Feeding the Family (bonus episode)

Speaker 1 One of the perks of my job is that sometimes I wind up in delicious places.

Speaker 2 We do have some chocolates if you guys are interested in tasting them.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, thanks. I'll pass.

Speaker 4 All right, well, then let's get out of here.

Speaker 1 Have you not seen my mouth watering over here? I'm visiting a company called California Cultured. They make chocolate and coffee.
I'm at their headquarters in Sacramento, California.

Speaker 1 In a small kitchen, Steve Stearns, a former chef at high-end restaurants, has three three different chocolates lined up for me to try. Little thumbprint-sized morsels laid out on a platter.

Speaker 1 I'll try to spare you the chewing sounds, but the first two samples taste a little sour. It's not my favorite, I'm gonna be honest.

Speaker 1 Steve says I'm picking up on the fruity, more acidic notes. The third one is a nice, toasty, dark chocolate.
I think that's my favorite of the three.

Speaker 1 It's got a little bit more bitterness to it,

Speaker 5 but it still has those fruity notes.

Speaker 7 So how do you guys feel like now having for the first time tasted chocolate from cells?

Speaker 1 You know, I didn't even think about the fact that it came from cells.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 8 This is not like other chocolate.

Speaker 1 This is the chocolate of the future. It didn't come from a cacao plant grown in the ground.
It was made here in a lab. created from cells in a petri dish.
And why would anyone do that?

Speaker 1 Climate change is making cocoa harder and costlier to produce. Cocoa prices have risen to record highs in recent years due to extreme rainfall, drought, and heat.

Speaker 1 But it's not just climate change that's impacting food. Tariffs, supply chain issues, and inflation mean we can all expect to pay more for all kinds of food.

Speaker 9 Beef prices have soared to all-time highs with many families feeling the squeeze. Researchers are tracing price jumps, including an 80% spike in the cost of U.S.

Speaker 9 vegetables, to extreme weather linked to climate change.

Speaker 10 The key inflation report released last week shows prices have risen at the fastest pace since the start of the year. Many consumers are feeling that financial squeeze at the grocery store.

Speaker 1 I'm Amy Scott, and this is Feeding the Family, a marketplace special about the business and economics of food.

Speaker 1 Over the next hour, reporters from around Marketplace will explore the complicated forces impacting the food on our tables this holiday season.

Speaker 1 From farmers in Texas grappling with a sudden loss in federal funding to the ways TikTok is reshaping our meals. Plus, we even have a few cherished and inexpensive recipes to share.

Speaker 1 We're going to start with one of my favorite holiday indulgences, chocolate.

Speaker 1 Because as wild as it sounds, growing chocolate and and other treats in a lab may be the key to enjoying them years from now.

Speaker 11 About 85%

Speaker 11 of all the land that's currently used for chocolate just will not be suitable for it. It's going to either be too hot, too cold, too wet.

Speaker 1 That's Alan Perlstein, CEO of California Cultured. Without new technologies, Alan says those might become luxuries for the super wealthy.

Speaker 1 He says in a couple decades, you might still be able to buy chocolate, grown the old-fashioned way.

Speaker 2 Sure, for

Speaker 2 80 bucks per bar, maybe.

Speaker 1 To see how the chocolate of the future gets made? Safety glasses, we don't need them.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes, we actually do. Good

Speaker 12 call.

Speaker 1 I follow Alan through California Cultured's office space in the front and into what looks like a quintessential lab, where he opens a retro-fitted pizza fridge with racks for stacking pans of pizza.

Speaker 1 Only instead of pizza, there are trays of Petri dishes filled with tiny brown blobs. They look like little like boogers, basically.
Yeah. I don't know how else to describe this.

Speaker 11 It's basically little clumps of brown cells. So that's what they look like when they're growing inside of the cocoa pods.

Speaker 1 Each little blob, Alan says, contains thousands of cocoa cells.

Speaker 11 We sort of wrangle the cells and make them do what we want in this part of the lab.

Speaker 1 By wrangle, Alan means they're actually sort of tricking the cells to only grow the tissues they want, targeting certain compounds, flavors, and fats.

Speaker 1 And part of how they do that is by feeding the cells certain mixtures of food.

Speaker 11 Mostly sugar, plant extracts.

