“It’s not about simply that protectionism and nationalism–that we only want to make sure that we eat Lithuanian food. It is a much deeper sense of urgency that as a state–and its political sovereignty–depends on the ability to produce food and feed its population for a long time.” This week on the show a conversation with sociologist Diana Mincyte who studies food systems in post socialist Eastern European states like Lithuania. And Muddy Fork Bakery’s Eric Schedler guides us through the steps f...
May 24, 2024•52 min•Season 2024Ep. 21
“There’s a restaurant on almost every street in our various cities–they are woven into the fabrics of our communities, and they are deeply embedded in our lives. Restaurants are the places we go to celebrate marriages, to mourn divorces, the places we go to gossip with friends to celebrate after church and they become these places to hear the stories of their community. They’re talking to the farmers everyday, they’re talking to the fisherpeople everyday, they’re talking to the other producers, ...
May 17, 2024•52 min•Season 2024Ep. 20
“We all need to eat to survive and the quality of the food, the access to the food--the type of food that we eat is central to our health and to the health of the planet.“ This week on the show, a conversation with Carey Gillam, the author of The Monsanto Papers - -Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice. And we have a story from Harvest Public Media about how farmers are turning to bio-char for carbon sequestration.
May 10, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 19
“Imagine, we have dinner like at 7, 8 pm–my baba would take all of the çörek to the bakery and have it baked and he’s back home at 10pm–doesn’t matter! Fresh tea, hot tea, feta cheese, olives–breakfast. That’s like your night breakfast the day before Eid.” This week on the show, we spend time in the kitchen with Derya Dogan . She walks us through the steps of making her version of Poğaça–a Turkish hand pie filled with cheese and herbs. She shares treasured childhood memories of communal baking i...
May 03, 2024•49 min•Season 2024Ep. 18
“When I try to understand–why on earth would agriculture be practiced that way? The answer is colonization. The answer really is, this wasn’t about managing land for everyone’s mutual benefit. This was a process of extraction.” In honor of Earth Day earlier this week, we are revisiting an important conversation about regenerative agriculture with Liz Carlisle, author of Healing Grounds : Climate, Justice and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. And learn about restoring native prairies and br...
Apr 26, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 17
“And she brought two jars of lilacs, like [a] drink made of lilacs. She brought also cups and everybody could try it. It was really something like a miracle for me because I have never thought that it could be drunk in this way.” This week on the show, a story about a community garden in Tallinn, Estonia. We talk with Jerry Mercury, a political immigrant from Russia whose encounter with the garden was transformative. And later in the show we have a recipe for quick, garden-fresh pickles, plus st...
Apr 19, 2024•49 min•Season 24Ep. 16
“And as the blade rotates and the interior cylinder freezes, it begins to churn the ice cream into a wonderful fluffy content that will be established shortly thereafter.” This week on the show, let’s kick off the summer season with a story about ice cream. Toby Foster talks with Jordan Davis and Elijah Lawson of the Chocolate Moose, Bloomington's classic ice cream stand, and so much more. And we go into the kitchen with Chris Manansala and Maria St. Claire of Pinoy Garden Cafe to learn how to m...
Apr 12, 2024•51 min
“You know, you’d wake up the day before, in the morning, and there was Grandma, already in the kitchen. You’d just get the smells, the aromas of the garlic and the citrus from the mojo, and you know it was just kind of ingrained in the memory of sitting there with my grandma while she was preparing it and just talking…” This week on the show, we dive into a family recipe from Cuba with producer Alexis Carvajal. producer Daniella Richardson review the critically acclaimed show all about kitchen c...
Apr 05, 2024•47 min
“We’re not shooting for perfection, we’re shooting for richness of experience.” This week on the show, we revisit a conversation at Groundwork Indy with then Executive Director, Phyllis Boyd. She gives us a tour of their on-site garden tended by teams of young people in their youth development program. Then we take a drive around Northwest Indianapolis to see more inspiring projects, including a community orchard. Plus, from Harvest Public Media, we have reports on an increase in honey productio...
