Please have one of the guests say a few words about “franken-crops,” the phenomenon seen by the cross pollination of genetically treated “nuisance” plants and other weedy species in and around cash produce fields.

What is the necessity of allowing agribusiness and other corporations to OWN our food supply? Non GMO crops, fertilized by wind-blown GMO pollen becomes a patent-infringement, deemed as pirated and illegal crop.

It’s just another example of the march to serfdom… we’re all headed to a feudal society in which corporations are the overlords selling us everything we need to survive.

Are either of your guests familiar with the concept of “vertical farming”? That is, the concept of using a tall building or skyscraper and turning it into farm land. For example, say on the 5th floor you could have a field of wheat or durum and on another floor, you can raise cattle.

(the attached website features the concept, in question, and is in no way affiliated with me, whatsoever)

Just curious why so many people are allergic to wheat. I just became aware of my wheat and or gluten allergy and am struggling with the fact that I can’t eat this staple anymore.

The March issue of Wired Magazine also has a great article about this topic

The monoculture of states’ worth of land with near-clones (with uniform response to new diseases and pests)will one day look like one of the dumbest things we could do—future generations will be completely unable to understand it, they won’t be able to viscerally understand that we didn’t have the genetic tech they assume all civilised people have (see: indoor plumbing, once an oddity, then a luxury, now assumed in the First World).

Outside the box: dependable power sources + nanotechnology = true food factories—I’d still prefer a real tomato and real (if perhaps vat-grown) meat, but above all I prefer to stay alive.

Given the widespread incidence of celiac disease and other diseases resulting from intolerance to gluten, the myriad problems with monoculture, and the poor nutrition of grain crops resulting from anti-nutrients, maybe its time for a wholesale change to more sustainable and healthful agriculture. The planet and the health of the human race would both likely benefit from the elimination of grain monoculture.

I hope the stores of quintotriticale are well-protected.

What makes any thinking person with any substantial knowledge of mankind’s history think that the human race could possibly survive until the year 3,000? The powerful [rich]will protect themselves from the powerless [poor] as they always have, until it it too late; then it will be too late. Not only will there be no cake to eat; there won’t even be bread.

With the exception of Wasabread and Ry-krisp cracker type breads, most commercially available rye breads are at least half wheat. Rye has a very, very low gluten content. Bread without gluten will be very thick and heavy, not palatable to or popular with the general public.

I heard about this book from a friend and once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. I used to work as a staff member in Congress, and I wish some group would fund getting a copy to the agriculture staff person of every Senator at least, and hopefully House Members, too. Could the author Susan Dworkin tell us something about the state of awareness of House and Senate Members so far, of the importance of funding seed banks around the world, and what obstacles they might face in trying to pass appropriate levels of funding?

The more food we grow, the more people there will be. Thus creating further hunger, drought, famine. There is a limit on our planet’s resources. This is such a confusing problem.

There’s a thin line between facilitating discussion and overwhelming it.
Mr. Ashbrook, I’ve listened for years, support public radio and appreciate the forum of this show, but please refrain from constantly interrupting and let your guests speak! We tune in to hear their perspective and comments, not yours.

Monsanto = scary beyond all reason.

If they can patent the genome of a GM crop that is wind-pollinated… there’s nothing to stop them infesting all of the non-GM crops and subsequently owning those farmers via patent lawsuit (don’t laugh, it’s already happened in places).

At that point, what’s to stop them charging whatever they want and starving anyone who can’t or won’t pay it? It becomes a proprietary crop. It’s like Microsoft Windows, only with the world’s food supply.

I can’t believe that we are even talking about feeding 9 billion people as if this were a possible or desirable goal. The problem is partially food production, but is mostly population control. Why has reducing the birthrate not been discussed? Is this such a sensitive and undesirable topic that we would rather allow a huge portion of the population starve than to deal with birth control options? We need desperately to reduce the number of new people who will need to be fed, or else starve in a world with limited resources? We cannot increase food production forever.

