question to answer. Maybe the easiest. I can’t tell. Why did you write this book?
Dan Saladino: Well, I have been making radio programs for around 15 years on the subject of food and farming. And I was lucky enough in that work to travel as well. And because it’s a radio program about food and farming, we don’t really do recipes and cooking. This is very much about the economics, politics, science around food. But very early on in making these programmes, I came across this project that Slow Food International had launched from Italy in the 90s. And this was a catalogue of endangered foods, which they called the Arc of Taste.
And it was in my very first outing for this radio programme. And I was lucky enough to travel to Sicily, where I have some family history. And so I knew there would be This interesting story to tell. It was February and I knew the citrus harvest was happening and I wanted to record that event, really, and thought I would be travelling to record a celebratory programme explaining how this fruit had shaped the island for a thousand years, had also given... Many of the community’s income and also culinary important flavors in their food as well.
But I actually arrived and there were farmers telling me it was their last harvest and they were going to leave some of the fruit on the tree. Well, they were going to leave the fruit on the trees the following year. And I was told about this project because many people in Australia, Evolved in Slow Food wanted these oranges, these blood oranges grown around Aetna, to be added to this catalogue called the Arc of Taste. And I didn’t know what the Arc of Taste was. I then realised it was like Noah’s Arc, but for food...
And it included everything from types of cheeses to animal breeds to varieties of crops, so wheat and maize. And then I spent, I must have spent about 10 years making programs and where possible factoring in This catalog because it took me, if not physically, it took me intellectually to different parts of the world into food’s deep history about why some foods existed. And then when I was lucky enough to be invited to write a book and naively said, yes, I’d like to do that and was asked, well, what would you like to write about?
There was no question, really. I’d become obsessed with this catalogue of endangered foods and knew I wanted to tell the story of some of the 5,000 foods that were now in this catalogue from 130 countries. But it was only in writing the book. Wow.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe we should use Sicily as a case study. Why is citrus so important there? What’s happening to it? Farmers are leaving unharvested fruit on the trees. Is this way of life dying over there?
Dan Saladino: An aspect of it, yeah, a really important part of it. So citrus had arrived... In the island of being in one of the most important strategic places in the Mediterranean, traders and travelers had come and gone over many, many centuries. And when the first bitter and sour oranges left South Asia and eventually found their way into the Mediterranean, The people in the ninth century in particular. So this is when Sicily was under Arab rule, started to grow the fruit. And then when the when later the sweeter oranges arrived with the Portuguese, that.
That’s when Sicily really came into its own as an important supplier, not only to Europe, but much of the world for citrus. And this also did shape the landscape. So citrus groves were planted and you still see that today. But I think when I was growing up and going to school in my summer holidays, I would spend many of the summers on my own, staying with my nonna, my grandmother, because my parents were working. So I headed over. And that was the first opportunity I had to step foot on a farm as well.
So Sicily was a really important place for me in shaping ideas around food and farming. And the citrus is always there. Oranges for every meal. And if somebody had a job, either as a teacher or a police officer or whatever, they would also be farmers. And most often in the village where my father came from, Ribera, they would be orange growers. What changed was the fact that many other parts of the world started to produce citrus. As a commodity crop and then trade it at lower prices than the people in Sicily who are growing on small plots.
So what really has been lost is the small scale family farm and a lot of the diversity of the crop. And so for me, that was an important insight into the fact that it can seem that we have an abundance, but actually there are things that are And in a sense, for many people, it was a way of life and an identity because citrus was always part of their livelihoods and gave them an extra income so they could send their children to university. And at the same time, there were all of these unusual types of citrus because the fruit can mutate Quite easily and produce so much diversity.
And in many of the plots, many of the citrus groves, there would be a couple of trees that were unusual. And that’s why there’s the story of the vanilla orange in the book, because that’s a type of fruit that very subtle, doesn’t have a lot of acidity, but it’s just one of these quirks, one of these Glorious aspects of food that the people in Ribera prized, you know, it sold for a great price. But as the commodity crops started to be traded from North Africa and increasingly from Spain as well, it just became no longer economically viable to keep these plots going.
And so a lot of diversity was lost. And that’s part of that’s one of the stories told in the book.
Ross Kenyon: Has the market just been flooded with something that’s easy to transport or sweeter? Something like navel oranges has taken the place of this diverse crop of many types of citrus.