Mar 29, 2024•51 min
“After the peace, whenever that comes, we will have land that will have to stay out of production for years because it is so heavily mined or full of cluster bomblets.” This week on the show we talk with geographer Elizabeth Cullen Dunn about the current food landscape in Ukraine. We discuss what the future may hold for farmers and food producers in the region as the war with Russia drags on and as land policy shifts in Ukraine at the start of the new year. We also talk about ice cream! We look ...
Mar 22, 2024•51 min
“We know that there are all sorts of good chemicals that come out of the dirt and working with land–working with plants–that are beneficial to our mood and our health. For refugee populations that have had to be on the run or had to live in refugee camps for decades, having a little piece of land that you can tend to that you can take care of and then see the results and not feel like you’re gonna be bombed out the next day–it brings a kind of peace of mind and a little bit of healing.” This wee...
Mar 15, 2024•52 min•Season 2024Ep. 11
“I just wanted to provide context for folks because I do think that the conversation around plant-based food for the last eight years or so has been pushed toward a more corporate, vertical, lab meat, impossible burgers, beyond burgers, meat substitutes that act like meat and look like meat and has gotten really far away from whole foods and vegetables and legumes and how nice it is to just eat some beans sometimes.” This week on the show we talk with food writer Alicia Kennedy about her new boo...
Mar 08, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 10
This week on the show, Toby Foster talks with the creators of Planted , a local plant-based food truck and catering operation in Bloomington, Indiana. We learn about their inventive, plant-based menu and their commitment to sustainable practices. We have an interview with Julie Guthman about the troubled strawberry industry and we wrap up the show with a recipe for pickled carrots.
Mar 01, 2024•51 min
“Bloomington is known in the science world--if you say Bloomington, people think fruit flies.” This week on our show, we tap into the 15 years deep 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 2020, so you’ll hear some mention of the global pandemic. This is a strange one–but fascin...
Feb 23, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 8
"Peanuts had become popular because of this movement of new American pastimes that were accessible to like the common man, or the common person. So, baseball and theater halls and circuses--all of those places became places where people were interested in buying peanuts." This week on the show Kayte Young talks with Jori Lewis. She’s an award winning journalist and the author of, Slaves For Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation and a Crop That Changed History. It’s a book about the natural an...
Feb 16, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 7
“There’s a feeling to it that’s kind of satisfying in that way. It doesn’t feel so much like we could survive on it, as we’re able to provide some of our sort of staple foods.” On today’s show we’re continuing to celebrate our 15th anniversary with a favorite story from 2020 about my visit to a farm East of Bloomington Indiana, to speak with Denise and Sean Breeden Ost. We talked about growing food, preserving food and eating food. We check out their dry bean threshing techniques and reflect on ...
Feb 09, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 6
“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 land that extends beyond yourself and even your family. We speak with Larry Gillen and Helen Vasquez abo...
Feb 02, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 5
“...Call them tamale pancakes, stuffed masa frita, the humble lovechild of a quesadilla y calzone…” This week on the show, we’re celebrating 15 years of Earth Eats with favorite stories reaching back to 2018. We visit a midwest chocolate factory crafting world-class chocolate and a poet making pupusas in his kitchen. We talk with Suzanne Babb, an urban farmer with La Finca del Sur in South Bronx and hear about how home canning is making a comeback (that last one is from Harvest Public Media, and...
Jan 26, 2024•51 min•Season 2024Ep. 4
“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. We talk with high school students and educators about what their school gardens mean to them....
Jan 19, 2024•51 min
“Society has gotten so far disconnected from where their food comes from, that if we can begin with the students, start with children, teaching them how to grow food, they will be much more interested in where their food comes from as they get older. I think that’s a very important part of the process” This week on the show, we talk with Kendall Slaughter, he’s the farm-to-school coordinator for Springfield Public Schools in Southern Missouri. We’ll tour an elementary school designed as a sundia...