-Tobi

If people stopped eating so much meat, using land and water resources to feed cattle and pigs, there will never be a food shortage in Earth.
Also, you wouldn’t have all these farm diseases spreading to humans such as pig flu, chicken flu, and mad cow disease (JCD)

Doesn’t the “free market” play havoc with attempts to provide enough food for everybody, now and in the future?

I don’t know, John Murphree. I suspect the human race will survive for quite a long time. We’re shockingly adaptable, and probably too smart for our own good.

Civilization, on the other hand… I’d say that’s pretty ripe for collapse, especially about the time we hit 9 billion.

the real problem is the heavy subsidization of farming in the west (and Japan) which thereby drives down the world price of crops and throws unsubsidized farmers in the developing world off the land, as they can not compete. To improve yield does not require the corporatization/GM etc, of farming but rather to allow price of farm produce and indirectly the income of 70% of the world population to rise. I used to farm in Africa.

From 6,000,000,000 people to 9,000,000,000 People? A drain on our food supply? Duh! We are already at or beyond the planet’s “Carrying Capacity” Why isn’t anybody talking about curtailing “Human Population Growth”? If we stop breeding like cockroaches that would go a long way toward resource conservation as a whole and stop the inevitable violence and war that always results from competition for scarce resources.

I was very surprised that no one brought up curbing population growth as part of the solution. I was in the Peace Corps in West Africa and while there were many NGO’s bringing in food, very few talked about birth control. Better fed parents were having more kids and food supplements meant more kids were reaching adulthood. All this is doing is compounding the problem.

If we are not going to approach this as a population problem first, perhaps we should just sit back and let things self-correct.

Would that the calories fed to livestock be instead directed to human needs would there not be a healthier and cleaner planet, and would there be this crisis?
Personally my choice is for more sustainable and more humane living

I was listing to the show during lunch. As always, the content and the commentary is excellent. However, Tom, I can assure you that the vast majority of beer is made without any wheat at all.

Barley, as you most likely know, is the major component in beer making. Wheat accounts for a very small subset and while it is a major component in wheat beer styles such as Hefeweizen, it typically accounts for no more than 60% of the grain bill. In fact, 16th century Germans passed a series of laws forbidding the use of wheat in most beer production. Presumably, this was done to save the wheat for bread.

Thanks again for the great program.

You simply cannot have infinite population growth in a finite world. The more we push the human population above the natural carrying capacity of the world, thanks to technology, the more precarious it becomes for most species to exist,not just human. The increased likelyhood of mass starvation, disease, war and species die-off increases with the continued growth in population. We may be a clever or smart species, but I seriously question our collective and/or individual wisdom. Every technological solution creates a new set of problems.

Thanks for a great topic. I’d love to hear more discussions of sustainability issues including various aspects of agriculture, energy and transportation and how research and design are helping or hurting efforts to protect the environment. Population is one issue but can totally derail other discussions since it is so complex. I wish the sale of seeds in the EU had been brought up since I understand that they must be registered which is leading to the loss of heirloom varieties which might be critical for future breeding.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/food-water-africa-land-grab/print

Listening to the show and having spent 20 years in the computer/IT field, I was struck by the parallels between what Susan was describing with the seed banks and the software Open Source movement. As farmers require seeds with new properties, they get “source” seeds from the bank that are likely to produce the desired results, work with them, then submit the working new seeds back to the public seed bank, complete with notes & write-up. This is exactly the kind of open, public collaberation that has resulted in extraordinary innovations like Linux, the Apache web server, and the Firefox web browser. I have no doubt that if there were a wider awareness of the seed bank program and benefits, that its usefulness and effectiveness would grow at a surprisingly rapid pace.

