Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download
Picture walking into any grocery store and the shelves are filled with a variety of products and foods for you to choose from (at least in the US, Canada, and most of Europe pre-pandemic). It gives you the impression that you have great diversity and choice in what you eat, right?
Our guest on the podcast today is Dan Saladino, a prominent BBC food journalist, who just wrote a book that proves your impression may be wrong.
Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them is an exploration into how the structure and globalization of our food system have caused a loss of food diversity and traditional food cultures. The resulting food monoculture brings with it staggering costs like a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites that threaten our health and the health of the planet.
Just take a look at these examples:
- The source of much of the world’s seeds is mostly in the control of just four corporations.
- Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow.
- Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company.
- One in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer.
My co-host, James Connolly chats with Dan about why he felt compelled to write a book that shines a light on the issue of food extinction and why it’s currently relevant in today’s world.
Listen in as they cover:
- Dan’s background and how he found the topic of endangered foods
- The history of seed hunting and seed saving
- The worldwide effects of colonialism
- How an accidental American cheesemaker saves an iconic British cheese
- Why advanced technology in agriculture isn’t all bad
- The impacts of the 2008 economic crisis on agriculture
Resources:
Nikolai Vavilov, Russian-Soviet Botanist, Seed Bank Pioneer
Trofim Lysenko, Soviet Agronomist, and Biologist
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
The World for Sale by Javier Blas
Connect with Dan:
Radio Show: The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4
Instagram: @dan.saladino
Twitter: @DanSaladinoUK
LinkedIn: Dan Saladino
***
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
This episode is sponsored by Levels, a continuous glucose monitor that gives you individualized insight into your metabolism. This is a tool I personally use and recommend to people I work with. It’s helped me figure out what foods spike my blood sugar and which ones keep me level. I can also see how certain tricks like walks after a meal affect my body. Right now Levels has a waiting list of over 150,000 but they are allowing my listeners to skip the line if they go to sustainabledish.com/levels and sign up. Try it out to see how the food you eat affects your metabolism. This is a must-have tool for anyone interested in personalizing their nutrition.
Quotes:
“When you start to really dive into the composite ingredients, the things that are being made, they’re essentially all just monocultures.” – James Connolly
“This is not a new idea that we’re losing genetic diversity on a grand scale.” -James Connolly
“Foods and food systems and food cultures that developed over 1000s of years are far more complex than science can actually reveal to us, but we are losing them.” – Dan Saladino
“The idea of our gut microbiomes thriving on diversity and our gut microbiome says all the trillions of microbes we store in our guts are extremely influential on our physical and mental health. And these cheese’s with these beneficial microbes, safe microbes have been produced in these pasture-fed systems for 1000s of years.” – Dan Saladino
Transcript:
(Intro) Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
James Connolly
Hi, this is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I’ve had the opportunity over the past couple of years to really interview some amazing people. I read a lot, probably two to three books a week. And so for me to find somebody who really writes a book that really garners like a whole new interest of mine, and makes me want to kind of go out into the world and, you know, function, change my whole lifestyle to start saving seeds is sort of amazing. I first became aware of Dan Saladino, because of a BBC interview you had done on the cusp of the UN Food System Summit, and I had followed Michael Thackery’s work for a long time, Frederic Leroy, a number of different people that you interviewed on this, and I found it was the most balanced and comprehensive understanding of why people were or at least felt an antagonism towards the pathway, the UN Food System Summit had been sort of hijacked by. And so then lo and behold, Dan is coming out with a new book. And I reached out to him. Really welcome, Dan, thank you so much for coming on. Can you just give a little bit about like your history and talk about like, where you got started on this and everything like that?
Dan Saladino
Yeah. Well, I’ve been a radio producer and presenter with the BBC for 25 years now. And I’d worked on daily live Consumer Affairs programs, I’d worked in newsrooms, I’d made investigative documentaries. And then, about 15 years ago, I was invited to join the program that you mentioned, which is on the speech network called Radio Four. And it’s a program that was founded in 1979, called The Food Program by a pioneering journalist who wanted to take food seriously as a journalistic subject. And when he created the program that I work on, in 1979, it was the end of a decade that had seen huge amounts of change in the UK food system. And in writing the book, I started to join the dots and realize that what Derek Cooper, this journalist wanted to capture in 1979, was really the impact of the Green Revolution, because so much had been lost in the UK and Europe and elsewhere in the world, definitely in the States as well. And this program was set up to remind people or actually, as unusually for the BBC, a campaigning program to try and prevent things becoming extinct, including, in his words, good food.