Speaker 1 From here, Alan says it's a bit like repotting plants. The bigger the cells grow, the bigger the container they need to keep growing.

Speaker 1 To make chocolate, the cells get fermented, roasted, and ground into a powder or liquid.

Speaker 1 You and I can't buy California cultureds chocolate yet, but the plan is to sell the ingredients they make here and also lease the technology to large-scale producers.

Speaker 1 Although, Alan's a little shy about saying which companies they're talking to.

Speaker 4 Uh,

Speaker 11 Probably some of the big guys out there

Speaker 11 of the companies who

Speaker 11 would require millions of tons of chocolate per year and have unfortunately been hit hard with the current chocolate tariffs and price increases.

Speaker 11 We're going to be launching our first product most likely with the current sixth largest chocolate company in the world.

Speaker 11 And we're also in discussions with number two, three, five,

Speaker 11 eight, eleven, eighteen.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So

Speaker 1 all ones we've heard of, I'm sure.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 Alan did finally say a name. Next year, they're releasing a chocolate product with Meiji, the company that makes those little chocolate pandas.

Speaker 1 And they're hopeful that people are ready to embrace this type of food. It's not just chocolate that researchers and companies are trying to grow by culturing cells.

Speaker 1 They're also making salmon and chicken. The consequences for meat could be huge.
I took a food tour of the future and actually tasted these products.

Speaker 1 You can find out how that went by listening to the new season of Marketplace's Climate Solutions podcast, How We Survive.

Speaker 1 From the chocolate of the future to something a little more vintage, I'm talking about seafoam salad, cranberry salad served in a gelatinous ring, broken glass jelly.

Speaker 1 And what do all these dishes have in common? One ingredient that you can pick up for about a dollar, jell-o. We asked our digital producer, Dylan Mietnen, to dive into the economic history of jell-o.

Speaker 1 Hey, Dylan, so this was a fun assignment. Where did you start?

Speaker 7 So yeah, for this piece, I decided to call up our family's resident jello expert.

Speaker 13 Hello. Hey Grandma.

Speaker 7 That would be Grandma Dawn as she will almost universally introduce herself no matter your relation to her. She famously makes lime jello dessert every year for nearly every occasion.

Speaker 7 It's a recipe that she got from her mother-in-law. I filed it away in my metal recipe box for later use.

Speaker 14 Grandma died in 1985, and I became the only family member that attempted her lime jello dessert recipe. It was a light, fluffy family favorite, and it became my kids' most requested dessert.

Speaker 14 But I only make it for special occasions now.

Speaker 7 So yeah, it's a family tradition, one that includes lime jello, evaporated milk, and an Oreo cookie crumble.

Speaker 7 Every year for his birthday, my uncle requests two lime jello desserts, one for the family birthday party and one for him to hide away in a secret stash.

Speaker 1 Okay, so lime jello, jello, evaporated milk, and Oreos?

Speaker 15 That's good stuff.

Speaker 1 And you're telling me this tastes good together?

Speaker 7 It does. It may surprise you, but it does.

Speaker 1 So you've been looking into the class history of jell-o. I understand it started out actually as a more high-end dessert?

Speaker 7 So not jello, per se, but certainly its predecessor, gelatin. One of the very first recipes for aspic, which is a savory gelatin, first appeared in a medieval French cookbook around 1375.

Speaker 7 Now, gelatin is created by breaking down collagen, which is found in the bones and skins of animals.

Speaker 7 Not overly appealing, but you boil them down, you purify the byproduct, add in fruits or juices and sugars, and you get something more dessert-y. Carolyn Wyman is the author of Jell-O, a biography.

Speaker 7 Before the creation of Jell-O, gelatin was something for the very rich, as cooking gelatin often required a maid or two spending a good part of their day making this one part of just one dish.

Speaker 17 That was a statement, just the way if you bought a Porsche or a BMW today, you know, or a Rolex watch, you know, people would know you were rich.

Speaker 1 Okay, so not just one made, potentially two working on this. Exactly.

Speaker 1 So gelatin was this ultimate status symbol back when people played the lute or wore powdered wigs.

Speaker 1 Zooming ahead more than a century. It didn't just stay a dish for the ultra-rich, though.

