Podcasts

The quest to conserve rare breeds The importance of yesterday’s heritage breeds for tomorrow

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A White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury plain in England

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Cover artwork

Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That efficiency, however, comes at a cost: the food needed to support such a metabolism. Much of that food could be eaten directly by people, and certainly the lush pastures that support modern dairy cows, for example, might be put to better use growing food for people. But then, where will our meat, milk and eggs come from?

Lawrence Alderson founded the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the UK in 1973. Those breeds, he contends, are the key to future food security. It is thanks to the foresight of Alderson and other visionaries around the world that rare and heritage breeds are still here to convert stuff we can’t eat into stuff we can eat.

Notes

  1. Lawrence Alderson’s has a website. His new book is The quest to conserve rare breeds: setting the record straight. If you follow that link (which is an affiliate link), you’ll do better by clicking on the flag at top right and switching to the UK front for bookshop.org.
  2. Here’s where to find out more about the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
  3. I remain dubious about the whole Sir Loin story, although I wasn’t going to press the point any harder than I did. Wikipedia seems to agree: “There is no reliable evidence for this explanation and scholars generally hold it to be a myth.” I don’t doubt that James I of England dined on some fine beef at Hoghton Tower in 1617, and the beef could well have come from White Park cattle. Did he knight it? Convince me.
  4. In case you were wondering about the new herds of Northern Shorthorn Dairy cattle, I think this is one of the places Lawrence Alderson was talking about: Stonebeck Raw Wensleydale Cheese.
  5. Rules 4 and 10 of Ten golden rules for reforestation to optimize carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery and livelihood benefits are why you should not plant trees on uplands.
  6. Here is the transcript.
  7. Banner photo of a White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury Plain by Natural England/Paul Glendell used with permission

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Podcasts

The International Year of Fruits and Vegetables No need for confusion

2

All the fruits and vegetables emojipedia knows about

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Another year, another International Year. Several, probably. The one that concerns me is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, as designated by the United Nations and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

I’m deeply skeptical about these things, and always wonder how else the money could have been spent to better effect. But the money is never available to be spent on anything else. So I’ll just take the opportunity to rail against people who can’t seem to separate the partially overlapping magisteria of botany and cuisine.

Notes

  1. International Year of Fruits and Vegetables 2021
  2. I just need to tidy up my notes, and then there’ll be a transcript here.
  3. New year, new season, new appeal for support.

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Podcasts

Oh, poop “If you eat, you’re gonna excrete”

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Photo of muck barges on a river in Shanghai from Franklin King's Farmers of Forty Centuries, published 1927

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:03 — 22.1MB)

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Portrait of Professor Donald Worster
Professor Donald Worster
It’s time to face an uncomfortable fact. After more than 200 episodes devoted in their various ways to what we eat and drink, I’ve never looked at the direct consequences of all that ingestion: excretion. Time to remedy that, by talking to Professor Donald Worster. The ostensible reason is his essay The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China. While we do discuss the origins and details of what he calls “the faeces economy,” there’s a lot more to it than that. Excrement is unavoidable. But is it simply a waste product, to be dumped out of sight and out of mind? Or is it a valuable resource that we squander at our peril?

Notes

  1. I’m pretty sure that neither of the Donald Worsters you will locate on Twitter is the real thing. However, The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China is available to download at The Rachel Carson Center.
  2. Here’s the transcript.
  3. The problem of human waste is still with us, even in the “rich” world. Two weeks ago, The New Yorker published The Heavy Toll of the Black Belt’s Wastewater Crisis.
  4. The poor world too, more so, but for some reason the people actually doing something about it don’t want to talk to us about their work.
  5. You can also download Franklin King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries; or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, which is where I got the banner photograph.

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Podcasts

How the Brits became a nation of tea drinkers Coffee leaf rust in Ceylon had very little to do with it

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:57 — 26.6MB)

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Erika Rappaport
Erika Rappaport’s study of tea meticulously documents the many ways in which tea, as it became one of the first global commodities, was responsible for so many aspects of modern life. In the course of our conversation, it became obvious that there is no single reason why the Brits turned to tea. They were drinking roughly equal amounts of tea and coffee to begin with, long before coffee leaf rust arrived in Ceylon, but it was mostly Chinese tea. When the British East India Company decided to try their hand growing tea in Assam, they came up against one big problem: back home, nobody much liked the taste of Indian tea. Persuading them to change their minds was a massive undertaking involving racist rhetoric, fearmongering, and little glimpses of heaven on earth. And it worked.

“Comparative Consumption,”
Sir James Buckingham, A Few Facts about Indian Tea and How to Brew It
(London: Indian Tea Association, 1910, p. 4. British Library shelf mark 07076.48 (4).

Notes

  1. Erika Rappaport shared just a few stories from tea’s not so glorious history. There is masses more in her book, and if you’re looking for a long read in which to lose yourself (or a loved one), I highly recommend A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World.
  2. Not entirely by chance, I also watched a video of William Dalrymple talking about his newish book The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. Tea barely gets a look in, but there is so much else to digest.
  3. There is now a transcript, thanks to the show’s supporters

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Podcasts

Where did the chicken cross the road? The domestication of livestock, as revealed by DNA

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A boy herds cattle home at dusk in Mozambique

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:41 — 20.9MB)

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podcast artworkNot so long ago, the only clues we had to animal domestication came from archaeological digs. If you were lucky, you could get a reasonably accurate date for bones that were definitely not from wild animals, although the origin stories they told were vague and unsatisfying. More recently, molecular biology has come to the rescue in the form of DNA sequences, which can even — again with a bit of luck — be extracted from very old bones. Better yet, it has become routine to sequence DNA from all manner of living creatures, and those sequences can shed light on ancient events even when there are no bones in the picture.

Olivier Hanotte is one of the foremost experts on livestock DNA, with a particular interest in indigenous African cattle. We spoke about research on chickens, sheep and cattle, and how understanding the history of domestication offers ideas for how to sustainably improve African cattle so that they can feed the growing African population.

This picture of a fat-tailed sheep comes from A new history of Ethiopia.: Being a full and accurate description of the kingdom of Abessinia. Vulgarly, though erroneously, called the empire of Prester John. In four books … illustrated with copper plates. by Hiob Ludolf, published in English in 1684. On the subject of “fat and ponderous“ sheep tails, Ludolf says:

the least of them weigh Ten and Twelve, the biggest of them sometimes above forty Pound, so the Owners are forc’d to tye a little Cart behind them, wherein they put the Tayl of the Sheep, as well for the convenience of Carriage and to ease the poor Creature, as to preserve the Wooll from durt and nastiness, and being torn among bushes and stones.

Notes

  1. The latest paper on African cattle is behind a paywall, but Olivier Hanotte wrote an excellent article about it for The Conversation.
  2. The chicken paper is not behind a paywall. Have fun.
  3. Nor is a paper on fat-tailed sheep from Ethiopia.
  4. A proper discussion of fat-tailed sheep will have to wait, but in the meantime, here’s a fascinating blog post (and comments to match) on Anissa Helou’s website.
  5. Here is the transcript.
  6. Banner photo of cattle in Mozambique by ILRI/Stevie Mann. Red junglefowl photo by budak.

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