James Connolly
Yeah, I lived in the UK for close to a decade. And I remember being over there, there was a movement afoot to capture regional dialects before they had died out. And so there were all of these stories that the degree to which modernization had homogenized, even England itself, which it has very regional very distinctive differences. Even from town to town, people had been recognizing how much was being lost through new technologies, right, the radio… the way that people talk, any number of different things. I remember reading George Orwell’s book, one of his diaries, and he had spent some time actually working with itinerant workers, agricultural workers, he tried to sort of dress up and act like them, but they immediately picked them out. It was Irish itinerant, you know, move from town to town, and they were agricultural workers. And even just the way that people would kind of talk about the loss of the foods that were given to them when they were harvesting was really interesting. Head cheese had seemed to be like the thing that most people were overjoyed to get, these agricultural workers. And I was thinking about that. It’s like… it’s a really interesting concept because I think the homogenization that you talked about, even within the UK supermarkets and the global supermarkets now looks like an abundance of variety. You say in your book like you can start up in the morning and you can have porridge… you have an English porridge to start sushi for lunch and Korean food for dinner. And it seems like an incredible variety. But when you start to really dive into, you know, the composite ingredients, the things that are being made, they’re essentially all just monocultures.
Dan Saladino
Yeah, yeah, And in a sense, there’s kind of two observations that I make in the book about that seeming abundance and diversity. And one is, you know, the one that you point out that it’s diversity, that’s the same diversity that’s spreading around the world, whether it’s avocado or sushi or a certain type of bottled beer, whatever. on that level, there’s that. But also, it’s the manufactured or industrialized diversity as well that we’re experiencing. Because in the book, I do point to the idea that it’s the building blocks, the foundations of the food system where you really need to look. And that’s in the type of maize that is then processed into so many different foods or the kind of wheat that might be grown by a farmer. But the same farmers across vast tracts of Britain, Europe, and also the US, and the consolidation of the businesses behind the seeds for those fields of maize, and wheat, and that bottle of beer. So again, and as you say, it’s fascinating to think of it in parallel with the homogenization of fashion, of language, of music of cinema even and, you know, food is part of that narrative, that process, that trend. And that’s why I wanted to write the book, not just about that process, but also what was being lost. And as you mentioned, there’s some inspirational people in the book who are out there saving these foods as well.
James Connolly
Yeah, could you go a little bit more into it, because I think you actually have a really nice way of giving the scope of the landscape of consolidation that’s happened, the manufacturing of cheese that accompanies all of the specific points that you bring into the book?
Dan Saladino
Well, Wherever you look, in the food system, you will find huge amounts of economic power and global reach. And some of them are less well known than others. So I think the consolidation in the seed industry… so the postwar rise of chemical companies, agricultural, chemical manufacturers, who then start to buy up small seed companies, and then become The Big Four controlling more than 50% of the seed industry. I think that more people know that story. What’s less well known, there are things as you mentioned, like the cheese industry, in which you have Christian Hansen, a Copenhagen-based company, producing starter cultures and enzymes, for 50%, of the world’s cheeses. And I visited Christian Hansen and stood in this vast warehouse full of preserved frozen bacteria, in which it snows because it’s so vast and then each room has its own climate, and they’ve been extremely successful in doing what they do in a highly specialized industry, but I think most people do not realize the extent to which consolidation has taken place. And also in brewing, so the likes of ABN, brewing one in four beers consumed around the world. Yeah, staggering. And then there’s the genetics as well. So you know, if you think about the poultry industry, you know, there are tiny handful of super productive, fast-growing breeds of chicken and the genetics are mostly in the control of two corporations. Again, it’s just staggering consolidation.
James Connolly
And you have a waiver between these simultaneous movements that are happening with the consolidation of the seed industry, the consolidation of the mechanization of combine John Deere, the agrochemical companies, Dow and DuPont, and all of that. And then you have this simultaneous movement to preserve the world seeds in Svalbard and outside of Gatwick is… Can you tell me a little bit about that story?
