The FarmED Podcast: Telling Food Stories with Dan Saladino
May 12, 2025
This month on The FarmED Podcast, Alex Dye talks to acclaimed author and producer/presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, Dan Saladino. Dan explains how his childhood in the citrus and olive groves of Sicily led to his ‘passion for telling stories of food and flavours’ and just why these ‘wonderful stories’ are ‘the richest subject for any journalist’, a lens through which to look at ‘politics, power, science and culture.’
It was The Arc of Taste, a slow food project to save the world’s most endangered foods, that inspired Dan’s celebrated book, Eating to Extinction, and Dan recalls some of his ‘favourite food memories’ created while researching the book. These include time spent with the Hadza people in Tanzania, Africa’s last hunter gatherers whose extraordinary relationship with the honeybird demonstrates the perfect 'collaboration between humans and animals’. He talks about why the drink made from endangered Perry Pears, is ‘the champagne of England.’
Regenerative farming and its focus on increasing biodiversity and thereby increasing resilience, is crucial to our future and the future of food security in an age of conflict and inequality, Dan believes. ‘We’ve enjoyed huge productivity but it’s been at the cost of resilience,’ he says. Our ‘dependence on cultivated plants’ and ‘a few species of food, in an increasingly unstable and fragile world’, makes us dangerously vulnerable to climate change, diseases, and upheavals in world trade. He talks about how ‘shocks to the system’, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and food price inflation have already had huge social and political impacts. Looking to the future, water shortages could be catastrophic for food production. The answer is to build resilience into our food systems.
Ultimately hopeful, Dan explains why we should all ‘seek out and explore the diversity of foods in our own locality,’ and ‘think like the Hadza’.
He also reveals to Alex his favourite take-away dish!
Find The FarmED Podcast wherever you usually listen to your podcasts. Do please subscribe, like and leave a review. Follow on @thefarmedpodcast
Links
Read more about Dan Saladino and his work:
Read about the Arc of Taste:
https://www.slowfood.com/biodiversity-programs/ark-of-taste/
Transcript
Alex: Take a slice of whole grain sourdough bread, which is farming, add a slather of butter, which is a hopeful future, and you've just made The FarmED Podcast. Hello, welcome to FarmED my name's Alex Dye, welcome to the FarmED Podcast. Please do check us out on social media, give us a like on all your podcast streaming areas, give us a subscribe, follow us, let us know how we're doing, give us a rating. Anyway, my guest today is a presenter, a broadcaster, an author, a food buff, I mean I could go on really, it's Dan Saladino.
Dan: Good to be here. Good to be back at FarmED.
Alex: Yeah, you came a few years back, is that right?
Dan: Yeah, when Eating to Extinction came out, I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk and a brilliant audience to be having a conversation with because not only was I talking about what was in the book but I was getting this feedback and probably lots of ideas for future projects as well. So yeah this is a good place to be talking about food and farming.
Alex: Absolutely and on the topic of food and farming, for you why food? Why was food the thing that you thought this is what I want to do with my life?
0:01:26
Dan: Yeah, I've thought about this a long time because I fell in love with radio and trained to be a broadcast journalist. And so I've been working for the BBC for more than 25 years now. And I worked in general newsrooms, television and radio. That was the first 10 years of my career but I wanted to then make documentary style programmes and I did that and I did investigative programs. There was one I worked on for about five years called Face the Facts. And then I had an invitation from an editor to say, would you be interested in spending some time on the food program? And it wasn't a program that I'd been asking, can I please work on the food program? But it was something I'd enjoyed as a listener. And I remember being familiar with Derek Cooper's voice and also Sheila Dillon's. So this was back in 2007. So I left news programs behind and joined the food program. I thought this would be good for a year, you know, on the CV.
0:02:43
Dan: And also I loved listening to the program and I knew it was highly respected, had a big audience. And a year has turned into almost 20 years now. And the reason I think is twofold. One is there was always food and farming in my background. So my father comes from Sicily and every summer I would go over to the island and spend time in the southwest, live with my Nonna. Everyone had a farm. And so I would arrive and there would be conversations about food that just didn't exist when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. My Italian wasn't great so people would be shouting and arguing and thinking some family feud is underway. Turns out they were just disagreeing about where to get the best cannoli, for example.