Speaker 7 No, it did not. Jell-O, this sugary instant gelatin powder that we know today, was created in 1897.

Speaker 7 At the turn of the century, Jell-O is advertising itself as America's most famous dessert, and it was truly American.

Speaker 7 Because it was so easy to make and so easy to digest, it was served to newly arrived Americans at Ellis Island.

Speaker 7 Still though, when Jell-O was advertised in publications like the Ladies' Home Journal, it was marketed toward middle and upper class housewives. Here's food historian Laura Shapiro.

Speaker 17 I think the early advertising and marketing was pushing you up a little. It's a kind of cheap product in a pretty dress.

Speaker 1 So you dug into, what, 125 years worth of advertising? What did you see?

Speaker 7 That's right. There's lots.
You have ads that were illustrated by artists like Rosie O'Neill, even Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 7 You have the Jack Benny radio program, which was sponsored by Jell-O from 1934 to 1942.

Speaker 12 J-E-Help Help! Oh!

Speaker 18 The Jell-O program, starring Jack Benny.

Speaker 19 Look for the big red letters on the box.

Speaker 20 They spell Jell-O.

Speaker 7 Jell-O also also famously printed tons of recipe books and booklets, among some of the best recipes I've seen, though admittedly have not created.

Speaker 7 Asparagus salad, mint jell-o with capers, prune whip, mystic fruit layers, and again, an affordable enough food option, two-penny salad.

Speaker 1 Oh my, you know, Dylan, these sounds so gross to me, but

Speaker 1 apparently they tasted good. Have tastes changed?

Speaker 2 Well, tastes have indeed changed over time.

Speaker 7 So it's like thinking back to the Great Depression.

Speaker 7 How this was advertised was it was sort of like a form of escapism from the poverty of the day. It was economical, sure, easy to make, yes, but it could be sophisticated.
It could be beautiful.

Speaker 7 When you look at recipe books of the day, they included these really fun illustrations of people gnashing on jello in these extravagant gowns and tuxes.

Speaker 7 Fast forward to World War II, sugar had to be rationed, and that did impact jello production.

Speaker 7 But at the time, it was seen as patriotic to ensure that food, especially fresh foods, fruits, and vegetables, did not go to waste during that time.

Speaker 7 So Jell-O helped food stretch further for homemakers during a time of war.

Speaker 1 So it makes sense that Jell-O had a moment during the Depression and World War II because of how cheap it is and surprisingly really still is.

Speaker 1 So talk to me about where Jell-O stands in the American culinary tradition now.

Speaker 7 So like I said, Jell-O has for a long time been this thing that's colorful and sweet and tasty that moms could make and kids could enjoy.

Speaker 7 So for adults these days, it can scratch that sort of nostalgic itch.

Speaker 7 But as Laura Shapiro points out rather comedically, unless you like really grew up eating jello, it might not have this special place in your heart.

Speaker 17 You know, once you've been told that jello is one of the few things you can eat while you're waiting for a colonoscopy, it loses that

Speaker 17 lure and joy.

Speaker 2 Fair, fair, fair.

Speaker 7 But I just want to say jello is far from gone. I recently spoke with one of the owners of Solid Wiggles, which is a great name for a boutique gelatin shop based here in New York City.

Speaker 2 Wait, what?

Speaker 2 Boutique gelatin shop? You heard me right.

Speaker 7 You heard me right. They create these really artful, artisanal takes on the traditional Jell-O shot.
So it's not blue raspberry.

Speaker 2 You have like Apparol Spritz.

Speaker 7 You have Manhattan. They're not served in these little plastic shot glasses.
They are in beautifully cut cubes. Business is strong for Solid Wiggles.

Speaker 7 Their products are served in 19 restaurants across New York and counting, and they'll be publishing a cookbook next June.

Speaker 7 But I don't want to make it seem like that's that, that you can really only get jello these days at really swanky New York City eateries or in hospital cafeterias.

Speaker 7 It's still at many a church supper, many a family gathering with all of the fun little add-ins and accoutrements you can imagine. Oh, and as for Grandma Dawn and her lime jello dessert?

Speaker 14 I'm actually glad to be known as the only family member still making the dessert. But my granddaughter Olivia has recently asked to watch me make it, and I look forward to that.