Dan Saladino
The way I think of it, and I think this is a helpful way of understanding. So there’s a global network of seed banks and Svalbard, which is in the Arctic Circle on a small island and the most secure place that people who wanted to have a backup could find. So samples of all the world’s seed banks have been requested. And many of those seed banks have then given backup samples to Svalbard so it is described often as the Doomsday Vault. So it’s the backup for the seed banks and there are more than a million seeds in and it’s growing all the time. In the south of England in the county of Sussex near Gatwick Airport is the Millennium seed bank. Now, that’s interesting because it’s overseen by Kew Botanic Gardens and some of the leading botanists in the world who are looking around the world for many of the wild crop relatives that are disappearing, which again, the importance of that genetic resource. So much diversity has been lost in the major crops around the world. Crop breeders are increasingly having to look at the crop wild relatives to find the traits that they need for disease resistance, for example, a drought tolerance. However, this is nothing new because Vavilov the Russian botanist at the beginning of the 20th century already was trying, traveling around the world in search of seeds. And there were many American seed hunters as well, doing incredible work for the USDA at the time. So seed exploration and storing is an ongoing process with a very long history. I don’t think it’s ever been more urgent, though, because of what has been disappearing from the food system.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, let’s go into that because I just find him such a hero in so many different ways. So he is a young man, just gets together this caravan of people, he travels all over China, Korea, goes all the way through middle Europe, ends up in South America. He travels for years on very little sleep. I’m sure he comes down with a ton of tropical diseases, a number of different maladies. And he creates one of the largest food banks. So this is not a new idea that we’re losing genetic diversity on a grand scale, even the beginning of the 20th century, because this kind of starts out in the 20s. Right?
Dan Saladino
Yeah. And I think growing up at the end of the 19th century that probably well, most definitely the potato famine in Ireland would have been relatively recent memory to hold, in which the lumper potato had been planted in the same field year after year, and will then overtaken by the fungal diseases which devastated Ireland, its economy. A million people died, many left the country. And then there were famines in Russia. Vavilov grew up realizing that well with a mission to try and protect the resources that he believed we needed. We all needed… the world needed to ensure the food production and crop breeders in the beginning of the 20th century that the word genetics had been coined. So Mendel had been doing experiments with bees a few decades earlier. Darwin obviously, had done his amazing work as well to try and explain how evolution was working. And the application of all of that knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century created modern crop breeding. And so Vavilov in some ways was actually looking for the materials for that new science to try and improve crops as well. But could see that though many of the resources that would be needed, which is disappearing. So, as you say, he and his colleagues, saved 150,000 different plant varieties. And they were stored in what is now called the Volilov Institute in St. Petersburg. And, yeah, I mean, it was the largest seed bank of its time. And he inspired people to believe in this mission to save what had been at that point 1000s of years of agricultural history. So your ancestors, my ancestors, over generations had saved seeds, had nurtured crops, had survived environmental pressures in producing food, and had these adapted plants that were suited to particular conditions. Vavilov understood that diversity really, really mattered, and others were inspired as well, to the point where, in the Second World War, when the Leningrad at the time was besieged by the Nazis, his colleagues were so determined to save this seed collection, that they dedicated their lives during this one-year-long siege, and many starved to death doing that, even though they were surrounded by seeds that were potentially food, including rice. And Vavilov himself fell out of favor, with Stalin.
James Connolly
Very polite way of saying that.
Dan Saladino
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it’s fascinating because it reveals a lot about the Soviet regime at the time, because Vavilov, his ideas were being dismissed, and Lysenko, his counterpart, who had more ideological rather than scientific ideas about the future of crop breeding. And so the idea that if you took a plant into an extreme condition, it would then be able to adapt. It’s almost like seeing it as the kind of populations on Soviet communism, that if they were conditioned in a certain way, then they would become citizens of a particular nature. And so, you know, like Lysenko was in favor. Vavilov fell out of favor. Vavilov was imprisoned and ended up dying of the very thing that he dedicated his life to trying to prevent which was starvation. It’s a tragic story, but and it inspires botanists and seed savers to this day.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s the way… I’ve heard it described as almost a re-education for plants, re-education camps for plants. And he falsified most of the studies that he had done working with fruit flies, and then with wheat. This is Lysenko, yeah. It’s a really interesting story, because I think it’s… the term was called vernalization. And it goes kind of into this notion that was inherent within communists at the time, which was, they had completely rejected most of the genetic work. Russia was actually at the forefront of a lot of genetic work until Stalin came in and Lysenko kind of took over. But you would see… they would do these things where they would build rice fields, and they would build wheats, and then hide within the wheat, they would hide these benches that were at the top of the wheat, and the kids would walk on top of them, and they would photograph it. So it looks like it was so dense with wheat that the kids could actually just walk to school on top of it.
Dan Saladino
How propaganda and again, people were starving… these images of abundant harvests and full of this unbelievably tall crop. Yeah.
James Connolly
And it, to me… it’s sort of interesting because I think we’re still going through some of the degree to which you know, the numbers of people that died… he may be actually responsible for 14 million deaths in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and in Russia, USSR, but a lot of his ideas are actually exported to China. And so we see some of the famine deaths that happened in China were also attributed to Lysenkoism. And one of my fears is that because of a new interpretation of the notion of genetics that is going on right now, which talks about like epigenetics, which is a function that happens to genes in reaction to their environment, Lysenkoism is actually having a new birth in Russia at the time now, which is scary to me. You know, yeah.
