IG: I’m speaking with Dr. AS, a research scientist with the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation.

AS: The cryopreservation facility here holds plants, seeds, yeasts, fungi, bacteria, and viruses that aFect plants and agriculture. This facility is a biodiversity backup collection, so we maintain our historic and legacy collections as well as receiving material sent from the other ARS gene banks around the country.

IG: Is this the Cloud for plants?

AS: [laughs] Yes, you could say… well when you back up your phone to the Cloud all the files go to some drive in a cold room with everyone else’s stuF too that they’ve backed up. And you think nothing will ever happen but just in case it does, you have a copy, and you can go and get that copy sometime in the future. That is what we’re doing here. One day if something catastrophic happens with disease, or climate change, or conflict, or something we don’t even know about yet, we can get a copy and start growing again or cloning to make sure we don’t lose those species forever.

IG: So what can we learn here?

AS: There’s so much plant biomass on Earth and in all kinds of diFerent environments, so like humans, plants have developed all kinds of adaptations. But importantly, if conditions change drastically, humans and most animals can pick themselves and their families up and get out of there. Plants are very limited in their movement –

IG: I’ve never seen one uproot itself and get out of anywhere.

AS: No, they don’t! But as a result, they have all kinds of symbiotic relationships, adaptations, and genetic tricks to deal with stress and change. The more examples we have to study, the better chance we’ll be able to find solutions to adapt.

Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life. I’m IG. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a wide variety of diFerent kinds of stories on that theme. Today’s program, What We Learn From Plants. Act One, The Fungal Mind. A psychologist and a mycologist walk into a bar. Act Two, The Brick Moon, in which actual astronauts discuss growing plants in outer space.

Act Three, Restore from the Cloud, in which radio producer CP travels to Texas to see what happens when you need a backup from the Cloud. Stay with us.

[…]

IG: Act Three: Restore from the Cloud. We heard in our introduction that you can make withdraws from a plant bank – you can restore from the Cloud, so we sent producer CP to find out what comes next.

CP: I’m headed to the Wildflower Center just outside of Austin, Texas. Like the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, this is a scientific facility but it’s not on campus and it’s not really in the city. When I get out of the car, the first thing I notice is the heat. It’s oppressive, even for early March when I’ve scheduled this interview.

I’m meeting with SQ, the director of public engagement at the Wildflower Center. She’s walking up to meet me but there’s so much going on behind her I’m already distracted as she leads me into the interpretation center.

CP: So what’s going on here today? Is it always like this?

SQ: No, we’re always busy, but not like this. This year is the perfect timeline for us to meet because the freekeh is ready right at the end of Ramadan. We’re setting up for a big party for Eid tonight. Because the lunar calendar changes every year and the growing cycle gets earlier as the climate heats up, we usually have events during freekeh season and then other events around Eid, but this year it overlaps; it’s kind of perfect.

CP: There’s that word again – ‘freekeh’ – what is that?

SQ: Freekeh is the young wheat. It’s a variety of durum wheat that is harvested early and then traditionally burned. It’s an ancient grain that’s been growing in diFerent parts of the Middle East and North Africa since biblical times or even before.

CP: So where’d you get this ancient grain?

SQ: With the influx of migrants from the Levant to Central Texas, we were really inspired by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas – ICARDA for short – who lost access to their seed bank in Aleppo in Syria in 2015. They took a withdrawal from the Svalbard seed bank to rebuild their collection for research. And we thought, in recent years, like, 30, or more than 40 years later now, what good is a collection in a freezer? So we also made a withdrawal too.

CP: How do you go from wildflowers to ancient wheat?

SQ: That’s a real journey for us as an institution: to challenge our own legacy of defining and protecting Texas’s biodiversity. But what it comes down to is humans are part of biodiversity too. So with these waves of immigration from the Middle East in the 2020s up to the 2040s and before because of war and environmental pressure and more conflict, we now have multi-generational Arab-American families building new lives here in Central Texas.

And when we wanted to engage these newcomers, we actually worked with ICARDA because of their legacy. Their collection was inherited from families who grew the wheat over thousands of years in the Levant. Passing the seeds from generation to generation then to the scientists then to the freezer and now back into the hands of those same people; it’s coming full circle and literally around the globe. So the freekeh we grow here today is a variety developed here at the center from Levantine strains adapted for Texas’s drier conditions due to climate change. Environmental issues are still at the center of what we do here, but we’ve widened our concept of the environment. We rejected the humanity versus nature dichotomy and put taking care of humans into our strategy for taking care of the environment.