0:03:34
Dan: And then we would always be able to spend time, drive 10-15 minutes, and you'd be walking on to a farm, a citrus grove or olives, grapes and again and I say this in Eating to Extinction, it was like the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy Dorothy goes from the black and white of the beginning of the film and home and then you're transported into this Technicolor world and that was what it felt like going from Britain and its food culture in the 70s and 80s to Sicily. And then as a program maker what I really started to understand was in telling stories of food there was nothing that was off limits journalistically. So through the lens of food it was possible to explore history, politics, power, economics, science, culture, all of those things. And that's why I think it's the richest subject for any journalist.
0:04:34
Dan: And yet, and maybe this has worked in my favor as well, I think one of the one of the most underexplored and undervalued in terms of journalism. There aren't enough serious programs that are made about food. We are blessed in many cases with lots of programs and books about cooking and recipes, but journalistic explorations of the role of food in our lives and in our culture and in, for example, the food security of the nation and what that entails in a world in which we are now talking about conflict, you know, big issues of inequality. You can explore all of that through food, which is a very long answer to explaining why is it that for the last 20 years I've been obsessed in collecting and telling stories about food.
0:05:29
Alex: So everything, pretty much.
Dan: It’s everything.
Alex: Yeah, and it can be, and you're absolutely right. It's a way of looking at so many different issues that are happening in the world through a, well, I'll say a small lens, but it's not really, is it, it's enormous. It's an enormous lens and the stories are wonderful in that it does cover so many different things as well. And because it isn't that well covered, I think, there are so many surprises that you can explore. So I loved, for example, in researching Eating to Extinction looking at the origins of our food. So how is it that we came to have this relationship with a particular group of plants that we've become heavily dependent on? How did that happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen? So I think the stories for me have just been so illuminating and fascinating, just a completely different way of looking at us, our relationship with the planet, the adventures and risks that our ancestors embarked on, that led us to where we are today. And I think to understand where we are today, it's really important to look at that trail that goes back tens of thousands of years from when we were hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers on to today with a highly industrialized food system.
Alex: when you mentioned sort of risks that were taken in these foods. Are you talking, I mean, I'm gonna go straight for sort of cartoon example like Hunters hunters taking down a mammoth. That's something like a big bit It was a risky process to fight this huge animal. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about or do you have a more specific?
Dan: Yeah, well, I think you could describe that as a risk, but I also think to then start this long and I think in many cases, unconscious process of becoming increasingly dependent on cultivated plants. And we know in the fertile Crescent, for example, between 10, 12,000 years ago, our Neolithic ancestors were identifying and selecting and interacting with wheat and barley and chickpeas and bitter vetches and starting to change those plants and the plants in turn were changing those humans and creating a new way, not only of producing food but also of being. And we do know that it was a difficult transition for humans and that we know, for example, that there were periods in which populations shrunk and that the size and the health of people was reduced because of this new way of being and interacting with the land as well.
So what I think is really important for us to understand that we are the beneficiaries. We have inherited so much experimentation and innovation from people who had to test out new systems, new ways of being, exploring new landscapes, and then creating systems that we of course have changed and developed, but the big leaps that they took we haven't had to take. So I'm talking about domestication of those plants, domestication of animals that become the livestock animals that we have. All of that work was done thousands of years ago and we, as I say, we are the beneficiaries of all of that experimentation and risk-taking.
0:09:06
Alex: And you've mentioned a lot in your books and your other works about how a lot of these have led to a loss of diversity in our food. Why does that matter? Why should the average person watching this? Why should they care about the loss of diversity in their food or in the food system?