Dan Saladino
No, I think it’s so important too. This is why I wanted these characters to be featured in the book, you know, that to actually understand how some of these debates and disagreements and disputes over how to feed the world have played out over the centuries.
James Connolly
So let’s, uh, let’s jump a little bit back to, I would say… we’re talking about some of the famines that are occurring in Russia. In Ireland, we’re looking at the Global fertilizer trade, right, nitrogen fertilizers. We kind of go a little bit into that history, because I’ve actually studied the atolls and the nitrogen fertilizers, off of burden bat guano that had sort of really started to push a new form of colonialism in the Americas and Central and South America. But what we started to see towards the end of the 19th century into the 20th century, was a real fear of the loss of farmland and the loss of virility in the soil, which was part of the colonial moment. Then the colonial movement, that kind of started in the 1870s into the early 20th century. Hitler talks about it in terms of lebensraum, the need for German farmland, that comes up a lot in his speeches. But there is a global crisis happening at this point. And then for Tabor kind of comes into it. So I wonder if you can go a little bit into that story. Because I find that utterly fascinating as well.
Dan Saladino
Yeah, yeah. And, again, it’s such an important part in the book because like the way I structure that first quarter of the book really is to take us into the world of wild food, a lot of indigenous food cultures, and the impact of colonialism impacting on those indigenous food cultures, which happened to be either Hunter gather food, knowledge in East Africa, or indigenous food systems in Australia. And then this transition from hunter-gatherers and wild foods to cereals, which is part two of the book, and the domestication of the wild grasses that give us wheat and barley and maize and rice. And as you say, that pivotal moment towards the end of the 19th century where it’s all really coming together, you’ve got these concerns over soil and fertility and land and at the same time, the arrival of genetics and modern crop breeding. And the brake on that system really was in many ways fertility. And so the breakthrough of synthesizing… well, the Haber-Bosch process of the production of ammonia, and being able to fertilize crops through an industrial process that requires a lot of huge amounts of fossil fuels and energy was a huge breakthrough. It wasn’t an immediate… it wasn’t immediately applied after their breakthrough in the early 1900s, but really came into its own, certainly leading up to and then after the post-war period. And again, there was a break on the application of synthetic fertilizers because of lodging. So the idea that a crop would be able to grow very quickly and very tall but wouldn’t actually be able to survive. In a sense, it would fall over. And so then you get into the work of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, and taking what was a Japanese dwarf wheat and breeding it. So, you know, not only could you have disease resistance through Borlaug’s breeding program, but also something that could grow in such a way that it’s high yielding, but not growing so tall that it’s going to fall over. So again, these steps then are taken from the 19th and late 19th century into the 20th leaders towards that moment when basically we can take that huge amount of control over nature and natural processes.
James Connolly
You have a great quote in there that I had to kind of print out that says the physicist Albert-László Barabási an expert in unraveling complex networks, both manmade and natural argues that the driving force of science during the 20th century was a relentless kind of reductionism. Convinced by our own cleverness, we believe that we’re capable of deciphering nature and all of its complexity and then overriding it. And yes, we had brilliant at fathoming the constituent parts. But we too often have failed to understand nature as a whole, like a child taking apart a favorite toy, Barabasi says, We have no idea how to put it back together again, in writing reductionism, we run into a hard wall of complexity.
Dan Saladino
And that was something important. Yeah, absolutely, is great. But and it’s such an important quote, in the book, and such an important idea to provide the readers with writing the introduction, in that I’m not anti-science, I’m not anti-technology. But what we have seen is the pursuit of applications of science and technology, that are short-term fixes that appear to be delivering what we need. And yet they are completely, you know, working in such a way that they’re missing the big picture. And nature is so much more complex than we have realized or appreciated for so long. But now it’s catching up when it really has caught up with us. So, you know, if you think about all of the problems, the big global issues we’re dealing with right now, and some of them were discussed at COP 26, or last year’s UN Food Systems Summit. We know water emissions, you know, soil, public health as well, which, which isn’t talked about often enough. All of these are the consequence of that reductionist approach to thinking high yield huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of water, that’s our food system. And more Barabasi is saying, and actually, you know, it’s reductionist, because it ignores the complexity of all the other parts of that system. Now, the reason why it’s also important is because so many of the foods in the book actually recognized or are part of that complexity. So foods and food systems and food cultures that developed over 1000s of years, are far more complex, that then science can actually reveal to us, but we are losing them. And that not only the knowledge, but some of the important genetics, plant genetics and breeds that have that farmers understood were important. And were part of complex food production systems, but were dismissed when that new science came along.