Dan Saladino: That’s exactly what happened. So the naval Washington arrived in a couple of different points in the 20th century. But really, when Sicily felt the need to try and compete with these other markets, they went for the naval. It was seedless. It was big and impressive and sweet as well. The oranges are still grown in Sicily, but they are pretty much, it’s mostly companies that control the entire supply chain. And in fact, there are lots of companies from outside, not only of Sicily, but Italy, who have come in, big global fruit businesses that have come in to actually buy up a lot of the citrus production because they have the economy of scale.
The other aspect that really was much of One of the themes that we’ve come back on this show so many times is this tension between centralization and decentralization. And it’s a hard question to answer because there are some serious benefits to centralization and scale and operating Commodity scale.
Ross Kenyon: You can get a lot of calories for much less effort. Well, it depends on how you count it. I suppose that’s a controversial thing I just said. But having this single variable that you’re isolating for, which in many cases is transportability or a less complex flavor that’s more palatable to more people or a mix of these things, that’s way easier than having this confusing farmer’s market seasonality. I feel like everything I just said, I think you could take issue with every single part of that. Is there anything about what I just said that you think is compelling or do you think that’s entirely missing?
Dan Saladino: I think what you’ve said just illustrates how complex this is. And in writing the book, what I haven’t tried to do is Point a finger and say it’s this part of the food system that’s to blame. And if only that hadn’t happened, I think. And that’s why I wanted to try and go into different histories of our food as well, whether it’s going back three and a half billion years to when we start to see the origins of biodiversity itself or us as a species, two million years or wherever you want to take your starting point.
Back to the origins of agriculture, in the case of the Fertile Crescent, 10,000, 12,000 years ago. And then in the post-industrial era, you know, those incremental steps when new technologies, new science arrives. And so much of this wasn’t part of some grand plan or scheme. Some of it was just we were finding our way through this problem of how do we feed ourselves? And so, you know, most famously with the Green Revolution, it was seen as an important solution to a problem that was being experienced in many parts of the world at the time, which was a shortage of calories.
And in that project, it actually, within a relatively short space of time, used new genetics, crop breeding, Modern irrigation and lots of other inputs to provide those calories. But this is where it gets complicated because clearly in the context and seen at the time, many people believe that staved off huge amounts of hunger and starvation. But it took us into a whole new set of problems, which we’re now facing with in terms of fossil fuels to provide the fertilizers, the water required for a lot of the Green Revolution crops and the uniformity of the genetics increasingly becoming vulnerable to disease.
So I think it’s extremely complex. And I think we now are learning that one of what this is my the key argument really in the book is one thing that we have neglected for too long is the need for diversity. And that’s genetic diversity within the food system of crops, plants and also animal breeds, but also diversity of systems. And here we are. We’re having this conversation. There’s a war in Ukraine. A third of, you know, almost around a third of globally traded wheat is locked up in the Black Sea region.
We’re realizing or we’re increasingly seeing with each problem we face, global problem, whether it’s the pandemic or this particular war, there is a fragility in the system that has given us this abundance of calories. And just finally, the other complexity is us and our relationship with food. So at the time... I think there was obviously clearly a strong case made. Where we are right now, I think increasingly we are seeing the complexities of the problems that we faced and we need more complex solutions, I would argue.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a good sign, or I think it’s a sign of a good book that makes you ask these questions and think without it being hit too heavily square in the nose. I think one simple thing we could take away, I suppose, I postulate this is uncontroversial. That diverse foods of strange artisanal heritage, cultivars and varietals, those are the tastiest typically, right? When you’re getting like, maybe it’s unfair to pick on the red delicious apple, but it’s probably the worst apple you could eat out there. It’s mealy, it’s not very good.
Eating some strange type, I feel like there’s more character, might be more bitter, might be more sour. There are health benefits to those as you put in the book. Also, it just makes our food more interesting and not just so bland and the same thing over and over, right?
Dan Saladino: Yeah, yeah. And certainly here in the UK. So, for example, there are much celebrated, certainly for those who delve deeply into this story, much celebrated writers and experts who were writing about apples at the beginning. Or towards the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, writing about apples in the way that people today would be writing about wine. I think there was an appreciation. So not only have we lost the diversity of the fruit, we obviously, along with that, we’ve lost the appreciation of what that fruit can be. And you mentioned also about the health benefits.