In an adjunct show, please consider having as guests someone like Alessio Fasano MD and/or Martha Herbert MD. They could, I think, shed some light on the correlation of modified food sources (mostly grains) of the last thirty years and the rapid increase of disease (mostly autoimmune) during the same time period. Over population and the ability to sustain a population is one thing but what that population looks like in terms of its mental and physical health is quite another. As Susan says at the end of the hour there are a lot of smart people out there, I personally have no doubt science can figure out how to make food that is pest and drought resistant and not human resistant, but we are not there yet. First we have to realize the complex correlation. The areas of the world using the most modified food sources are the areas plagued with the highest increases of disease, many of which have just in the last few years reached epidemic proportions. To have some quests who understand this correlation, who can explain it and help get this ship turned around would be an invaluable gift.

this looming food pandamic is a again another example of how commercial industry is diverting attention from what is really going on here
Genetic industry is just getting us dependable on they’re genetically modified crop and the pesticides on which they own the patents.
they are responsible for the decline in diversity of the crop we grow what is making us vulnerable in the first place.
This lady you have on the show, “whoes, stem rust, feeeeer”
what a tool of the industry
genetic modified crop is the real treat and not fit for human consumption. it is banned by many EU county’s an linked to cancer. Yet in the US it does not even show op on the label,
you might be eating Gen. Mod. Crop right now.
you might want to look into this since your talking about food

The science in this show is a great example of how this should be done. Scientists constantly monitoring crops the world over, freely available seed banks, donating and being donated to. I hope we can keep it up.

when Monsanto sues farmers, when Monsanto Franken-crops spread into private crops, farmers should counter-sue Monsanto for contamination and destruction of property.

Monsanto and Dupont–GM–is a scourge on humanity and the earth.

We don’t have a food shortage–that’s a lie–we have horrible eating habits. Do you know how much food goes to waste in the back of kitchens, at McDonalds and KFC, or how much is wasted feeding factory-farmed animals–a very expensive way to feed the planet. Plant food for people, not Franken-farms.

The natural order of the ecosystem should not be circumvented. The population is not sustainable. The wealthy need to share more. Too much food creates a population surplus that leads to environmental destruction and illness, physical and psychological.

She says in conclusion–’…if we can have a civic conversation.’ I don’t see how..we can t have one about anything else–not health-care, not war, not the environment. The government simply doesn’t care about plebeians. big money is the only ting they care about. Gm food is not about feeding the world, its about domination. Subsidize local organic small farms, eat local food, grow gardens in the front yard the back yard, on the roof, in skyscrapers, in parks, in city streets and lots. If everyone is at least partially self-reliant nobody is going to starve. We need to get out there and teach people. We need to get it done, yesterday! No Gm foods. They should be researched in high-security labs for 100 years before using them in the open, in an open-market, and longer if we still have reservations.

Just because so-many scientists, as she says, agree with GM, doesn’t mean it’s true. Scientists are wrong all the time, and they just love science-they cant resist experimenting with it, even when its dangerous, or lethal. And who did she sk? Corporate sponsored scientists researching GM, no doubt.

the problem is not food shortage but overage of people

So many complaints about overpopulation! While I don’t disagree that population is an elephant in the room when we talk about the environment, I thought we knew how to deal with it without having people starve to death. Empower women, promote education, make contraception widely available and affordable and talk back to the religious zealots who try to prevent its use – this is how we deal with overpopulation in a humane way.

Very interesting program about our staple food ‘wheat’. Well done!

Harry – I second your comment.

Listening on webcast from Eastern Washington state. Great show, Tom.

[...] by a colleague I listened to a little bit of a long radio programme featuring Susan Dworkin, author of The Viking in the Wheat Field, and assorted luminaries. The Viking in question was Sir [...]

I listened to this show on the plight of food and overpopulation. I have to address some of the false assumptions presented in the show and also the limited and fearful thinking,which I don’t buy.

I enrolled in a world hunger class in 2007 where I learned that chronic hunger is not caused by lack of food, but by corrupt government and poor distribution. It’s caused by inequality and injustice. There is more than enough food in the world to make each of us fat, if we chose that, but a lot of grain actually rots in silos and other storage facilities. And grains aren’t the healthiest stuff we could eat either.