(Ad for Levels) Diana Rodgers, RD
Hey Guys, I wanted to tell you about my experience with using Levels, a continuous blood glucose monitor that I’ve been trying out as one of their early access members, and let you know how you can get an early one too. As you know, I pay close attention to how I eat and where it comes from. I’m one of those people who always wants to know how food impacts my health and I’ve known for a long time that excess carbs have been a big problem for my blood sugar levels. Before I started eating this way, I was on a blood sugar roller coaster and would feel really terrible if I skipped a meal. I constantly felt like I needed a snack and I didn’t understand why. The great thing about wearing a continuous glucose monitor is that you know exactly what’s happening inside your body minutes after you eat a meal. It’s been a huge game-changer for me to learn that certain carbs or food combinations work better than others and the cool thing is, everyone is different when it comes to how certain foods spike your glucose. For example, white rice, even in the context of a meal, will send my glucose soaring. But potatoes with the same amount of carbs keep me pretty level. I also learned that I don’t need to be quite as low carb as I thought I needed to be and certain tricks like eating salad or vegetables first or taking a walk after a meal make a huge difference in my spikes. I’m recommending wearing one for a month or so to everyone I work with. Levels currently has a waitlist of over 150,000 people but they are offering my listeners first come access to their beta program. So just go to sustainabledish.com/levels to get yours without a prescription. That’s sustainabledish.com/levels to jump ahead of the line and try it out for yourself to learn how your individual body reacts to food. I know you’ll think it’s pretty cool.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I find some of the stories of the food heroes in this book are so inspirational in so many different ways. Can you talk a little bit about the American cheesemaker who moved to England? Was it Stilton?
Dan Saladino
Yeah. Yeah. Well, he … Joe Schneider, who grew up in New York State. And I think his arrival in Europe was… I think the main purpose was to be with his girlfriend who is now his wife. And I think he met a guy who owned a feta cheese business in the Netherlands, which is where he started out and then became a cheesemaker by accident. He then arrives in the UK and visits a shop, called Neal’s Yard Dairy, which is an extremely important business, not only because it sells some of the finest cheese produced in Britain, and in some other parts of the world as well. But it was created by a guy called Randolph Hodgson, who was almost in the late 70s, part of the punk movement. So it created a way of doing business that was, you know, almost countercultural, and not only sold cheese, but visited farmers to understand what they were doing, and also to help and support them and solve problems with them. And his keen interest was to save what remained of Britain’s unpasteurized milk cheeses, so raw milk cheeses and a cheese he loved was Stilton, the king of cheeses, it’s a blue cheese, blue vein cheese, extremely difficult, challenging to make, which is why it’s a celebratory cheese and people eat Stilton, mostly during Christmas. However, by the 1990s, because of the attrition, really, that had taken place in the 20th century, in cheesemaking in Britain, particularly with the Second World War, where the… when the government took control of cheesemaking, and there was only one cheese that could be made, so huge amounts of skills lost. And then, most unpasteurized milk cheeses were also then lost, partly because of speeding up the process. And the technology meant that you know, starter cultures could be used, as we’ve mentioned before, you know, it’s a highly efficient business that happened to Stilton in the 1990s. So that basically, the traditional raw milk unpasteurized version of Stilton went extinct. And to Randolph Hodgson, this was heartbreaking and it was… almost he went through a grieving process. Joe Schneider had walked into Neal’s Yard Dairy as a shop and fallen in love with these big truckles of cheese, these huge cheeses that Randolph was selling with these different flavors, aromas, and textures and said I want to make one of these cheeses, they became friends. And together, they came up with the plan of bringing back the unpasteurized version of Stilton. And they did… they succeeded, but they weren’t allowed to call it Stilton because, by that point, there wasn’t… the EU, the European Union had recognized Stilton as a traditional cheese. And when it described what Stilton was, it described it as a cheese that was made with pasteurized milk. And so they had to come up with a different name. And so they call it Stichelton which is the Old English name for the town of Stilton, where the cheese has never been made. It was traded, it was traded from this town in Cambridgeshire on route to London. And so we have… we can thank an American cheesemaker for bringing back one of the greatest English cheeses ever made.
James Connolly
And a cheese that has been accused of smelling up every refrigerator it’s ever been.
