Earth Eats

“So if you were a giraffe or an elephant you would go along in your world and you would consume things off of trees. And so we try to mimic, as best we can, what we call browse, which is edible tree material.” This week on the show, Toby Foster talks with Barbara Henry at the Cincinnati Zoo. She’s the one who figures out what each of the animals need to eat, where to source

“In the first Trump administration, about 350 thousand people from Central America or Mexico were given these H2A visas to come in temporarily with labor contractors. And many of them seem to have overstayed their visas because their labor is needed. We can’t pick the crops in this country without them.” This week on the show, we welcome back geographer Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

“Our younger generation, and mainly the girls, have got hearing, and they can hear that high frequency squeals that the vacuum puts off, and man they can just go in the woods and start finding ‘em and you just cut that out put a connector in, put another one in and they can just run through the woods fixin’ holes. Older guys that can’t hear, you’re a strugglin’ trying t

“The goal with the collective is to bridge that gap–so then there is a lot more equity and a lot more opportunity. Because these coffees are incredible and most of the time when they’re coming from people of marginalized identities, those people are ensuring that they’re honoring the farmers as well–and so the farmers are then getting equitable pay. And so it’s creating

“When the phorid arrive, the ants release a pheromone that tells their nest mates, all the other ants that are in the vicinity, their sisters that are in the vicinity, tells them ‘Careful! The phorid are here! You better go back to your nest or get paralyzed.’” This week on the show, we get to nerd out on insects with Ivette Perfecto who studies biodiversity and agroecolog

“A community is not resilient unless those benefits that we have from natural resources, like urban trees, are distributed in a way that all people are benefiting from them. And we do know that we have areas of the city that have lower canopy cover and some of those are associated also with lower income communities and marginalized communities. And arguably those are the people [

“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, Christine Folch about how one plant can tell us so much about ourselves, and

“[It’s] the same old narrative that we hear, that it only happens to white folks and white women. And I argue that eating disorders not only don’t discriminate, but they target marginalized communities such as women of color.” This week on the show, a conversation with Gloria Lucas, the founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride We’ll be talking about her organization’s soci

“Filipino food is not really known like that, especially in Indiana, so we wanted to bring something new.” This week on the show, we visit with the owners of Pinoy Garden Cafe. They talk about what it means to them to bring authentic Filipino cuisine to Bloomington, Indiana and they share a recipe for vegetarian lumpia, a Filipino style spring roll that locals can’t seem to

Have you ever had a hunch about something, tested it out and been shocked by the results? That’s what happened to pharmaceutical microbiologist Funmi Ayeni. She took a traditional Nigerian home remedy and applied the rigors of scientific research to test its efficacy. The results were nothing short of jaw dropping. This week on Earth Eats, food research that could end up savi