Well, going back to the citrus story, Huge amount of ingenuity of crop breeders to produce something that was bigger, fleshier and sweeter. But obviously, what we’ve also lost in the bitterness and the sourness, which is produced by the plant’s defence mechanism, are some more complex chemical compounds that we now understand are beneficial to our health, which is interesting because in the book, The communities in Northeastern India who still live among the wild citrus trees, they do treat the citrus there as medicine. There’s research underway at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew where they’re looking at the fact that we’ve bred out so many of these beneficial compounds.
We’ve lost the bitterness and the sourness and replaced it with sweetness. So again, our palates have changed. Our appreciation of these more complex foods have changed. And what I didn’t want to do in the book is just to end up thinking these were endangered foods and aren’t they beautiful, wonderful, quaint traditions. Actually, I wanted to make an argument that they have something that we should value. These foods, I’m not suggesting, will be the foods that will feed the world, but actually they are foods that we will need as we feed the world.
So I think we need that diversity and we need to find diversity. Wherever we are, we find ourselves in the world. There will be a diversity around us that we should be seeking out and trying to support in whatever way we can.
Ross Kenyon: This was a relatively expensive show for me to produce because I had to go on the hunt for as many of these foods that you single out as possible. I could not find Solaire’s. I had to email a French from Agerie trying to get them to send me out some, and I could not do it. Stitchleton I got.
Dan Saladino: Oh, congratulations.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a beautiful blue aggressive cheese. I loved it. Oh, I got Cantal. Cantal was as close as I could get to Solaire’s and maybe that’s more commercially available.
Dan Saladino: Solaire’s is an Easy to find here either. But that is part of, I think, the joy of this, really, that there are things that, I mean, we’ve become so used to being able to have whatever we want, whenever we want. And I’ve benefited from that myself. You know, I think it’s an amazing experience. Achievement in many ways, the fact that we can have access to these things if we’re in a fortunate position to access them and buy them. But at the same time, the fact that there is a cheese out there that you are still wondering what on earth What does that taste like?
I think that’s a great thing. And this is one of the other things. So much of the book is about food security and the food system and we need diversity. But at the same time, it’s about being human on planet Earth in which wouldn’t it be so dull and boring that if all of us ended up wearing the same type of clothes, listening to the same kind of music and eating the same type of cheese?
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to act like a salty old man for a second with my story of walking both ways uphill in the snow. Just growing up, I remember going to Blockbuster and you try to get there as early as you could. But many times the thing, the game that you wanted or the movie that you wanted would be gone. You’d be like, oh, someone rented Spaceballs. God, what do we want instead of that? And I sort of like the early digital age. It was kind of clunky. We were starting to get more virtual, but it was mostly clunky is the word I would use for it.
You might have a VHS tape that you might ruin the actual magnetic tape in it somehow. Whereas now I can watch any media the world has ever produced probably within a minute. I think I could find almost anything if it exists. And I like that. I like and I miss that delayed gratification thing. I feel like it was important. I like the making do with what you had. Am I just a salty getting older kind of person here? Is there something to that?
Dan Saladino: No, I do think there is something. And again, I don’t want to join you in the good old days of delayed gratification. But I do think, you know, obviously I think There are parts of the world where obviously you and I are in a situation where that digital world is within reach and we can access that. Many parts of the world cannot. I mean, that’s one aspect of it. But I do think there is something which, yeah, just being able to value something because it isn’t so easily accessible. And I think growing up, for me, I experienced that with music.
A song would come on the radio or a friend would play me something that he had that I didn’t have. And I just think how precious that was and how much I could look forward to that and how much value I placed on that. And I think if everything is so easily accessed, then surely it becomes devalued. And I think possibly that’s where we’ve ended up with food as well. I do think that the fact that when I was growing up, salmon as a fish, It was such a rare, a rare thing to be able to taste.
And now it’s one of, you know, it’s certainly in the UK, the most traded fish of all in a lifetime. And that comes with problems because obviously the production systems that have made that possible, Exist with issues of what have we done to the environment in order to control it to create that much protein on that scale? So yeah, I think you’ve made me think also about the delayed gratification and the rarity value and in your case, not being able to get hold of a piece of Solaire’s, but I hope one day you will.
And when you do taste it, it will be even more special for that reason.