0:09:22
Dan: Those are the conclusions that I came to in a lot of the radio programs I've made, but also in the book, but it took me a long time to get there because, and just to give you a bit of background as to how I then became really engaged with that area of food and farming. So quite early on during my time on the food program, I think probably in the first couple of years, I was invited to an event in January to make a program which was mostly about fish and fishing. And it was organized by Slow Food International based in the north of Italy. And I was there because I was following some oyster growers who were traveling from Cornwall to Genoa to tell the story of how they grow oysters and they were going to be shucking the oysters and selling and having conversations with people from all over the world who are arriving at this event. And then while I was recording that, I was taking a walk around the other stands, and there were people who were displaying these cards, information cards next to the foods that they were displaying, saying that this food that they had brought over from .. and there were people from Africa, across Europe and the Americas, these foods were from something called the arc of taste. And this was a slow food project that had begun in the 1990s to identify and start to try and save the world's most endangered foods. The arc being like Noah's Ark of taste of foods. And this project that they'd created in Italy as they were starting to see the varieties of certain fruits and vegetables disappearing and also breeds of farm animals as well, they created this project that had grown to around 6,000 endangered foods from I think around 150 different countries and I started to take a look and I became obsessed with this catalogue. And as a journalist, it was a treasure trove of stories because there were these little entries.
0:11:38
Somebody in Peru, for example, would put forward a type of maze that they had been growing in over many generations. And it had a certain look and a certain taste and it belonged to a particular community and so it had a history and all of those things and there were peas from the southern US that told stories of the movement of people from West Africa to the American South. There were stories of cheese and dairy in England that made you realize that actually the diversity of farmhouse cheeses would be completely unrecognizable to us today. So I could just extract a story from this catalog and then it would just take you into this entire world. And I must admit that for the first few years of looking at these arc of taste stories and I've made a radio series, I didn't join the dots and really have the answer to the question, why does this matter? Because they were just such beautiful stories of diversity and history and culture and all of these things. And then when I was asked to write a book and I naively said, yeah, I'll write a book, which is very different to making radio programs I've discovered. I had to do a much, much deeper interrogation of the stories because I wanted that book to be about Arc of Taste. And then I realized that these weren't just wonderful stories of traditions, which from the outside looking, you might think, well, these are just food traditions and food traditions come and go.
0:13:36
And do they really matter? They do matter because what those stories in the Arc of Taste represent, and as do many food traditions, they represent the existence of huge amounts of diversity around the planet, across and throughout the food system, of stories of identifying particular foods that are adapted to particular conditions and particular environments, that are also selected for cultural reasons as well. And why they matter is because in the last century particularly we have gone from this huge diversity of foods and the numbers change but it could be anywhere between 10 and 30,000 edible plants that humans have interacted with over time becoming heavily dependent on just two with around four providing most of the world's calories now, including the wheat and the barley and the maize and also potato.
0:14:14
And just to finish off that idea, why does that matter? It's because we do live in an increasingly unstable world, fragile in many ways. Climate change is happening, we are seeing the spread of crop diseases, we are also seeing instability when it comes to the globalised world of trade and exchange and what that diversity represents is resilience because a lot of the plants that we are losing and are endangered have been adapting in soils and on farms for literally thousands of years, co-evolving with the climate, co-evolving with plant diseases.
And so we are now creating a system where we've had huge amounts of productivity. So we've selected the high yielding crops that provide a lot of carbohydrate particularly, and a lot of energy, storable food that could be transported as commodities, but we've lost our resilience in losing so much diversity.
Alex: And a lot of this feeds into monoculture as well. Monoculture is exactly what you're saying, that we've selectively bred a lot of thesethings, say wheat, you mentioned, to grow vast amounts of it, to produce loads and loads of yield because supermarkets have got a growing population and all that. And as a result, it kind of can't defend itself now. It doesn't have the genetic diversity to be able to protect itself from disease, from viruses, from insect pests.
