美国国家公共电台 NPR Can This Breakfast Cereal Help Save The Planet?

 

SIMON SCOTT, HOST:

In San Francisco, a bunch of food writers and environmentalists recently gathered to taste some breakfast cereal and no doubt hum along to our theme music, which is composed by B.J. Leiderman. This breakfast cereal has an ingredient that's being touted¹ as a step toward solving some of our planet's worst environmental problems and reversing a choice made by our distant ancestors. NPR's Dan Charles has the story.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE²: There's an environmentalist named Wes Jackson, a prophet of the prairie who says humanity took a wrong turn thousands of years ago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

WES JACKSON: When we started agriculture with the wheat plant...

CHARLES: Here's Jackson giving a speech at Oregon State University explaining that this was when humanity became dependent on plants, like wheat and rice, that grow from seeds that have to be planted every year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JACKSON: Which means that if you're going to get your seed to germinate³, you got to destroy the vegetation at the surface.

CHARLES: You have to clear away anything that competes with your fragile seedlings⁴, which means you wipe away habitat for birds and insects, lay the soil bare, so it washes away and pollutes streams and rivers. Jackson dreamed of a totally different style of farming based on the example of the prairie, and he set up something called the Land Institute in the middle of Kansas to pursue this dream. Tim Crews is research director here.

TIM CREWS: This is a patch of native prairie.

CHARLES: We're looking at a carpet of grass, wildflowers and clover. These plants live right through the winter. Their roots go deep into the earth.

CREWS: This is the vegetation that actually builds soil. It's what created the rich soils that feed us across the breadbasket of the Midwest.

CHARLES: And the Land Institute says we should be getting our staple⁵ food from plants like this - perennials⁷, plants that stay rooted in the ground year after year. And they're feeling pretty excited at the Land Institute these days. They may have a real perennial⁶ grain on their hands. It's a relative of regular wheat called intermediate wheatgrass, which sounds kind of clunky, so they've renamed it Kernza.

For the last 15 years, Lee DeHaan has been cross-pollinating individual Kernza plants, selecting the best offspring, paying particular attention to the size of the seeds they make. Bigger seeds means a bigger harvest to mill into flour.

LEE DEHAAN: As you can see, the seed is pretty small. It's about one-fifth the size of wheat.

CHARLES: But it's twice as big as when he started. A few farmers now are growing small fields of Kernza, 40 acres or so, harvesting it with combines. And the most amazing thing is General Mills, the company that makes Cheerios and Wheaties, now says it wants to make cereal out of it. Here's Maria Carolina Comings, the marketing⁸ director for the company's organic brand Cascadian Farm.

MARIA CAROLINA COMINGS: I think the R&D team saw this lovely grain and thought, there is something we can do with it.

CHARLES: In the past few months, General Mills gathered up all the Kernza grain that the company could find, milled it and made 6,000 small boxes of cereal to hand out as samples - Honey Toasted Kernza.

COMINGS: We want to scale this and be able to find it in any grocery store, sitting on the same shelves.

CHARLES: If you're curious, it looks and tastes kind of like Wheaties - pretty sweet. But General Mills wants to market it, probably years from now, as the first cereal made from grain that grows like grass on the prairie, protecting the soil, taking carbon from the air and storing it in the earth.

COMINGS: You can start to be a part of the solution to climate change by eating a cereal, which is just so lovely.

CHARLES: People at the Land Institute pursuing Wes Jackson's radical⁹ environmentalist vision don't want to promise too much too quickly. One of them said trying to commercialize Kernza now is like taking a car for a test drive when it's just halfway¹⁰ down the assembly line. But they have grand ambitions, too. Lee DeHaan says we don't want perennial crops, like Kernza, to be boutique items for eco-conscious consumers. To have a real impact, they need to cover the landscape - millions of acres.

Dan Charles, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE B-52S & BRUCE HORNSBY & THE RANGE SONG, “THE WAY IT IS”)

1 touted   

v.兜售( tout的过去式和过去分词 )；招揽；侦查；探听赛马情报

参考例句：

• She's being touted as the next leader of the party. 她被吹捧为该党的下一任领导人。
• People said that he touted for his mother and sister. 据说，他给母亲和姐姐拉生意。 来自辞典例句

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 germinate   

v.发芽；发生；发展

参考例句：

• Seeds will not germinate without water.没有水，种子是不会发芽的。
• Can thin and hollow seeds germinate?瘦瘪的种子能够发芽吗？

4 seedlings   

n.刚出芽的幼苗( seedling的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Ninety-five per cent of the new seedlings have survived. 新栽的树苗95%都已成活。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• In such wet weather we must prevent the seedlings from rotting. 这样的阴雨天要防止烂秧。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

5 staple   

n.主要产物，常用品，主要要素，原料，订书钉，钩环；adj.主要的，重要的；vt.分类

参考例句：

• Tea is the staple crop here.本地产品以茶叶为大宗。
• Potatoes are the staple of their diet.土豆是他们的主要食品。

6 perennial   

adj.终年的；长久的

参考例句：

• I wonder at her perennial youthfulness.我对她青春常驻感到惊讶。
• There's a perennial shortage of teachers with science qualifications.有理科教学资格的老师一直都很短缺。

7 perennials   

n.多年生植物( perennial的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Name six perennials and six annuals suitable for indoor flower arrangement. 列出多年生及一年生花朵各六种，它们必须是适合插花的。 来自互联网
• Herbage can be divided into three categories: annuals, biennials, and perennials. 草本植物可分成一年生、二年生和多年生。 来自互联网

8 marketing   

n.行销，在市场的买卖，买东西

参考例句：

• They are developing marketing network.他们正在发展销售网络。
• He often goes marketing.他经常去市场做生意。

9 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

10 halfway   

adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途

参考例句：

• We had got only halfway when it began to get dark.走到半路，天就黑了。
• In study the worst danger is give up halfway.在学习上，最忌讳的是有始无终。