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This is our debut episode of Food Futures, our new podcast about designing the future of food. In it we speak to Momoko Nakamura, aka the Rice Girl, a woman on a mission to bring naturally farmed Japanese rice to the rest of the world. In Japan alone, there are over 200 varietals of rice grown throughout the country—from the snowy northern islands to the Ryukus with their subtropical climate. Through her rice subscription service, she sources directly from farmers and educates rice lovers on the traditional Japanese seasonal calendar by delivering 24 sub-seasons of hand-selected rice.

We often think of taste as an immutable part of our five senses, but as we now know, the way we sense taste is different from person to person and can evolve over time. In this episode of Gastropod, one of my favorite podcasts about the science and history of food, hosts Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber unravel the complexity of how we experience food and more interestingly, how we sense flavor (a unique alchemic combination of taste, smell, memory and more). BONUS: The next issue of MOLD Magazine, coming this Spring, will explore how we might design for the senses!

Jack Algiere is one of the most thoughtful and important people working to transform the complexities of our global food system into diversified, locally-supported food ecologies. In this episode of Edible’s new podcast, he speaks about the importance of having intimacy with the land and the effort of the Slow Tools Working Group to create open source, appropriately scaled, lightweight tools for small to medium-scale farmers.

This story is about the most important place you’ve probably never heard of. The Noah’s Ark of seeds, the Crop Trust in Svalbard, Norway is a library of the world’s food crops with seeds from every country in the world. For example, they safe guard 3,000 varieties of coconuts, 35,000 varieties of corn, 125,000 varieties of wheat and 200,000 varieties of rice. **BONUS: I’m interested in creating a kit for creating local seed libraries, so collaborators, hit me up! Also a more local story about how food history intersects with efforts to combat climate change, check out this story about oyster-tecture in NYC.