Dan: Yeah. So, and I tell the story of the, of this experience you can have if you were lucky enough to go to, into the Arctic and, and the island of Svalbard on the West Coast of Norway. And if you were to go down a tunnel that's been dug and the seed vault that exists there, you will find more than 200,000 types of wheat that have been collected from different parts of the world. And legally now across Europe, there will be the approved list that focuses mostly on around 10 varieties and they all are all quite genetically similar because of the breeding programs that really took off at the midpoint of the 20th century. So to go from 200,000 possibilities to a list of around 10 that are genetically uniform, what you are losing is the genetic traits that mean that there might be an adaptation to less water or more water or a type of fungal disease, possibly a different kind of nutrient profile as well. And with wheat, for example, we are seeing the spread of diseases such as wheat blast or fusarium head blight, things that don't make the headlines that we might not be familiar with. But they are causing a huge impact for farmers around the world.
0:17:11
And what we are now seeing is crop scientists bringing back in some of those lost traits from that gene pool that disappeared in the 20th century to boost resilience and every crop that you look at, most famously the banana, which there are 2000 or more identified varieties of around the world. Famously we now cultivate and trade mostly the Cavendish and it is not propagated from seed, it's propagated from the suckers that grow underground.
0:17:52
So they are clones, which means that when you do have a disease coming along, which there now is, Panama disease back in the 19th century and early 20th century wiped out one type of early commodity banana, the Gros Michel, the big Mike, and that was replaced by the Cavendish. Now we have TR4, another iteration in a way of Panama disease that is causing huge concern around the world because it suffocates, it kills off the banana plants and it means that a plantation is devastated and once the fungal disease arrives into the soil, that's it, you can't get rid of it.
0:18:39
So we're talking about huge amounts of food insecurity because of what's happening around the plant. And we're now, it's almost like the payback to that huge success of providing extremely cheap food or supposedly cheap food that could move around the world, that is genetically uniform and can be grown in, you know, from Australia to China to Europe and the Americas,
Alex: So let's say hypothetical worst case scenario, if we change nothing, we continue with this system where we've got very limited amounts of varieties of food that we have on shelves, that we're supporting, that we're growing, what does a future like that look like in your opinion?
0:19:33
Dan: If we carry on on this path?
Alex: Yeah, without considering diversifying, without...I recognize that's a huge question.
Dan: No, no, it's an important question. And I think what I was careful to say in the epilogue of Eating to Extinction is that I'm not predicting a future in which we will starve. Although I think there will be huge amounts of food insecurity in different parts of the world, particularly because of climate change and the lack of adaptation that currently exists in the food system.
0:20:10
When you think about what happens in shocks to the system, we saw this with the COVID pandemic, we saw this with Russia's invasion in Ukraine, we see this when a ship gets stuck in the Panama Canal. It's an extremely fragile system that one shot can travel throughout the whole system. And so the least worst case scenario is what will happen is that we will see production levels impacted because of the spread of diseases or the fact that things will not be growing as they should. And again, there are many stories of this from beyond the banana and wheat, including coffee, for example. What we will see is at the very least, increasingly big problems of food prices, food price inflation, because production will be impacted. And we know already, wherever you look around the world, huge levels of food insecurity, many families already struggling to feed themselves. And so therefore, if you see shocks, food price inflation, the impact of that economically, politically, socially will be huge. And I'm not saying this is happening tomorrow, but over the coming decades, as we do see issues with climate change and particularly with water shortages.
0:21:29
So already in Southern Europe, this is a huge problem. And so we are seeing more of our food coming, for example, from West Africa because of production being impacted by lack of water in Southern Europe. It's an extremely fragile system that will be vulnerable to all kinds of shocks. And if we are trying to grow monocultures in an unstable world of climate change and water shortages, we will not be resilient. So over the coming decades, what I'm arguing is that we just need to bring more diversity and adaptation back into the system so that we can manage those shocks, so that we are not dependent on a very small gene pool that could be impacted, possibly even wiped out by a disease that we don't even know exists yet.
Alex: And where does regenerative farming fit into all this, would you say?
