Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2018
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listener Pogo wants to know why there aren’t any cabbages – or any of the other vegetables – in his local forest. Where did they all come from? And could they someday disappear? Presenter Gareth Barlow goes hunting for wild snacks in a city park and unearths the evolution of our most beloved greens. The vegetables on our supermarket shelves today were not always nicely wrapped and tasty. Humans have been selecting for specific genes in plants for thousands of years by choosing to grow those we liked the most.
Tomatoes have been transformed from a small prickly desert plant in Peru into a water guzzler with round, juicy, sweet fruits. But with breeding – and sometimes cloning – of plants we have also created genetic bottlenecks in many of the crops we rely heavily on. This has left many of our vegetables across the world vulnerable to shifts in climate, natural disasters, wars and diseases.
To find solutions to this massive breach in food security, CrowdScience heads to the Millennium Seed-bank in England. By collecting and storing our most precious seeds in vaults beneath the ground, scientists are protecting the genetic diversity that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.
Presenter: Gareth Barlow Producer: Louisa Field
Picture: Man holding basket of vegetables Credit: Getty Images/valentinrussanov
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and maybe it's when I had a hand in. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Tammy Walker and I produce podcasts for the BBC. |
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| 0:30.1 | I'm Neil McCarthy and just before this podcast starts, I want to let you know that all 10 episodes of Death in Ice Valley are now available to listen to and download. |
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| 0:44.0 | I'm one of the presenters and I go on a journey through Europe and back in time to the Cold War. |
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| 1:01.6 | When the seeds come out, when they're still green they pack a really powerful garlic punch so if you want to try |
| 1:06.7 | Take one of those mmm. Oh wow you're not joking with the powerful punch. |
| 1:16.0 | This is crowd science from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:19.0 | I'm Gareth Barlow and this week producer Louisa and I are foraging for edible plants in a very wet park in Wales. |
| 1:26.5 | That's really garlicky. |
| 1:29.7 | Ooh, there's an aftertaste. |
| 1:31.6 | There's an aftertaste. There's an aftertaste. |
... |
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