Earth Eats

In the fall of 2024 Kayte had the chance to talk with Nicole Keith, Food Sovereignty Coordinator of the Nottawasepi Huron Band of the Potawatomi (also known as NHBP ) and Kevin Harris, Culture Specialist with the NHBP. They visited Bloomington in the fall of 2024 to share a film about wild river rice with The First Nations Educational and Cultural Center on the IU campus, in partnership with the I...

“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 ro...

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...

 ”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 abou...

 “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...

“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...

“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...

“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...

“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...

“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 202...

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...

“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 la...

" 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 Willh...

“ 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...

“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...

“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. ...

“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,...

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 w...

“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 , whi...

“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 fro...

“There's a different time…what I would say–like a lifely, real time, and to be able to have, at least moments, periodically, in our lives, where we're attuned to that. And the attunement sometimes is also really pleasurable. It's like a deeply pleasurable attunement to ourselves--as not apart from, but in fact, in fact, life …as life.” This week on the show, we pick serviceberries with Ross Gay an...

“You gotta take the phyllo dough, put it down on your station. One person takes the butter, garlic, lemon juice mixture, wipes it down.  And then someone else spoons on the filling, and then they fold it. And then the butter person butters the outside, puts it in the baking tin. And then you gotta immediately start the next dough...” This week on the show, Kayte Young hands the mic to producer Dan...

“I knew that this was gonna be a little bit of an adventure, because I’ve never done this before. And so, I’m sure I’m gonna make some stupid mistake that your listeners are gonna be laughing at me while I’m doing this.”  From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, this is earth eats and I’m your host Kayte Young This week on the show, just in time for the hot pepper harvest, we revisit a story from 2019 ab...

“We have about a four acre parcel of land here that’s subdivided into a whole bunch of micro-plots, basically, where we can isolate, you know, the Black Strawberry Tomato, or the Chinese Wool Flower or a gourd or whatever it happens to be. And we can make sure that those seeds stay pure. Purity is one of the biggest things that we do here. We do a lot of purity trials, so we maintain that the seed...