Jan 12, 2024•51 min•Season 24Ep. 2
“When you think of literacy and you think of what does that mean and what are all the parts of it– think about reading a recipe. Think about measuring the ingredients. Think about learning how to cook. Think about planning a meal, or budgeting for that meal.There are so many things that are learning-through-play, learning-through-doing-it, in a teaching kitchen. That’s the reason why we call it a teaching kitchen. It really is about learning literacy as well as some skills that are very specific...
Jan 05, 2024•51 min
“Double zero refers to the fineness of the grind–so it’s super fine because of that designation, which also helps make it be as smooth and glutenous as possible in the final dough. I buy it in these 55 pound bags through a restaurant store and I just have it shipped to me.” This week on the show we talk with Pete Giordano about what it takes to make the perfect, Neapolitan-style pizza at home. And we learn how to make persimmon pudding using a recipe from Clara Kinsey.
Dec 29, 2023•45 min•Season 2023Ep. 53
“I love cookies. They’re hands-on, there’s a lot of technique involved in them, they’re really fun and easy to do with kids, they bake quickly,they’re perfect for gift giving any time of year, and they’re great.” Holidays and baking go hand in hand. Join us for a collection of favorite wintery stories for the holiday season with Earth Eats. We drop in on a cookie baking workshop with kids at a food pantry, we enjoy a hot cup of coffee on a chilly bike ride, and we toast up a batch of maple grano...
Dec 22, 2023•51 min•Season 2023Ep. 52
“And that’s why we call it a food value chain.You know, it’s a supply chain but it’s based on the values that you have as far as how the land is treated, how people are treated, what kind of nutrition contents in your food–all those things [that] people up and down–from the farmer to the consumer have an interest in. And so, this system that we’re developing is about addressing those values and making sure they happen.” This week on the show, an uplifting conversation about organizations and coa...
Dec 15, 2023•51 min•Season 2023Ep. 51
This week on the show, producer Toby Foster visits with one of the owners of Tacotarian in Los Vegas. They talk about the vision behind this vegan taco spot and explore the possibilities of both fake meats and vegetable-forward options. Plus, East Coast style bagels come to Indiana, and a story from Harvest Public Media about a new farm to food bank program.
Dec 08, 2023•51 min
“And so I really love to be able to see how other BIPOC farmers in the community are doing good with the land.” This week on the show, we talk with recipients of a fellowship that brings BIPOC farmers together to build community in Monroe County, Indiana. The farmers also receive funding for farm projects. We talk about what the fellowship has meant for the three farmers and how they will put the funds to use enhancing the local food system
Dec 01, 2023•51 min•Season 2023Ep. 49
“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 we’re selling [to] somebody–we wanna make sure that that seed is 100% true to type.” This week on t...
Nov 24, 2023•51 min•Season 2023Ep. 48
“Apple cake is a very family-specific recipe–I’ve never heard of it anywhere else, seen it anywhere else. My gramma started it–for as long as I can remember we had it on Thanksgiving. It was served in a very specific bowl and as a child, for Thanksgiving everyone would look forward to the apple cake. And when that blue bowl came out on the table it was just like –gasp!-- there’s the apple cake. And you knew that Thanksgiving had arrived.” This week on the show, a Thanksgiving special featuring a...
Nov 17, 2023•50 min•Season 2023Ep. 47
“There’s a restaurant on almost every street in our various cities–they are woven into the fabrics of our communities, and they are deeply embedded in our lives. Restaurants are the places we go to celebrate marriages, to mourn divorces, the places we go to gossip with friends to celebrate after church and they become these places to hear the stories of their community. They’re talking to the farmers everyday, they’re talking to the fisherpeople everyday, they’re talking to the other producers, ...
Nov 10, 2023•52 min•Season 2023Ep. 46
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 their food and the best ways to feed the animals to ensure that they thrive. And, Daniella Richardson talks with the founder of the Indiana Black Loam Conference about obstacles and opportunities for Black farmers in Indiana.
Nov 03, 2023•51 min