Dan: Well I think regenerative farming, choose your definition, I mean I think this is an interesting question to explore because it can mean so many different things but what it does mean is a farming model where there is more biodiversity, where you are replenishing an ecosystem and particularly with a focus on soil and the biodiversity that exists within and around that farm as well. So already we are talking about more resilient farming systems that aren't dependent also on so many external inputs such as fossil fuels and different types of chemical protection, which again, we don't know whether we can depend, well, we know we can't depend on that because we saw with the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the shocks to the system, fossil fuels but also on fertilizers as well. So I think by its very nature, regenerative farming includes models that are far more resilient and because of the emphasis also in regenerative farming systems on greater diversity, that really is an important contribution and so we have seen a major shift taking place, not only on a small scale, but obviously large scale food companies and farming around the world, where at the very least, these ideas are now being taken seriously, which they were not 10 years ago.
0:23:56
And alongside that, we are seeing a lot of the breeding programs around the world that underpin the current global food system. So as I mentioned, the crop scientists now exploring underutilized crops, trying to see what we can be growing in the UK in the next 50 years, for example. So there are millions of pounds being invested now in exploring what those crops can be, should be in the coming decades that break us out of this dependence on the small number of crops that we are growing intensively. And obviously a lot of that is not just, is not directly for human consumption, but also a farming system where we are feeding a lot of either grain or pulses to livestock to then provide us with our food, which you could argue is another form of fragility.
0:24:59
Alex: And do you think that, like you said, there are systems are coming into place to support these sorts of things. And one example that I'm thinking of is Wild Farmed, who are supporting people who are regeneratively growing wheat, and they're working to get those regenerative heritage grains into supermarkets. So I can't remember which supermarkets have signed up to it, but the little green label on those loaves of bread. Do you think that people, the general public, will be on board for this? Do you think it's something that they should take an interest in and do you think they will take an interest in that?
0:25:51
Dan: Yeah, very interesting because I would describe myself as a storyteller and what interests me about Wild Farmed is an exercise in storytelling about something that most people are unfamiliar with which is where wheat comes, what kind of farming systems they come from. These mostly are unknowns and I think I see Will Farmed as an example of trying to tell a story that brings people up to speed not only with how it's done, but how it should be done in the future. So if you think back to the story of Nikolai Vavilov, which I tell in Eating to Extinction, the Russian botanist, who in the 1920s was travelling across five continents collecting seeds with a particular interest in wheat. So he would be traveling across Europe and Russia, the Soviet Union at the time, into Africa, so he spent time in Ethiopia and into the Americas collecting as much wheat diversity as possible. And then you end up in the 1950s and into the 60s with the Green Revolution, where the success of Norman Borlaug's crop experiments result in these higher yielding varieties that are so successful they do spread across the world. That's the pinch point that I was mentioning earlier about the shrinking of diversity in one of the world's most important crops. And what Wild Farmed are trying to do is draw on that idea that there is a huge amount of wheat diversity that we can still explore and then also intercropping.
0:27:13
Dan: So we think, for example, that when, well, we know that when the first farmers were planting seeds or saving seeds and then somehow creating farming systems, they would have been intercropping. We wouldn't have, they wouldn't have had just a clean pile of grain that they would have planted as a seed. They would probably have had a collection of different plants that would have grown in one field. And so Wild Farmed are not only bringing back some, the idea of greater diversity of wheat, but also that intercropping system and eventually part of that model is bringing livestock back into the system as well which obviously has some inspiration from organic thinking as well. And for that to then appear on the shelves of supermarkets and that I know it's at the moment M&S and Waitrose for example. This is a story that was quite niche now playing out on the high street which is fascinating and you know I think it's one to watch. And I think their main asset is that they feel they have a story to tell.
0:28:28
Dan: So in just a few short years, when I was starting to write Eating to Extinction, saying, well, this is about agro-biodiversity and food diversity, this really matters, my editor would be saying, just explain what it means again. I mean, it was quite, it was a relatively unknown story. It wasn't a new story. People had been talking about this for a century, but now to think that we are able to walk into a supermarket and be confronted by somebody telling a story of food diversity, I think is a really important breakthrough. I think that's great.