Dan Saladino
Yeah, but I think it tells us that even though you know, the intention of this European Union regulatory system was to protect traditional foods, right? It worked against Stichelton and Joe Schneider says that, but the law would allow him to make him pasteurized milk Stilton and put a banana in it or cranberries or whatever. But he couldn’t make a Stilton with unpasteurized milk cheeses. So it’s again a bizarre story but, and also reflected around the world. There are many cheesemakers struggling today to keep these unpasteurized milk cheeses alive. Why does that matter? Well, it matters because of flavor and the connection between pasture of breeds and the microbes of that system being transferred into a food. And it’s an emerging science, there’s still a lot more we need to know. But the idea of our gut microbiomes thriving on diversity and our gut microbiome says all the trillions of microbes we store in our guts are extremely influential on our physical and mental health. And these cheese’s with these beneficial microbes, safe microbes that have been produced in these pasture-fed systems for 1000s of years. There’s a new argument why we should be eating these delicious cheeses because they’re good for our gut microbiome. So good for us.
James Connolly
Yeah, you have two wonderful quotes in there. I think once starts the chapter. It’s Craig Venter said, If you don’t like microbes, you don’t like planet Earth. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other one was how do you govern a nation that has over 200 varieties of cheeses?
Dan Saladino
Yeah. And then, again, you know that idea that diversity existed, and in a sense, the disappearance of that diversity in the fact that there are now, you know, very large, global dairy companies making camembert cheese, and the traditional camembert of Normandy is becoming really endangered. That actually doesn’t just reflect what’s happened to cheese. It’s reflecting what’s happening to an economy, to politics, to a nation, to identity, to culture. So I think, yeah, through these food stories that reveal so much about how quickly things have changed on so many levels.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, and I fear for it, I, you and I both have children, I think it was Daniel Quinn, who was one of my favorite writers, but I may get this wrong. He said that the fear is that you get used to degraded landscape, and you think that it’s normal. And I think that one of my biggest fears is that we have created an environment where we almost have everything we could possibly want. And yet we’re still not happy, because the world is getting smaller and smaller. And the ubiquity of knowledge and the ubiquity of like just the different ideas of essentially just been honed down to a point where, you know, you have these people who are holding on to these traditions that are almost considered to be an archaic, right. So and you follow all over the world, you go to these places that talk about the smells of kavilca, and the distinction and differences between the varieties of bananas that we eat. The history of Geechee red peas, right? Amazing, absolutely amazing history of the African diaspora of food that, in essence, have become part of a landscape of American culture, but now have been excised from a lot of the history. And then these people, you know, individuals part of a large lineage of grandmothers who saved seeds, who saved biodiversity, who brought these cultures with them all over the world. And I think that that is one of the things that actually gives me so much hope in reading this book.
Dan Saladino
And I think those stories that you recount there, I mean, it does feel when you speak to the people who are saving it, just saving these foods, it does feel like a real fight know that they feel that their culture and their identity is under attack. And in some cases, it really has been the case with a lot of colonialism, and land grabs. But at the same time, there’s also this, you know, the homogenization that comes with that corporate power. And you know, that the spread of the same model, the same system into these different cultures. And I think the fact that these people have taken a stand, and you know, many of them have been extremely brave to do this and taking risks of every kind, you know, and financial and all kinds. And I think we should have… we should all be thankful that they are out there. And they’ve recognized the importance of something that very few of us get to even see or experience. You mentioned, Kavilca and these Turkish farmers who they understood that a certain type of wheat grew really well in the fields, and modern wheat could not survive there. But you know, because the ability to kind of send the equipment and the chemicals to override those conditions, you know, it was a very close thing that the wheat could could have disappeared. Luckily, they were in such a remote place that the chemicals and the Green Revolution didn’t hit them hard. And they’ve saved a genetic resource that could be extremely important for their future. And certainly one in which they don’t need as many inputs as the modern farming systems. So in a sense, by saving something from the past, they are giving us a glimpse into a possible future.
James Connolly
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, like the there are times when I look at the way that we’ve kind of told the history of this even just the Green Revolution, I’d first heard about Norman Borlaug in a West Wing episode. The president at the time, he was talking about the the Nobel prize that he had won and and how he had changed that and saved so many millions of people, in some way the Haber-Bosch process, right? Absolutely. Yeah. We can almost estimate the number of people who are alive today because of these technologies, but I find the addendum to Eating to Extinction, your book, and Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet also gets us to recognize that when the wheat that was grown by Borlaug was exported to India, they didn’t want it. They actually they did not like the taste of it. They were dealing with famines that were brought on because of the conflict in the West. And because of policies that were set out by Churchill and his scientist friend, Frederick Lindemann, who excised and pulled enormous amounts of food and brought it to England, sort of hoarded it, for the war and for after the war. And so we talked about the Bengal famine, were close to 3 million people died because of war policies that happened in Britain. And so you had these conflicts, famines that were brought on, that were manmade. And then we have this also manmade new revolution that’s supposed to feed everyone. That is also an imposition on a culture, that is, you know, kind of hard to… embracing the complexity of all of this means that we also have to deal with the like some of the aspects of how much we’ve sort of forced the Green Revolution in many of these different agricultural policies on the world. And just sort of finish my point, the Gates Foundation in Africa now is doing many sort of Neo colonialist policies that I find actually very disturbing, because they’re, in essence, sort of in league with seed companies, and agro chemical companies and stuff like that to sort of force a new Green Revolution onto Africa. And there is enormous pushback on that within agricultural and conservation communities in Africa. But it almost seems that seems to fall on deaf ears. So just wondering if you had any opinion on that?