Speaker 7 So, the Jell-O-Baton gets passed along. The family tradition, the brand that goes along with it, will be cemented at dinner tables for years to come.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks so much, Dylan.

Speaker 2 I learned a lot.

Speaker 7 Awesome. Thank you, Amy.

Speaker 1 This time of year, the internet is filled with influencers sharing ambitious holiday recipes, promising the best ever turkey or wow-worthy wine pairings.

Speaker 1 The kinds of meals that make you think, I wish I was eating that when you scroll past. But on another side of the internet, people are strategizing about how to put any kind of food on the table.

Speaker 1 Food insecurity was already on the rise even before the federal shutdown hit snap benefits.

Speaker 1 In 2023, 18 million families were food insecure, up a million from the year before, according to the USDA, which has stopped tracking those numbers under the Trump administration.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, grocery prices have shot up more than 25%

Speaker 1 in the past five years, which means that there's another kind of food influencer popping up, the kind who will teach you how to cook something delicious on a budget.

Speaker 1 Marketplace's Alice Wilder has the story.

Speaker 15 Kiki Rough's videos usually start the same way.

Speaker 21 If this is your first time being poor, I'm Kiki.

Speaker 15 There's no telling what recipe will come next. It could be a batch of hot dog buns, roasted tomato soup, or caramel apples.

Speaker 15 But whatever she makes in her Indiana kitchen, you can be sure it will be cheap.

Speaker 21 But you just gotta keep your eye on those sales.

Speaker 15 Ruff has dubbed her creations recession recipes. She told me that she frequently fields requests from hungry followers who are adjusting to their new economic reality.

Speaker 21 If they are going to a food bank for the first time and they're getting flour and lentils, they're like, well, I don't bake, and what is a lentil?

Speaker 15 On Ruff's channel, flour turns into donuts, and lentils become chili or burgers. She got the idea for recession recipes while scrolling LinkedIn.

Speaker 21 There was someone who popped up on my feed who was talking about how he was in a transitionary period with his job and he couldn't buy granola bars or fruit snacks for his daughters anymore.

Speaker 21 They had to cut the expense and how stressful it was for his daughters.

Speaker 15 That LinkedIn post inspired her to put together her first recession recipe. She posted it to TikTok in February 2025.
And the next morning, she woke up to 90,000 new followers.

Speaker 15 Ruff has a full-time job in software technology, but she immediately decided to devote her free time to making more videos.

Speaker 21 People are relying on food banks more than ever. And like, I

Speaker 21 just saw that that was a need that needed to be filled.

Speaker 15 Today, she has over half a million followers between TikTok and Instagram. If you want an idea of what her videos are like, imagine if your favorite babysitter taught you how to cook.

Speaker 21 Now the next part, you get to get a little crafty. We're gonna season these.

Speaker 15 Ruff is warm and goofy, but we'll also dole out some tough love if the moment calls for it.

Speaker 18 Oil your pan!

Speaker 22 Oil your pan!

Speaker 18 Oil it!

Speaker 15 She wears heart-shaped glasses and has the red hair of an off-duty Disney princess. I'm at Ruff in the parking lot of an Aldi in northwest Indiana, where she does most of her grocery shopping.

Speaker 3 So what is our budget for this grocery shopping trip?

Speaker 16 I'm gonna try to get this under $15.

Speaker 15 She grabbed a quarter quarter to rent a cart and we headed in, laser-focused on our grocery list.

Speaker 16 Oh, pizza dough.

Speaker 15 We'd be making pizza rolls. Think cinnamon rolls, but with a savory filling and tomato sauce for dipping.

Speaker 21 They only have jalapeno. I'm allergic to jalapeno.

Speaker 3 We're gonna roll with it.

Speaker 21 Wait, check behind.

Speaker 18 There might be

Speaker 18 some regular.

Speaker 3 Oh, regular. Okay, perfect.

Speaker 16 I think we're gonna get this under like $8.

Speaker 15 Our total came out to $6.82.

Speaker 16 Hold on a second. Okay, so we got less than half of the budget that we have had for today.

Speaker 15 I have to admit that when I asked Ruff if we could make a holiday dish together, I wasn't imagining pizza rolls.