Alex: And I think that's a fantastic answer. And you're absolutely right, because I think that's great and I think that's a fantastic answer and you're absolutely right because I think the story of this food is so important. I mean we're obviously very lucky here at FarmEd that we have access to consumers who are very interested in these kind of things and they come here for that story. For example we started selling eggs just recently because we have our chickens that are just over there, they're out on the fields, they're doing their thing. And it's interesting because people can come in and they can say, oh I could just buy eggs at the supermarket, why would I buy these eggs?
And we say, well, A, you can see the chickens, you see how they're getting on, you can see that they're happy, they're well-fed, they're free-range, but they're also, they're doing a job. There’s an agroforestry system we've got as part of our farm, so we can then wood chip that and then use that as some fertilizer. They also drop in their dung, so that's, you know, your carbon, your nitrogen. Anyway, anyway, my point being, they can come here and they can see the whole story. And this is quite obviously quite a niche place for people who are very interested. And speaking of these sorts of stories, I was wondering if we could go in a slightly different direction and say, on your adventures, on your travels, are there any really interesting, tasty little bits of food that you've found anywhere in the world that you think are worth mentioning that you would recommend people go out and try and find?
Dan: Hmm. I think you could, I might need to separate the two things. So some of the experiences I've had would be quite hard to replicate in the UK, although I will come to one. But just to give you an idea of some of the things that really stay with me as food memories. One I always I'm really keen to mention because it was such a profound experience was and it starts the book as well is my experience of spending a bit of time with the Hadza in East Africa, in Tanzania. So some of Africa's last hunter-gatherers. And this experience of walking into the savannah, and they were making these sounds, these whistling sounds, which attracted the honey guide bird, who would then show them where the honey was. This is a conversation that we think goes back hundreds of thousands of years where humans were able to have control of fire and were able to smoke out bees and access honey, which is too dangerous for the birds to do. So this collaboration between humans and birds means that the humans can beckon the birds who can then assist in locating and then the humans get the honey, leave something behind for the birds.
0:31:47
Alex: I see. Is that a bit like, is it in Vietnam where they use cormorants for fishing and the cormorants dive in, grab the fish, bring them up for the fisher?
Dan: It’s the same kind of rare collaboration, this partnership between humans and an animal species in which we're helping each other. Now, we can't speak the same language, but somehow, I guess, it's mind-blowing how that happened over time. So, and they would, the Hadza would go up, smoke out the bees, throw down the honey, and then you would see the Hadza hunters down below gorging on this honey. And I use the word intentionally because it's interesting that they might not eat for a day or two, or they would be depending on tubers that mostly women would be getting with sticks. They might get lucky with hunting and bring back a porcupine, which I actually tried some of that. But their favorite food the number one food was honey and and this is something that we can we can obviously try today but this is very much wild honey so that's that's one that really stays with me because of that again what it reveals about our evolutionary history, the important role that biodiversity and nature had for human survival as well, because they are the greatest experts in biodiversity that you will ever meet.
0:33:15
heir intimate relationship with the plants and the animals around them, and they have a potential menu of 800 different plant and animal species, and we're talking about diversity. So that's one really important story that stands out. And then if I think about flavours and things I experienced in England. So I was lucky enough at harvest time later in the year to go out to collect some Perry Pears from a tree that Tom Oliver had found. Tom Oliver was one of the great cider makers, but these were Perry Pears and these tiny small pears that you would not want to bite into because they are so full of tannins and bitter. But they become a drink that is described as the champagne of England. But what was really such a moving experience in a way was the trees we were collecting the fruit from were so endangered that they had filled the landscape at one point but in the 19th and 20th century had been replaced to grow a lot of other commodity crops. So Tom Oliver was trying to save these trees and it's possible to drink peri. It should be a much more celebrated drink and it should be on the table in the place of, on many occasions I would argue, wines from across Europe. We do produce brilliant wines in England, but why is it that we've become so dependent on wines from different parts of the world where we have this beautiful drink that is incredible to have with food as well. So yeah, those are a couple of things that stand out. But we could fill a whole podcast with stories of foods and flavors and many of them I talk about in Eating to Extinction as well. Not as a list for people to tick off as they go through because some of these foods belong in their own particular context, in their own specific parts of the world.