Dan Saladino
Yeah. And again, like, Charles C. Mann, you know, I kind of feel it deserves… I wish I could have written a whole book on just that subject. But he, obviously he did that extremely well, with the Wizard and the Prophet. And it’s such an important story for us all to be aware of. And I think there are arguments that you know, that in the right context in the right place, that was important research and it in a certain context. And going back to that idea, that reductionist approach to science, even, you know, Norman Borlaug did not think that he’d find the kind of the complete fix for the food system. It was going to be, you know, a short term solution in his mind, and he felt was an appropriate model in some parts of the world. However, now, you mentioned India, and again, an extremely complex story about export of commodity crops from the US, of aid, of colonialism. I mean, it’s very hard to actually unpick this and actually kind of say it’s one factor or another. There is, interestingly, a story that didn’t make it into Eating to Extinction. But it’s the story of millets in India, because, you know, the British had done such a… kind of imposed so many crops on Indian farmers. And there were areas of India that became weak growing areas, which are now, interestingly enough, experiencing severe water shortages. Some of the crops that were lost include millet, type of millets. And recent research. And I think this is based in a number of universities have been involved in this in the States, have made calculations that if you replaced a lot of the wheat and rice production, the legacy of the Green Revolution, with millets, it’s Win-Win-Win on so many levels. So win in terms of water usage, you win in terms of the inputs required, and you win in terms of the nutrient deficiency that is affecting many parts of the population. So yeah, I think that idea that the technology made it possible to spread the same form of agriculture and the same types of crops all over the world, and displaced so much diversity that actually we now realize that we need. That story of wheat and rice expanding in India at the expense of millets is a good example of that. And actually, there are forms of technology and science that we need. And that is in the form of processing millets because that they used to be in traditional systems very hard to, to process and grind down. New technology means that that’s now possible. So again, you know, this reductionist approach of thinking you know, one solution fits all and it’s all about producing huge amounts of calories, I think, yeah, fascinating that you mentioned that.
James Connolly
I think this is such an important book. I want to get a little bit into 2008. Because I think that, that really sort of galvanize you, and maybe we can kind of finish up with that. So 2008 seems to be the sort of pivotal moment, I’ve actually been reading books centered around 2008 and 2009, for the past few months, because it seemed, you know, with 9/11, and 2001, we had these really seminal sort of pivotal moments in economic and international policy and any number of different things. 2008 seems to be a pivotal moment that I don’t know if we recognize the reverberations that have happened because of it. And you talk about it specifically from an agricultural perspective, while everybody else is focused on banking. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.
Dan Saladino
Yeah, an interesting, this is one, I am really getting my… you know, I’m becoming immersed in this radio program about food. And I end up looking at some news reports about what’s happening to rice prices. And then realize this is a global story. And what had come together at that point, which was a running down of global stocks of a lot of crops, and also some climate-related, bad harvests in different parts of the world. Market started to tighten, governments began holding on to supplies and quite quickly, where we find ourselves in a global food crisis, with price spikes, and a lot of people going hungry. And as you say, most of the world is really focused on the banking crisis. But this was a really serious wake up call to people who were monitoring food supplies around the world, and the FAO, a UN called an emergency summit. And then, following on from that, you know, we had the the Arab Spring. So I think the impact of this tightening in in food supplies and the spike in prices had a real impact on so many different economies and countries around the world. But such as the… such as the treatment and or the consideration of food and agriculture that this parcel of people buy, and they didn’t really understand the full impact that would have on creating instability, and hunger. And what what I say in the book is that at the time, it’s almost as if we could have seen the next wave of the Green Revolution, in a sense that what we really needed many people argued was another big push to produce huge amounts of calories. Why does diversity matter? I then ask in the introduction, Well, fast forward a decade later, and you’ve got one of the senior figures in one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, at a UN summit 2019, saying, we’ve reached the end of this system in which we have been killing diversity. And yeah, so it’s fascinating to think at that point, you know, we’re in a food crisis, and there’s a price spike. And we’re asking, Well, where do we go next. And then we start to hear, you know, the word biodiversity being used a lot more frequently. You know, obviously, climate becomes a big factor as well. And I know on this podcast, I know that you’ve heard from contributors, who would argue there’s sufficient food in the world, it’s just it basically the supply chains and the economics that we currently have that govern who eats what is what’s broken. And I think the idea now of talking about diversity, and the impact of this system of uniformity and homogenization, and part of that, you could argue, higher rates of meat consumption around the world, being fed by soy, which is created deforestation in different parts of the world. So again, this we’re just seeing a breakdown of natural systems. And you know, you could even argue that COVID is a consequence of the breakdown between the barriers that we have between the wild, you know, human, yeah, human populations. So, we are waking up to the fact that we have a real food crisis now, on our hands, but yet, you’re right, that I really wanted people to think back to 2008-9, and that point at which the world was asking what’s happening in the food system, or certainly people who are watching with great intent what’s happening in the food system.