Ross Kenyon: Actually, I really enjoyed the hunt for it. I eventually had to go online to get the Stitchleton. Some of these cheeses were quite hard to find. And I had to go to, I think I went to five or six different cheesemongers to make this show. And I found the experience of not being able to In the 1980s.
Dan Saladino: And into the 90s, I think there was this growing concern about the possibility of people being made ill by unpasteurized milk cheeses. And clearly, if something is badly made, or if measures aren’t taken in the production process of any food, it will create risks. There was an outbreak of a foodborne illness in the UK. It was at the time wrongly attached to Stilton production. And at that point, there was large scale Stilton production using unpasteurized milk cheese. And the industry panicked and said that we need to stop using unpasteurized milk cheese.
Even after the link between the illness and the... And the cheese was no longer substantiated. So it took somebody. Well, then that created a grieving process for many people who had loved this unpasteurized milk cheese. And again, there’s a whole section on the book about why that is the case and the link between The pasture, the animals, the microbial activity around all of that and through the system. And the idea that it actually follows through to the cheese and there is something significantly different inside. In the experience of eating one of those cheeses that hasn’t been made from a blank canvas of a pasteurized milk.
So in the UK, a guy called Randolph Hodgson, who is almost like the patron saint now of artisan cheesemaking in Britain, because he has saved so many cheeses. And he was the, as so many cheeses were lost, he was the guiding hand, really, that allowed people to keep... Making cheese and or for young people to start becoming cheesemakers. And he was the one who said this is wrong. The fact that we’ve lost the king of English cheeses, the fact that we’ve lost this most traditional, authentic version of the cheese is wrong.
And so he spent more than a decade finding out ways in which he could bring it back. And with the help of an American cheesemaker, Joe Schneider, who settled in the UK, Embarked on this project to do that, and because the law by then had locked the cheese in to being a pasteurised milk cheese, It was illegal to call it Stilton. Famously, Joe Schneider says I could have made a Stilton cheese, stuck a banana in it or flavoured it with cranberries and called it a Stilton. But if I’d tried to make it with a raw milk cheese, unpasteurised milk cheese, I would have been breaking the law.
And so they had to call it Stilton, which is the old English name for the town in which the cheese was. Was traded, not made, traded. So it’s a complicated, but I love the story and I love the cheese. I love Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson because of their determination to save what they describe as an important piece of British heritage.
Ross Kenyon: That’s part of what you’re saying, right? Pasteurizing, you reduce all of this life inside of it, and then you have a blank canvas to introduce a new culture and create this mass-produced kind of thing, whereas otherwise you’re just Working with whatever the cows ate, the local bacterial cultures that create something that’s truly unique and unable to be replicated.
Dan Saladino: And I think that’s it. It’s the fact that cheese for many people, and I buy into this as well, in terms of terroir or a food that represents a specific place, it captures the flavors of a place. It’s hard to find another food that could do that because, again, it’s that sense of the energy from the sun captured in the grasses and the wildflowers, perhaps, of that pasture and the soil. And again, the type of breed of animal for that to remain intact throughout the production process. Is a rare thing.
And Joe’s cheese, the Stichelton, is an example of that, as is Solaire’s. But yeah, if the milk is pasteurized and then you introduce a starter culture. And I also flag up the fact in the book that more than half the world’s starter cultures come from one manufacturer based on the outskirts of Copenhagen. They offer a huge portfolio of different starter cultures, but again, it doesn’t have that unique profile of the cheese from the pasture, but also I think the complexity that we are starting to glimpse in terms of our food and our interaction with our food.
I’m interested right now in a project called the Dark Matter of Nutrition, where they’re flagging up the idea that we know so few of the compounds within our food and are trying to map Some of the greater complexity in our in our foods as well. So I think the complexity is something that really fascinates me, something that we can often ignore. And that’s one thing that I wanted to try and flag up really in the book is how complex not only was the evolution of many of our foods, but still there are foods out there becoming endangered that we don’t even understand.
How they came to be or how they work. In the case of one of the stories in the book, a type of maize from Oaxaca, it remained a mystery for botanists for many years as to why it was dripping this mucus from aerial roots and growing 16 feet tall in really unpromising soil. Turns out that it was about microbes. It was the bacterial activity in the mucus feeding off the sugars being fed by the plant that was helping to fix nitrogen from the air and fertilize the maize. So we’ve only developed the tests in recent years that actually unlocked some of those secrets of the maize.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to go out on a limb with a question here, Dan, and I’m going to start with a minor insult to your people, but English food has a bad reputation. Are there versions of those things that are truly as beautiful as a stichelton that have been erased in the era of mass production? Is English food’s bad reputation a result of mass production more than anything else, or are you just culturally inferior?