0:35:29
But I think what we should all be doing is exploring the diversity that does exist in our own environment, in our own locality. And a lot of what happens where we are right now at FarmEd is exactly part of that story as well of making diversity possible on farms. But we should be where we come into this, that we as the citizens buying food, we should be seeking out diversity, which is why in the epilogue I say we can't be like the Hadza. We've moved on from that. That happened tens of thousands of years ago. We can think like a Hadza though, to have a better, more intimate connection with biodiversity. And we should be seeking it out and supporting the farmers and food producers who are producing these foods, whether it's a cheese or a peri, you know, a type of bread grown with an unusual grain.
Alex: And to that point, we have our heritage orchard on site here and we have, I think across FarmED, I want to say we have almost 400 different varieties of apple, quite a lot of them British varieties, quite a lot of them quite local to the sort of Oxfordshire area. And it's really interesting to have those discussions with people when they come by because we have apple days later on in the year people come and we do some some juicing we do some cider making that sort of thing and It's really interesting to hear people talk about it and to discuss it because they're all thinking at supermarkets in the UK. There’s maybe what four five varieties of apples and they're from New Zealand and all across the world and I think we've got so many varieties here in the UK and to watch everyone's face light up as they bite into a russet that perhaps wouldn't make it to a shelf in a supermarket because it looks a little bit different, it's a little bit unusual to a general consumer and to see them, have them say I don't know why, why this has been lost, why this isn't, more people are interested in this.
Dan: There was so much apple diversity in England at the end of the 19th century, right through to the 1920s and 30s that it would be possible to eat an apple a day, I think for four years, without eating the same apple twice. Huge amounts of diversity that was lost, and as you say, and what was lost with that was the knowledge and the appreciation of different types of apples as well, that when one variety would be arriving, what kind of apples would store really well, which apples you would bring to the table with a particular meal. And it's so sad that we've lost that relationship with something that grows so well in this country. And what you've described as the collection at Farm Ed, and you can also point to Brogdale as well as the National Fruit Collection, Not only is this a collection of biodiversity and also cultural diversity as well, because each one of these apples comes with a story. What you are collecting here and saving is food security. We need that gene pool for the future.
0:38:21
Alex: Absolutely. Thank you very much for bringing up those other examples of other places as well. I should mention that despite the fact that I'm contractually obligated to big up Farm Ed, especially because my colleague is currently writing my paycheck right now. So I have to say, yeah, Farm Ed, aren't we great? We're doing a good job. Pat on the back. So as I was talking to a member of the cafe team earlier and said oh I am talking to Dan Saladino did you have any questions about food or anything to do with that? And she sort of jokingly said, what's his favorite takeaway? And I sort of thought, I can't ask that. What's your favorite takeaway?
0:38:51
Dan: Well, what I am now able to say as a takeaway, because when I, going back to my childhood, summer holidays, going to Sicily, what would be so incredible would be to go there and get food on the street that would be impossible to find anywhere else? And you could say, well, actually, this is the story of people moving around the world because there are so many more Italians and Sicilians in England now and particularly people who are setting up food businesses and perhaps because also because we travel so much there's a bigger appetite for this food diversity. I would go to Sicily and I would love to have the street food there which is for example the arancini, so the rice balls that you can have with some kind of ragu in the center or sometimes with mozzarella and ham and also this thing called panipanelli which is these crispy chickpea flour fried snacks and you could put it into bread and have that. So for me they were tantalizing because I'd be in Sicily I'd leave I don't know maybe it would be years before I could try it again. Now I can be in Bristol or where I live Cheltenham or London and though that's the kind of takeaway food that I love and the quality now is incredible of what you can find is when it comes to Sicilian food. So that and I really do love fish and chips as a take. That's my other favorite.
Alex: It’s a British classic.
Dan: It is, it is, yeah. And if done really well and particularly when you're by the coast looking at the sea, eating fish and chips, that's so hard to beat, I think.
