Earth Eats

“Wild rice camp started a long time ago. It actually started thousands of years ago, with our ancestors having a real-time lifeway.”We have a jam-packed show for you today featuring traditional foodways from the original inhabitants of this land, foods from lands far away–Anatolia and Mongolia, as well as right here in our own back yard. Wild rice harvested in a canoe, sumac by the side of the road, and for dessert? Pawpaw ice cream.

This week on the show, we focus on tools of the trade. Muddy Fork Bakery upgraded their mixer and it turned out to be a game changer. Hot sauce production is made easier with a hand crank food mill. And if you ever accidentally purchase the wrong kind of rice in Tokyo, never fear, they have coin operated kiosks to help you out. 

“Sniff it! If they’re smelly, I mean stinky, then it’s not persimmon…”This week on Earth Eats Eats Wild, we explore the fruits of fall…and the nuts and even beans!Forager Chef Alan Bergo fancies the Kentucky coffee been in its GREEN state, Liz Barnhart crafts a deep purple elderberry syrup, Keako Liff takes a (ahem) aromatic walk down memory lane with ginkgo nuts, and we talk persimmons with a researcher in folklore and library science. 

 ”Acorns are, I mean, they're everywhere. They are incredibly abundant and they've been a really important food source for humans in essentially every region of the planet that had oak trees–which is almost every temperate zone on the entire globe."But we don't do much of acorn eating anymore as people and in communities in most places.”Graphic Novelist Mel Gilman made an instructional zine about eating acorns, and this week on Earth Eats Eats Wild, they talk with us about this abundant food source, and why comics can be a great medium for learning about foraging.And, we process some acorns of our own into flour for baking projects. 

 “For me it feels like we live in an age where you look on the news and it just feels like everything is going wrong. And so gardening feels like a small way we can have an actual, tangible, positive impact on the world around us. In a world where it’s easy to feel like everything is just falling apart, it’s a small way to actually see progress.”This week on the show, it’s back to school part two. We talk with high school students and educators about what their school gardens mean to them.

“And a man on his way to work hops twice to reach, at last, his fig which he smiles at and calls ‘baby.’ ‘c’mere baby,’ he says, and blows a kiss to the tree.”This week on the show, in honor of WFIU’s 75th anniversary, we revisit favorite stories from the Earth Eats archive. We share two pieces celebrating fig trees, including a poem by Ross Gay. We explore connections between food, fine art and memory with artist Mollie Douthit. Plus, a recipe for making pita bread using spelt flour. 

“I remember in Covid, Sara, she went to the grocery on her way home, on a Friday, to get milk and some other things--basically when Covid was shuttin’ everything down–and there was chocolate almond milk. And that was it.I’m a pretty big fan of food independence and food sovereignty and having control over your food system and choice over the food that you want. And seeing it not available because of supply chain issues was part of it. There’s gotta be a local option for milk. I just think there needs to be as long as we’re consuming milk and it’s part of our culture, we need to have a local option.”This week on the show we visit Twin Springs Creamery. We meet some of the people and the cows bringing local milk to Southern Indiana. 

“Speaking directly to Black women and wanting Black women to know that their bodies are not the problem. The way that our bodies are treated and problematized and pathologized, we’re often taught that it’s our fault, that it’s our problem to fix or we just need to love our bodies out of societal oppression.”  This week on the show a conversation with dietitian and author Jessica Wilson about her book, It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s BodiesShe’s challenging us to rethink the politics of body positivity by centering the bodies of Black women in our discussions about food, weight, health and wellness. 

“When you begin to zoom out, you realize that in fact palm oil is all around us, and the world, in a strange way, is made of palm oil; and we’re all, in a certain way, made of palm oil–in the sense that we use it to reproduce our bodies and to clean our skin and to live the lives that we live in a globalized world.”This week on the show, a conversation with Max Haiven, author of the book Palm Oil:The Grease of Empire. He traces the history of palm oil production globally, examining its damaging effect on the environment, the labor abuses in the industry and the ill-effects of this cheap fat on the health of people who consume it. An exploration of what palm can tell us about our global economy, climate change and who we areas a species.

“Bloomington is known in the science world--if you say Bloomington, people think fruit flies.” This week on our show, we tap into the Earth Eats archive, for one of my very favorite stories. It’s about our visit to the kitchen of a science building on the campus of Indiana University, where they prepare food for a tiny organism that supports genetic research around the globe. This one is from 2020, so you’ll hear some mention of the global pandemic. This is a strange one–but fascinating.