Dan Saladino: A good provocative question. No, I think the problem of British food as it’s been perceived for a very long time, and I think that is no longer the reality. We have amazing chefs, cooks, food producers, farmers, markets. We industrialize so quickly and early. And obviously the first to really industrialize that disconnect between people and the land was quite violent, I think. And a lot of people were moved off the land or ended up in urban areas.
Ross Kenyon: You mean like enclosures, that era?
Dan Saladino: Yeah, well, enclosures. Yeah, absolutely. And then also with the industrialization and new ways of working. So I think a lot of what then happened was, yeah, foods became... And then the war, both wars had a huge impact. So specifically in terms of cheese, by the time of the Second World War, but because of the war and supply chains being disrupted, it meant that the government by law said there could only be one type of cheese, which was cheddar, because it was the most efficient way of using the milk. And so a lot of skills and knowledge of how to make these other so-called territorial cheeses Died out completely and it’s taken a long time to bring them back again.
There are lots of different factors. There are now a group of cheesemakers in Somerset, so where the cheese originated from, who are making unpasterized milk cheddar cheeses. And they are doing it in such a way that, you know, cloth bound. And I tried one the other day and it was just such a remarkable cheese and so different to what many people would think is a cheddar cheese. And again, it’s all to do with not just the way the cheese is made, but the way the cows are looked after and what they eat.
But yeah, so I think it’s nothing. I don’t think it’s our culture that it’s at fault. It’s just been attacked on so many levels for so long. And there have been some determined people to try and correct that.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. I wish that was a more commonly told story. You should try to rehabilitate your country’s food. I suppose that’s a big part of what you’re doing. But I think this reputation lingers, even though, of course, London is one of the great food cities of the world. And I’ve had amazing meals every time I’ve been to the UK. But you’re just a victim of the Industrial Revolution, it sounds like.
Dan Saladino: Well, Industrial Revolution, War, Economics as well. I think one thing that we have in common with the US is that we have some of the cheapest food in the world in terms of proportion of income and cheap in inverted commas because obviously it’s cheap at the point of sale. But I think there’s a really powerful argument to be made about true cost accounting that obviously cheap food is rarely cheap because of either Environmental impact it can have and also the health consequences of that food as well. So, you know, we have we have extremely powerful retailers.
So really, really high, but more than 70 percent of UK food is sold through supermarkets. Many people don’t have access to alternatives. So, you know, a lot of our choices are edited heavily, heavily by the supply chain and the retail sector. But at the same time, we do have a really fascinating food history and a deep food culture. And we have quite a few foods that have been placed on the catalogue that I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, the Arc of Taste. And there are many people who are determined to bring them back.
And one of the most humble ingredients in the book is a type of lentil grown in southern Germany that went extinct in the 1960s, revived by a determined farmer. Who went from seed bank to seed bank to try and find this Swabian lentil. Managed to do so by traveling to Russia and going into the Vavilov seed bank and finding that the lentil had actually been catalogued under the wrong name. And there’s a wonderful picture of him online of cheering with his hands raised in the air of the success of finding this lentil.
And his story of reviving not just a farming system, because it was an important crop, a rotation crop, a delicious ingredient as well, different to any other lentil I’ve tasted, a real food in its own right that should be cherished in a dish. It inspired people in different parts of Europe to start looking back at what had been grown naturally. In terms of legumes and beans and pulses and lentils in that part of the world. So there was this movement got underway in Sweden. That story then inspired a group of people in the UK to look back at our history.
And then they realised father beans had been grown in what is today Britain in the Bronze Age. They set about bringing those back. So, yeah, we have a really deep, fascinating food culture, including fava beans from the Bronze Age that then became by the 19th century a crop grown just to feed cattle. And they’re bringing it back as a food for the 21st century that’s good for the soil, good for us. Good, they hope, also in terms of a fix for many of the agricultural problems we’re experiencing and the impact of high levels of meat production that we’re dependent on and a way of diversifying diets.