When it comes to our diets, there is an over reliance on grains, which aren’t necessarily good for us. While grains such as the all-pervasive wheat does provide some protein, B vitamins and iron, it is also overproduced and leading to obesity, type 2 diabetes (too many carbs in the form of refined flours) and causes many health problems for people who are gluten-intolerant, which from various sources is 1 American in every 139 to 150 people, and only 10 percent of them have been diagnosed.

Gluten is in some of the most popular grains such as wheat, rye and barley, but it’s also in tricale, spelt, kamut and other types of wheat. Though I think wheat is more nutritious than corn (another grain I would like to see disappear), I think it’s time to replace it.

Grains such as wheat and corn are grown, mostly conventional and in monocropping, both destructive to the soil and if you worry about starvation in the future, then switching to permaculture, sustainable and organic farming would be the best way to go and with multicropping, which no one mentioned on this show, sadly enough.

By multicropping, grains, vegetables and fruits, nuts, beans, etc can be grown on small plots of land with high yields. In fact, exchange the model of the large corporate farms, to thousands of small family organic or sustainable farms, with multi-cropping and many of the problems we face could be solved, including creating well-paying jobs for farmers, especially if microlending the fair trade model are adopted. Small sustainable farms that provide CSAs, sell at farmer’s markets and through farming cooperatives thrive better than conventional farms that are stuck with what ever price they can get at the market, and spend a great deal of money on seeds (which they have to replace each year if the seeds are GMO) and agricultural chemicals.

I want to address climate change. We cannot have climate change and an increasing population of 9 billion people on the planet by 2050. It’s simply not going to happen. Natural disasters, wars, disease and famines unfortunately,will wipe out millions of humans, not to mention other creatures.

I don’t know how we as humans can increase to 9 billion when we are already suffering from water shortages, natural disasters, wars and disease. Trust me, this isn’t possible and I cannot believe that the experts keep preaching this. I question their credentials and logic. We need clean air, clean water supply and essential nutrition to survive, so if that is all wiped out, the human race will perish.

But I still would like to offer a more hopeful view here. We as humans must start thinking outside of the box, stop waiting for our political leaders to wake up (since they are only fumbling in the dark), and start building the communities we would like to see that bring balance to the earth.

Every industry is crumbling at the moment, and I actually see this as an opportunity to start over and create something that is in balance with the earth. And this should include small villages, eco-villages all around the world with fair trade cooperatives, smaller farms, cottage industries, better use of resources, and stop all this consumerism and wastefulness. We need to change our values period if we plan on surviving.

As far as wheat, I think with so many people allergic to it and its derivatives, it’s time to consider growing teff, sorgum and other grains in larger quantities, grains that provide more nutrition per density meaning we can eat less and get more. Teff can do that and gluten-intolerant people can eat teff.

I’m against GMO and scientists playing around with our food supply. Saving seeds is one thing, genetically modifying them is another, a disaster on an enormous scale waiting to happen. You would actually wipe out the food supply, poison and deplete the soil and ruin health of humans and everything else by taking the GMO route on a larger scale. Leave growing food to the farmers, especially the traditional farmers who have been passing down sustainable practices for many generations. I trust them and not the scientists.

Though it hasn’t been proven yet or even brought up as far as I know, I link obesity with GMO corn and soy. Since these have dominated the market, I have seen more people over 300 pounds than ever before. I’ve seen much larger children and developing at too early an age. So I think a combination of GMO corn, soy fed to humans and livestock, not to mention the hormones in mile have led to this obesity epidemic. Perhaps First Lady Obama will address the real reason behind obesity. At least she has her eyes on the right page.

Now, there’s some food for thought. I’d like to hear more people with solutions, thinking outside of the box and not feeding us with fear and limited thoughts appear on your show.

Thank you.

Patricia

The ancient grain EINKORN (T. monococcum) is not only is higher in protein and minerals than modern wheat, but is safe for most gluten allergies. Its diploid gluten makes excellent artisan bread. Why?

Modern wheat is bred by the industry for uniformity, yield and high gluten. Almost-extinct landrace wheats have not been modified by the industry. See: growseed.org/einkorn.html

Eli Rogosa
Heritage Wheat Conservancy
growseed.org