This week on our show we listen back to a favorite episode featuring the story of a young farming family with a flock of sheep, on a quest for farmland of their own. We’ll learn about their dreams for Three Flock Farm and the opportunities and obstacles along the way.And we share stories from Harvest Public media, including one about how uncertainty in trade agreements with China is affecting US ginseng producers.

“I think our approach is: making it better–improving the land every time we have a chance. We are benefited by the sweetness of the maple, right? So, that’s a source of sweetness for us and for the people to come after us. And hopefully the pawpaws will be. One of these days, somebody can enjoy that fruit. Yeah.” This week on the show we explore what it can look like to have a vision for your land that extends beyond yourself and even your family. We speak with Larry Gillen and Helen Vasquez about their decision to gift their farm to a tribal college. And producer Josephine McRobbie visits with a Regenerative Farmer building soil in the sandhills of North Carolina with the help of some four-legged(and winged) “teammates.” 

"We get into a question based on life experience, based on the thoughts that have surfaced for everybody, what if anything are you wondering. What questions come to mind?"On this week’s show we talk with Laura Shepper and Kalie Dance about pairing food with art for socially distanced cultural events. We visit a teaching kitchen featuring Japanese food and talk with the chef and owner, Mori Willhite. And we have the story behind a chocolate cake recipe that some people are willing to share, and some aren’t.

“Throughout industrial history, the idea behind weeds is very political and it's very constructed. They are only weeds because they get in the way of ideas of how you think that a well kept clean, pristine area would look or like you're trying to reach a certain idea of class.”This week on the third SUMMER episode of our Eats Wild series, we harvest and cook edible weeds (also known as Quelites or wild greens) with Anthropologist Keitlyn Alcantara, and we talk about Indigenous foodways and how to think differently about our relationships with plants.Plus, how to make simple floral syrups from linden and elder flowers. 

“I am a human who yearns to remember that she is part of nature, in a way that I think our culture is trying to make me forget.”This week on the second SUMMER episode of our Eats Wild series, we head out into the woods with two amateur mushroom hunters. Ileana Haberman shares her story of seeking solace gathering chanterelles in the woods during the worst of the pandemic, and Carl Pearson walks us through the basics for positive identification of edible fungi–in this case, a bi-color bolete.Then chef Nick Detrich whips up an elegant salt-baked beet dish featuring wild purslane and wood sorrel from my backyard.

“Studying food is a way to study how we are connected to the world of life around us. Whatever we think about humans being so cerebral, so intellectual–it really breaks down because we are a part of everything else around us.” This week on the show we talk with the author of The Book of Yerba Mate, Christina Folch about how one plant can tell us so much about ourselves, and the world around us. Christine Folch is the Bacca Foundation Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Sciences & Policy at Duke University.She spoke with Kayte Young about The Book of Yerba Mate: a stimulating history, released in 2024 with Princeton University Press. And, Earth Eats producer Leo Paes brought his Yerba Mate kit into the WFIU studios for a tasting session.

“There is a beautiful Hindustani saying, ‘Kosa kosa per pani badle, chare kosa per vani,’ which means "Every two miles the water changes, and every four the language." So that, in fact, is the geography of taste and terroir in India.”This week on the show, we talk with sociologist Krishnendu Ray about place and food and caste in India and how identity can be defined as much by what you DON'T eat, as by what you DO eat.  And we share a recipe for a home grown hot sauce that cannot be prepared indoors.  

This week on the show we’re questioning the traditions and assumptions around the role of family in farming. “When something goes wrong in the family relationship, it can really affect the farm business, and when something goes wrong in the farm business, it can really affect the family relationship–which has big implications for things like food security–although we often don’t look at it that way.”My guest is sociologist Dr. Ike Leslie, of the University of New Hampshire. Join us for a conversation about Queering the Food System. 

“I often say that the only choice we don’t have in such a connected world, the only choice we don’t have is whether to change the world--because every act we take and don’t take is sending out ripples and we’ll never know the impact of our choices.”This week on Earth Eats, a conversation with Frances Moore Lappé. She’s the acclaimed author of the groundbreaking book, Diet for a Small Planet, which turned 50 years old in 2021. She’s co-founder (with her daughter Anna Lappé) of the Small Planet Institute: living democracy, feeding hope. Lappe has continued the work she began a half-century ago, of bringing analysis and insight to the study of our food systems and how they need to change for our own health and for the health of the planet.  

“Many of the farmers talked about the ability to be out in nature with other members of their family and other members of their community and several of them also talked about the benefits of being able to interact with people from other communities.” This week on the show, we talk with geographer Pablo Bose about innovative resettlement projects that help refugees connect with familiar foods from home, through gardening in community with others.