So, yeah, I think history is important. Helpful, in some cases, to show us what used to be grown in certain parts of the world and what used to enable communities to survive. Far from being quaint food history, really important insights into what the future foods can be.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there’s any risk as we grow to appreciate these new slash old food ways that we fetishize them in some way that we isolate for them and it creates other damaging effects in a complex system?
Dan Saladino: Are you able to forecast any of those? Well, no, they exist. And I think that is a real risk. And I think it’s all about thinking what food is appropriate for a part of the world and what is appropriate in terms of its commercial outcome, really, of being re-examined or revisited. So there’s a story in the book, for example, of Pu-erh tea in China, in southwestern China, where Again, it’s one of these so-called centers of origin or centers of diversity where, you know, wild tea Trees can still be found. And these were cakes of tea that could be stored and fermented and then sent along the tea equivalent of the Silk Road, called the Tea Road, ending up in places such as Tibet and further.
And when after the, well, certainly when China starts to open up, by the time of the Cultural Revolution, for example, it was really debased and it wasn’t really So a lot of the production wasn’t carefully done. It was really a type of tea consumed for people who just needed food. That in their daily lives, nothing to be prized or valued. When China starts to open up, people start to become interested in these Pu’erh teas, particularly teas that come from some of the villages in the more mountainous areas of southwestern China.
And people start to collect the teas. People start to find some of the more historic teas that have been stored away. And a bubble starts to develop and the prices become astronomical, you know, a few kilos of this tea selling for millions of dollars. And actually, this does then start to impact on the villages where there are. This is a part of China where there’s a lot of indigenous people as well who have these trees, these this and this very rich biodiversity is part of their community. That is part of an important feature of their lives and their history and actually a really important part of their future as well.
But the high price of these teas starts to distort life in the villages and actually starts to compromise the environment as well, because they start to actually clear land to grow more tea so it can be so it can be labeled as coming from one of these prized villages. So there are really unintended consequences that can be the risk. So, you know, there are many stories in the book of Supply chains being reestablished between villages, for example, one in Turkey, where they are growing some of the oldest known types of wheat.
So it’s an emmer type of wheat being grown in eastern Turkey. There are chefs in Istanbul who are now supporting the villagers to try and keep this wheat growing. This wheat cultivation growing. That to me, and there are quite a few farmers now who are joining the group in the village to try and grow this wheat. And as with the German lentil I mentioned, there are now a couple of hundred farmers growing the lentil. So it can be done in a way in which... It’s sustainable for the farmers, so they’ve got a good income.
And also it doesn’t create unintended damage to livelihoods and also the farming systems and environment. But I completely acknowledge it’s a really delicate balance. And each of these stories of an endangered food being saved will have its own particular path that the people around that food take. And then that’s why I wanted in the book to avoid generalities. Each chapter is a specific story of a specific place, a people, a food. So I think it’s very difficult to actually explore this idea without going into the level of detail that I’ve had to go into to actually travel, research, and then look at that particular food in its context.
But I do think that there are some of our crops that do need greater diversity that these foods might be able to contribute to. So a story that people are likely to be familiar with is the consequences of the monocultures that are behind the global banana trade. You know, in the 19th century up to the 1950s and 60s, that was dominated by one type of banana, which is the Gros Michel. When that became overwhelmed by a fungal disease, Panama disease, it was replaced by another commodity type banana that could travel well and could be grown extremely cheaply to the point where, you know, we now eat these fruits from tropical places and some of the cheapest foods in the supermarket.
But the Cavendish that replaced the Gros Michel is now vulnerable to a form of Panama disease, TR4. And there are crop breeders now specializing in bananas, looking back at the wild relatives of the banana, the wild ancestors of the banana, and also some of the other bananas that the one and a half thousand bananas that we’ve cataloged so far around the world to bring in some of the traits that have been lost. In the Cavendish that can be found in others that are more resistant to the disease. So, yeah, so I think in some cases it will be communities that should really be the only ones who experience all kind of can depend on these foods because they just cannot be scaled up.
But there are other cases in which we’ve got huge commodity crops grown in monocultures, which will benefit from greater diversity. But I think you’ve got to look at these foods on a case by case basis. But the big picture is we need greater diversity of every kind in the food system. Really, really expensive, but it’s an experience really. I mean, even just visually to see these blocks of tea, or even there are these small discs of tea you can buy. There are people who travel from the UK, travel from America, who are great experts in sourcing these teas, and they work quite collaboratively with the communities as well.