CP: SQ tells me to come back after evening prayer for the Eid party. She says there’s a few volunteers who may talk to me for this story, so I drive back after the rise of the crescent moon which marks the oFicial start of the holiday. I find her where she said to meet her by the desserts station. There’s a lot of celebration on this part of the recording. We cross the courtyard to a table of women of all ages under hundreds of twinkling lights and lanterns. There’s so much food, and everyone is laughing and talking.

SQ: This is CP from the podcast. CP this is FM. She’s starting on the freekeh tomorrow.

CP: Hi, Eid Mubarak, it’s so nice to meet you.

FM: And the same to you as well. Sit with me here.

CP: What’s starting tomorrow?

FM: You have to come back and see then, but you won’t be disappointed. Here try this. This is what most reminds me of the beautiful things in my country. When I came to Texas in the twenties, I thought I lost everything. I carried only my memories; I couldn’t even fill a suitcase for the journey. And when I arrived, nothing is familiar. It took me a long time to figure out who I was and how I fit into this new place. It’s through food I started to see myself here. I connected with other women at the mosque who cooked and shared food like what I remembered. Then we started working together to define and maintain our cultural identity here.

One of the other women in the group was looking for freekeh, so we started making calls. We contacted the restaurants, the caterers, the oil companies in Houston, and eventually contacted the university. Someone there put us in touch with the Wildflower Center who wanted to help. Now we’re here under these lights sharing our food with other migrants and refugees and with people whose families have been here on both sides of the border for hundreds of years. And we’re here together dancing and singing and reading poetry and making new culture together.

So I’m a grower; I coordinate a team of volunteers who grow and care for and harvest and prepare the freekeh for this center, for research, and for the community. And it’s extremely validating to know that the soil here welcomes my plants but also that the community welcomes our stories, our culture, and our ideas.

Come tomorrow early before it gets too hot, we’ll be right through there; you can’t miss it.

CP: I’m back at nine o’clock the next day and FM is right, I can’t miss it. I can hear a loud hiss as I come in from the parking lot.

FM: You’re right on time! Come closer meet JF, she’s on the flamethrower.

JF: Hi, just don’t get too close; it’s very hot.

CP: Okay, so let me describe exactly what’s going on here. I’ve walked into an open garden that looks like it was transplanted directly from Palestine. It’s just a few square yards of hip- high green grass planted neatly in rows wide enough to walk through with a wide paved path all around. FM and four other women are standing amongst the rows using curved knives to cut the heads of the wheat. JF is holding a flamethrower, and another woman is dowsing the paved area and the surrounding grasses with a water hose. After the women cut a few handfuls of the young wheat, they throw it down on the paving and JF roasts the grains.

FM: The thing I love most about this is that we can’t do it alone –
JF: I don’t think anyone would let me use the flamethrower by myself –

FM: Growing the freekeh together, even though its young, it gives us lots of time to share together.

JF: I heard all about FM’s life before she came here, and before we met here at the center. I was here with my grandchildren, and I saw FM and some other women serving lunch. Ancient grains. But not as a food trend – we have enough of those! They were telling their story, this story of their culture through food. So I kept coming back with and without the kids to hear their stories, their struggles, their triumphs. And every time I would leave, I would go home and be upset to my stomach, and I thought, “Is it the lunch?”

FM: It’s never the lunch!

JF: [laughs] No, it wasn’t the lunch. It was my gut telling me something was oF. And I kept coming back.

FM: You know the gut is the only way you can bring something external into your body. It’s a very underestimated way of knowing about the world: bringing the outside world inside of you and really digesting it in more ways than one.

JF: I think it was the lunch that saved me. Otherwise, I’d be too sad. I met FM when I wasn’t doing anything; I wasn’t even voting. I felt really isolated and I know that sounds woe-is-me compared to women who had to move around the world with nothing to flee climate and conflict that they didn’t have any responsibility for. Listening to FM and the other women at these lunches, they reactivated the rage and the fear and the hope in my life.

FM: We never knew we were going to do all that. We just wanted to share our culture in the community that we were sharing the space with. We knew there would be people out there who wanted to learn but we never set out to do it in this transformative way.

JF: Before I started working with these ladies, I really didn’t think I had anything to oFer to my grandchildren or future generations. We’d already messed up so much, and I was trying to not rock the boat with whatever time I had left. Now I’m out here flame roasting Palestinian freekeh grown in the same Texas soil I buried my parents in, welcoming new immigrants week after week, and trying to find the best halal barbecue in the city.

FM: Just like these grains, these seeds, which we put back in the Earth and put back into the food chain, our story isn’t frozen. There isn’t one truth, there isn’t one story and it isn’t finished yet.

[Credits]