Alex: Absolutely. I was talking to someone the other day who was, she's called Sylvie Verinder, I'll give her a little shout out there. And she was talking to us about biochar composting, different methods for that. And one thing she talked about as part of this, she said that she was working with, and I can't remember the name of the farm, I'm really sorry. If I can find it, I'll put it in the details for the podcast so people can find out. But she was saying that they organically had their chickens, they were organic chickens, and she said that they would use them for the eggs, for the dung, to compost, etc. But she said that when the chickens died, naturally, they would give them to Indian takeaways. And they said the reason that the Indian takeaways wanted these organic chicken was because the quality of the meat was so much better. They were tougher, they weren't stringy and they wouldn't fall apart. So this is just to say that if you are having a chicken tikka masala or something, you might well be having organic chicken. And I think that's quite a nice thing that they could big themselves up a lot more. They could shout about that a lot more.
0:41:38
Dan: Yeah. And I think that also reflects that in so many food cultures around the world that that deeper set of knowledge and skills about what tastes good and texture as well and unfortunately and I don't want to put the UK down but I think we have lost a lot of those skills and we are reclaiming that and I think certainly in my lifetime, you know, we've gone from that post-war period and particularly into the 1960s, 70s, huge amounts of social change, agricultural change as we've discussed as well and it looked like it was attractive to have really convenient food where you didn't have to have much input and people are reclaiming that and as we know from people, the numbers of people baking bread or experimenting with all different types of cuisine. So we are becoming more acquainted with, the nature of one ingredient is different to another and one variety is different to another and one variety is different to another and even breeds as well. And I think that's almost like a language that we lost that we're relearning.
Alex: Hmm, so What does the future hold for you? What's your what are your next projects? What your next steps? Well, what can we what can we look forward to seeing you do next?
Dan: Well, I still love making radio programs and I love telling stories that way and being able to point the camera at some of the great storytellers and experts in the food world. I'm working on a follow-up book to Eating to Extinction which is taking me a while and it's not going be a part two, but it's going to be building on similar themes because I still remain fascinated, obsessed with stories of diversity and how we got to where we are and why all of that history and all the diversity that still exists around the world, why it still matters. So I'm finding a different way of exploring those stories. And yeah, it's taking me a while, but I feel like these are stories that need to be told.
Alex: Brilliant, I'll look forward to that. So just to round off today's chat then, if someone who is listening has heard what you've said about food systems, food diversity, the loss of diversity, if they're interested in that, what would you recommend they could do to, aside from reading Eating to Extinction, available now, and looking out for future books and programs from you and anything that you do basically, what could they do to get involved, to learn a bit more, to take an interest?
Dan: I mean, you mentioned the book and the radio programs, but I do think step one is to know the story, not just from reading my book or my radio programs, but the most important thing that we all need to have is the knowledge of how we got to where we are and why it's so important that the future looks different. I think so knowledge, information and these stories are wonderful as well so wherever you find them that's that's one important thing.
Yeah think like a Hadza, think like a human being in an environment in which diversity exists, but you do need to make an effort and build up some skills and knowledge to seek it out. But I think that's not only our responsibility, but I think there's a joy to be had in finding out that maybe in your part of the world that there's a delicious cheese and somebody's working really hard to make it with possibly even a local regional breed of cow or sheep or goat and to know that story and to taste that food I think is just one of the experiences that is really important that we all can have and it's so delicious and so interesting and you can support somebody who is making that type of biodiversity possible to last into the future. And then thirdly, you know, for people who are in a position to influence the way in which our food is bought and sold. Even when it comes to a school, we can see models of, for example, public procurement in Denmark, where they, and other countries as well, even including Brazil, where they see the signals that a school menu or in a care home or a hospital, a prison can have throughout the farming system. That is how you can make big significant changes that use of public money for long term public good, which I would include in that agro biodiversity, the diversity of our food.
Alex: That’s excellent. Thank you so much for coming and having a chat with us. It's been really great having a chat. It's been wonderful. And I hope you have also enjoyed it. Thank you very much for joining us on this episode of the FarmED Podcast Please join us again next time. And Dan, we look forward to seeing what you get up to in the future.
Dan: Thank you very much.
Recent news items