So if you know where to buy teas, I also got to do a fair amount of drinking for this show.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s really lovely and it’s also one of those drinks where why don’t I see Perry on menus? Why did we all hustle around things like beer and just a couple grapes for wine? Is it just because our brains need that type of simplicity? Why do we do this? It’s so much more fun when we have options.
Dan Saladino: Yeah, I think that is something that’s an important observation in that Perry, for example, it should be the wine of England. I mean, in terms of what grows here very well and something that we had skills for and a huge amount of diversity of fruit to make Perry with. Yeah, it should be on the tables as should cider. But we are very much a wine drinking nation now. And again, there are a sequence of steps that take us to where that is. And, you know, hugely complex and fascinating to understand why that is.
And it’s everything to do with the fact that, you know, we had empire in which we could start to import a lot of our food. Including fruit. First World War, we lost a lot of people from the land as well. So Perry making can be quite labour intensive in terms of harvesting the fruit and then the manufacture. Easy to make on scale. We had one version of it, which you might have heard of called Baby Sham, which came and went. And the wine industry did very well in scaling up and becoming a global trade as well, based, as you said, on a relatively narrow number of grape varieties.
As well. But yeah, I mean, in the book, I wanted to have every single food group covered, really, which is why there’s tea in there. And there’s also the Lambic beer, you know, the Quevery wine. And the Perry as well, because I wanted to explore what had we lost when it came to the drinks and wasn’t that long ago that certainly in the UK or in Belgium or other countries as well, you would have had your local regional breweries or drinks producers and that would have been your local drink. And it’s one of the most dramatic stories of consolidation of an industry to the point where one in four beers is the product of one global brewer.
Under many different labels, I have to say, but yeah, it’s one business entity.
Ross Kenyon: I feel like there’s a bending back of the sine curve and artisanal production is growing much, much, much more quickly than perhaps ever before. I don’t know. Are we coming out of that artisanal production, that industrial revolution? And in the future, we’re going to have 3D printing and home manufacturing. This is a dream. I’ve been assured is coming at some point. Is something similar happening with food? Do you see this trend continuing?
Dan Saladino: Two things to add to what you’ve just said. So I think one is... You know, a process of deglobalization, you could say, partly because of what’s happening economically, but also just going back to the To the war in Ukraine, you know, I think initially the conversation was all about that we need to now urgently diversify our energy supply. And I think the food conversation or the food, the observations around food are catching up with that now because of the warnings that are coming out from the, you know, for example, the United Nations World Food Programme and others about the consequences of this just in time supply chain crisis.
Which has become so reliant on a relatively small number of producing countries as well. So I think that is a process that is now certainly fueling conversations about future food strategies. Certainly here in the UK, and I’m aware of that conversation elsewhere as well. We might not be able to become completely self-sufficient, but actually greater self-representation. Reliance will be a beneficial thing going into the future. Yeah, there is a, I’m not, interestingly, I’ve just made a radio program with a blacksmith who makes what he describes as pre-industrial kitchen equipment. So, you know, pots, pans, skillets, and his profession, I mean, he’s been a blacksmith for 30 years, very much connected with people working with metal in other parts of the world as well, you know, across Europe and also the States.
And there has been A revival in craft and the interest in the skills that various points could have been quite easily lost. And maybe that’s the more human side of this that actually to make things. Particularly to make things with our hands and create things. I mean, if we’ve been doing that throughout our evolution, it’s no surprise that many people are dissatisfied with careers or life experiences where they feel completely removed from that experience. And taking risks and prepared to accept lower incomes in order to feel more fulfilled by making things.
And I think that’s also the case with food, that there are people who I know many people who have started out as bakers who are now working closely with farmers to bring back the genetic diversity of different land race types of wheat in order to capture lost flavors as well in the bread that they’re baking. So there’s so much reason for optimism, I think. And that’s what I’ve tried to capture in the book as well. So I think some of the greatest So the major kind of stars of the book are the food, but also the people who’ve been saving them and spending so much of their energy and their working lives trying to protect these skills and this knowledge and these foods.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s a role for hobbyists too. I think a lot of people who work in White collar work that’s quite abstracted and computer driven. Myself as well, many of the shows that we’ve made recently have been craft oriented. And I don’t suppose that I’m especially handy or crafty relative to someone who’s quite gifted at those things. But I find the ability to transform and taste and to have this unique personal experience with something that I am consuming or just experiencing without actually eating or drinking anything. Such as woodworking or something like that.