Speaker 15 But she pointed out that potlucks are common this time of year, and there can be pressure to deliver something impressive.

Speaker 21 When you're invited somewhere, you don't want to show up empty-handed. But if you're only working with $10, it becomes, okay, can I go get the tiniest fruit plate in the world?

Speaker 21 Can I go get a block of cheese and just bring cheese?

Speaker 15 Or like, maybe I should just stay home.

Speaker 21 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's like, I think financial shame is so deeply rooted that it is going to change the way that people gather.

Speaker 21 That there might be less events within your friend group because, hey, like, no, I actually have to pay rent now.

Speaker 15 Ruff's hope is that this recipe will mean someone can say yes to a holiday potluck and be proud to bring a homemade dish.

Speaker 15 We return to Ruff's home/slash studio, where her husband helped her set up a camera and lighting in front of the kitchen stove.

Speaker 3 Can I ask you a quick question as we're getting started?

Speaker 3 What are the rules of your kitchen?

Speaker 21 Everybody eats, there are no mistakes,

Speaker 21 we're here to learn, and whatever you have is okay.

Speaker 15 As a kid, Ruff loved to cook. She told me this story while popping butter in the microwave.

Speaker 21 When I was little, I wanted to be a chef really bad. And I wanted to own my own restaurant.

Speaker 21 And I was trying to teach myself the fundamentals of cooking, but I stopped cooking around the 2008 recession because when I would mess up, it would waste too much from our family.

Speaker 15 Most of the frugal skills that Ruff teaches to her followers, she learned the hard way.

Speaker 15 After dropping out of college, she worked two minimum wage jobs and relied on food stamps, amounting to $40 a month.

Speaker 21 I was constantly monitored, which was frustrating. And I remember I got a 25-cent an hour raise at one of my jobs and I lost my EBT.
It's this difficult, lengthy process.

Speaker 21 It does not feel like, hey, we're coming in and helping you. And then the second you do a little bit of good for yourself, it can be yanked out under your feet.

Speaker 21 So then you're not actually getting ahead.

Speaker 15 She sometimes had sleep for dinner and lost a lot of weight. Then a friend gave her a four-ingredient cookbook.

Speaker 21 And I started building my skills off of that and then just having staples that I could make when I had the time between the two jobs.

Speaker 15 Once Ruff re-enrolled in college, she was able to get back on her feet and had reliable access to food. But years later, things still feel precarious.

Speaker 21 A couple years ago, when I could put whatever I wanted in my cart, it felt like the highest accomplishment. And it's just, it's not the case anymore.

Speaker 18 Why is that?

Speaker 21 Grocery prices have gotten so extreme that it's irresponsible to just be like, oh, yeah, I can bring home donuts. No, I need to make them because I can't spend $5 on a box of donuts.

Speaker 21 It's just like there is way more budgeting to it now.

Speaker 15 This past year, staples like coffee and bananas have gotten a lot more expensive.

Speaker 21 The middle class threshold has drastically changed. You know, like I'm working in software technology as an executive and I am considered lower middle class, right? I live paycheck to paycheck.

Speaker 5 I do not go out often.

Speaker 21 I do not buy myself nice clothes. I shop at Aldi.
My husband and I haven't even been able to take a honeymoon. We've been married three years.

Speaker 15 Ruff makes some money off her videos, but the the algorithm is fickle.

Speaker 21 The first month that I released this series, I made $3,000. And that, to me, I was like, yeah, I can get new tires.
I can get my oil changed, whatever.

Speaker 15 But the next month, Ruff earned just $175.

Speaker 15 Once the oven is preheated and the ingredients are laid out on the counter, it's time to shoot today's video.

Speaker 21 You have no money. You've been invited to a holiday party.
You have to bring a dish and don't want to bring... Hmm, I need to sound more excited.

Speaker 15 She spoke off the cuff and laughed through mistakes.

Speaker 18 Elbow grease makes it taste better.

Speaker 15 In just a few minutes, the pizza rolls were assembled, and not long after, it was time to take them out of the oven. Oh my god! Wait!

Speaker 18 That's so cute already!

Speaker 18 Ah, look at her!

Speaker 15 The rolls were golden brown, and cheese was sizzling on the aluminum foil.

