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!

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Links

Read more about Dan Saladino and his work: 

https://www.dansaladino.com/

Read about the Arc of Taste: 

https://www.slowfood.com/biodiversity-programs/ark-of-taste/