I find it to be, even if it’s objectively of worse quality than something I could buy on Amazon, I think there’s a lot of pride at learning the skill of practicing something. Even if it’s not as good as a cider that you could actually buy from a nearby hop shop. I feel like the pleasure of having done it on your own and learned during it to almost supersede that in some way. I think many people feel this way.
Dan Saladino: No, I completely agree. And there are some of, I mean, obviously the beer scene is very different to what it was 20 years ago, but a lot of the people who’ve made that happen, certainly in the UK, started out as home brewers. But actually, I think it’s even more significant than that in that Hobbyists or people who are using their spare time to get involved in food production in some way. So in the UK in the 70s, when we were losing a lot of food traditions and the diversity, and this is when the Green Revolution, the full effects of the Green Revolution were really starting to be felt.
A group of people set up something called the Heritage Seed Library. And these were just people with small garden plots or allotments where they were growing vegetables. And the Heritage Seed Library was the way in which they exchanged some of the older varieties of vegetables. And they did this mostly because... Those are the flavors that they could get from these older varieties that they weren’t finding in the ones in sale. That library still exists today and actually it is one of the most important resources when it comes to lost genetic diversity in our vegetables.
And likewise, a lot of the 7,000 or so endangered animal breeds They’ve been kept alive by small scale hobbyists, enthusiasts, societies of amateurs who’ve kept those breeds going. So I think without the hobbyists, without the amateurs, without the people using their spare time around their working lives to get involved in food production, we would have lost huge amounts of diversity.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve had a relatively optimistic show, more than I might have expected, but we did hint a little bit about Ukraine. And I’ve seen a fair number of articles in the last week or two about coming food crisis. How concerned are you? How concerned should listeners be?
Dan Saladino: It’s a really serious situation in that... We now have currently globally around 250 million people close to famine. The number of people who are food insecure has increased rapidly in the last few months. The amount of wheats that were being exported from the Black Sea region, so wheats that were being grown in Ukraine but also obviously now disrupted supply chains from Russia were some of the poorest countries that were most dependent on food imports. So they are going to be the ones where levels of food insecurity and food price inflation would be most extreme.
We really don’t know where that’s going to take us. Either politically or in terms of the impact on those populations. And, you know, it’s a really urgent situation. I know at an international level that people are trying to figure out what we can do, but this is also being compounded by the fact that there are now many countries who are halting their imports. So India, for example, has taken the decision... To restrict imports of its wheat. So already we’re seeing a tightening of global supplies. And that is quite scary.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t mean to make it too grim, but maybe the world is just inherently grim right now. We give you enough reasons for optimism listening.
Dan Saladino: Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think that is the most urgent problem we now face currently in the food system is the knock-on effects of... This war and then, as I say, restrictions on exports, future harvests are also not looking good when it comes to either flooding in China or drought in the States. You know, there are a number of factors that are converging that will create huge amounts of challenges globally when it comes to food.
Ross Kenyon: Dan, is there any place besides your, not to flatter you too much, but I very much enjoyed Eating to Extinction, the world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them. The audiobook is also good. You read it yourself as well. I do. Yeah.
Dan Saladino: I sat for five days in a dark room. Yeah, reading the book into a microphone and having a completely different relationship with my book after that, which was fascinating, line by line, word by word, after a bit of a gap from writing it. So I almost felt like I was in the position of the reader. So, yeah, bizarrely, I mean, I’ve really enjoyed the experience, which I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do, but I did.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Well, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Is there any place else that you might like to direct people?
Dan Saladino: If people can, and it’s available as a podcast as well, the radio program I work on. It has been in existence now for 40 years. Not all of the archive is available, but I think there’s around 10 years worth of our programs are available to be listened to. And if there’s a particular subject or theme and you can go through the archive and look, I’m sure there’s something there for everyone really. And we love what we do on the radio program and we hope as many people as possible get to listen.
So yeah, please check out the food program.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Dan.
Dan Saladino: Thanks for having me on, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: I loved the conversation. Thank you. Me too. And if you like this conversation, please give us a great rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Send it to a friend and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media.
We will catch you next time.