James Connolly
There’s a book that came out last year. It was called The World for Sale. And it’s about…
Dan Saladino
I have it on my shelf
James Connolly
Yeah, so Brilliant. I tried to get them on the podcast. But they… I mean, they had spent years… the global commodities markets and people who… the large brokerage firms and stuff like that are so secretive. You have Cargill, you have ADM, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus, some of the most secretive families, you know, private brokerages, some of them have gone public, but they don’t release a lot of their expenditures, they don’t release a lot of their profits. It took these guys, nearly a decade, I think, to sift through and sort of figure out the level to which they were directly affecting the price of any number of different commodities, raw commodities around the world. Mining, precious metals, oil, gasoline, and agricultural commodities. And I think that one of the biggest barriers to actually having true diversity within our food system is that it’s harder to commoditize diversity, right? So if you have Emmer wheat, and you have 50 different varieties of lentils, it becomes harder for these companies to in essence, sort of buy and sell and trade them in bulk. And I think that the way that we’re focusing on, I think we should be focusing more on divesting from the level of power that these guys have of these economies because they… The World for Sale was talking about 2008, and an inflation and prices, you know, at least partially due to these commodity brokers who were hyping up the price.
Dan Saladino
What I also find interesting is the idea that the way in… because I mentioned that towards the end of the book as well about the… it’s almost like an inbuilt degree of insecurity by policymakers and government to think, well, we need to keep the system going. And if we change the system, then can we feed our populations and what will happen to food prices, and hence you have the current use of subsidies to underpin the existing system. And yet, I think the tensions now are near between the existing systems that are being subsidized. And the issues over climate or lack of water, dependence on fossil fuels, and fertilizer prices now escalating. The tension between those two things means that, you know, we have a national food strategy review underway at the moment in the UK, where people are saying we really need to be thinking long term. But what I what I find really interesting now is to look at what’s happening in some of the big investor networks. So trillions of dollars are now being invested in new forms of ideas for innovation of food production, and farming systems, and application of ESG as well. So in the environment, social, and governance approach to investment as well. So follow the money. And I think the money is actually saying that the existing system is high risk, we need to invest in something else. Will that reach the Emmer farmers? Unlikely, but there… I think there is the possibility that with technology, we can have a more diverse food system, which is why in the rice chapter of the book, I ended up in this remote farm in southwestern China with the last farmer in his community to be growing this rare type of red-tipped rice. And he, standing there and gets out his phone. And he goes on the WeChat app because his customers are in Beijing and Chengdu and they want his rice and he’s using his phone to sell. So I mean, I think it’s an interesting thing happening in the investment world. And I think there’s some interesting things will be… there will come through unusual and interesting applications of technology and changing markets.
James Connolly
Well, I mean, Dan, it seriously, thank you so much for coming on. This is a big get for me, you know, I hope this is as fruitful of a conversation for you as it is for me.
Dan Saladino
Well really was James and I… you know, I love the fact that you’re able to, you know, read the book in a way in which… I’ve learned a lot about some of the, you know, the bits of the history that I think are important. I think you’ve helped expand on those ideas really well in this conversation. So thank you so much.
James Connolly
Great. So the book is Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. You know, you’re on Twitter. I think it’s @DanSaladinoUK. On Instagram, I don’t think you’re very much on there.
Dan Saladino
@dan.saladino, I think, So, what I’ve done on Instagram is just to… I think quite a few people have said well, I’d love to know what these foods look like. So I’ve been posting on occasion, a few images of the foods chapter by chapter. So if you’re patient I’ll get there and there will be more of those stories with images.
James Connolly
I found the Geechee peas and ordered some. Yeah really looking forward to making those. Yeah great, thank you so much.
(Closing) Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for joining us on the Sustainable Dish podcast. If you liked the show, please leave us a review on iTunes and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at Sacred Cow dot info. See you next time. Thanks for listening
