Unearthed - Journeys into the Future of Food

If you have a window box, veg patch or allotment, how does the way you are growing food change your relationship with it? 

In this episode of Unearthed, grower and forager Poppy Okocha hears how communities and farmers are producing food around the world, with the environment and changing climates in mind.  

Food educator, agriculturalist and cook Dee Woods joins Dr C...

With so many of our favourite foods facing extinction, including bananas, chocolate and coffee, what will be on our kitchen tables in the future?

In this episode, James Wong looks at what actions we need to take today, to secure nutritious and disease-resilient food in the future.

Hear from artists and designers Sharp and Sour on how they create installations to shock the public into the realities of food’s future plight.

Dr Car...

This time, Poppy Okocha’s looking at our relationship with growing and producing foods around the world. She meets up with Jeremy Torz, one of the founders of Union Hand Roasted Coffee, to find out how one coffee brand is protecting producers and delicate environments in Ethiopia.

Many livelihoods and traditions are being threatened by changing climatic conditions, yet many of these age-old practises hold clues to how we might pro...

Advolly Richmond is exploring how food production methods and climate change today are exacerbating issues of biodiversity loss. As conditions change and human activity intervenes with environments, entire ecosystems are thrown out of balance, and the consequences for species are dire.

We could be losing plants and species science hasn’t even named, all due to harmful agricultural practises and accelerating climate change.

But Ke...

James Wong takes a look at what you can do at home, versus what big business and supermarket giants are doing to make sure our food choices are transparent and production is fair and sustainable. He speaks with the Former Director at Sainsbury’s and Kew Trustee Judith Batchelar, as well as Anna Taylor of the Food Foundation.

Our food habits are exposing wild inequalities in our world: whilst more than 2 billion people are sufferin...

The food we eat connects us to the wider world; to global history, cultures and traditions. But the practises we’ve ended up with today mean that our systems are failing and many of our favourite foods and farming practises are heading towards extinction.

 In this first episode, Advolly Richmond explores the history of our relationship with food and how it’s led us to harmful modern-day production practices. She meets up with acto...

The way we produce and consume food is having a devastating impact on our natural world.

How can we avoid disaster, and feed the world well?

Unearthed: Journeys into the future of food, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, explores our contemporary relationship with food: what are we eating? What is it doing to our health and the health of the planet? And how are livelihoods and agriculture changing before our eyes?

Take a journ...

Dirt on our hands: Overcoming botany’s hidden legacy of inequality 

In this special episode of Unearthed, professional plant geek, author, and broadcaster James Wong explores the histories of inequality and personal experiences that lie behind a seemingly democratic and wholesome world of plants. 

From the colonial history of plant collections and our perceptions of what form a ‘traditional’ garden sho...

Time is running out for the world’s forests, ecosystems and the life they support. The consequences for human life and climate could be catastrophic – unless we take action now.

In this episode James Wong speaks to scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to understand how forest loss and timber trafficking presents massive problems for future generations – and how they are tackling the illegal trade of woo...

4 years ago, 15 year-old Natasha Ednan-Laperouse lost her life to a severe sesame allergy.

In this episode, James Wong speaks to Natasha’s parents Tania and Nadim, who worked with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to confirm the plant substance that caused their daughter’s death and on their fight to change the law.

We hear from the experts: Professor Monique Simmonds OBE explains how Kew was able to help, and Professor ...

In this episode James Wong learns how there’s nothing weirder and more wonderful than the everyday.

Hear about the depression trials that have seen sufferers tripping on magic mushrooms, and the zombie fungus that causes ants to explode.

Fungi may get a bad press for growing on your shower curtain or fridge, but there’s so much more to this amazing kingdom, so we gave it a whole episode.

James meets mycologists from ...

Deep in some of the world’s most hard-to-reach places lies a wealth of plant knowledge that could offer the next life-saving cure.

In this episode, James Wong explores how Kew scientists works alongside remote communities on the ground to understand plants’ medicinal properties.

And there’s a history lesson in it too, as James learns of the enormous impact that humble quinine, (found in your G&T), had throug...

Plants have the power to cure – and also kill. In this episode we hear how a spurned woman murdered her lover with just a mysterious plant substance.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was instrumental in the race to identify the material, and how it was used, so to bring the killer to justice.

James Wong hears how specialist plant knowledge uncovered the mystery from forensic samples, and a medical toxicologist shares the real...

One wintery morning in 2014, somebody stole a tiny and extremely rare waterlily from the collection at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It was never seen again, and they were never caught.

James Wong begins his journey into the mysterious world of plants and fungi by looking at the criminal underworld of plant trafficking.

Speaking to Border Force, Kew scientists and advisors, James learns about the little-appreciated fight to pro...