Speaker 21 You know, I could let them cool,

Speaker 21 but that would be no fun.

Speaker 15 Ruff arranged them on a plate, poured pizza sauce into a ramekin, and presented the final product to the camera.

Speaker 21 You're bringing these cute little things to your party, and they're gonna taste so good, too.

Speaker 15 I said before that her videos usually start the same way. Well, they end the same way, too.

Speaker 21 Please remember to eat, and also, I love you.

Speaker 15 Just to our left on the fridge is a note with the same phrase. A friend left it for her during those difficult, hungry years.

Speaker 21 And I try to give it to other people because that is the greatest gift I've been given.

Speaker 15 Ruff told me that after I left, she planned planned to split the roles with her husband and get right back to work, editing her next video. I'm Alice Wilder for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 A lot of the country's wheat comes from Kansas, a place that's grappling with tariffs and climate change.

Speaker 19 You do it for the love of farming, but also, you know what? I'm a businessman too.

Speaker 19 I gotta make money.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 I get really angry at myself myself when I don't make money.

Speaker 1 That's after the break.

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Speaker 1 You're listening to Feeding the Family, a special from Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott.
I took a trip recently to Dodge City, Kansas.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 1 I'm at a sign that says

Speaker 1 the 100th Meridian where East meets West. To visit the 100th Meridian, it's the invisible longitudinal line that runs from pole to pole and cuts through the Great Plains.

Speaker 1 The Meridian passes through the city approximately one mile east of this marker between avenues L and M.

Speaker 1 The 100th Meridian is historically significant to this region. It's historically significant because it symbolized the dividing line between East and West, not just geographically or culturally.

Speaker 1 In 1878, the explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell observed a difference in the climate, too.

Speaker 27 He said that was, you know, divided America into an arid half and a humid half.

Speaker 1 Richard Seeger is a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Several years ago, he looked into Powell's theory.

Speaker 27 And I thought, let's see if

Speaker 1 He found that Powell's observations about the east-west divide were pretty spot-on. But Richard also discovered something else.
The line appeared to be moving.

Speaker 1 Not the actual meridian on the map, but the dry line.

Speaker 27 The psychological 100th meridian is moving east.

Speaker 1 East of the 100th meridian, he says, is gradually getting more arid. And that could have huge implications for farmers, the economy, and the global food supply.

Speaker 1 About half of the wheat grown in Kansas is exported to countries including Mexico, Japan, and Nigeria.

Speaker 1 And since the 1950s, surplus harvests have helped feed the hungry through international aid programs.

Speaker 27 Climate change in the central U.S.

Speaker 27 is of enormous importance to food security across the world.

Speaker 1 I wanted to see how farmers are adapting, so I drove 170 miles across Kansas from west to east to visit Penner Farms in Hillsboro, Kansas. And boy, does the scenery change.

Speaker 1 The flat, treeless landscape gives way to rolling hills. I see a lot more corn and soybeans, crops that need more water.

Speaker 1 I pull into a driveway and see an explosion of small cats come from beneath a parked pickup truck, barn kitties that keep the mice at bay.

Speaker 19 Oh, hi, kitties. Yeah, you think I'm getting food.

Speaker 1 Paul Penner steps out of the truck.

Speaker 2 How tall are you, Paul?

Speaker 6 6'4.

Speaker 1 I have been looking up.

Speaker 2 Oh, I am sorry.

Speaker 23 No, no, not your fault.

Speaker 1 I've come to meet Paul because Richard Seeger's research suggests the dry line, once represented by the 100th meridian, now lies around here, closer to the 98th meridian.

Speaker 1 I wondered what changes Paul had seen in the 50 years he's been farming. Paul isn't like many Kansas farmers.
He didn't inherit land.

Speaker 22 What did you start with?

Speaker 6 Zero.

Speaker 1 He started renting 80 acres, eventually buying some land, and over five decades, he's grown to roughly a thousand acres. Today, he grows wheat, corn, soybeans, and a little bit of grass hay.

Speaker 1 We head out in his truck to take a look past acres of green soybeans getting near harvest and fallow wheat fields.

Speaker 19 I've made my own spreadsheets for the to calculate the yields and stuff going back 20 years.

Speaker 1 Over time have you seen yields go up with the modern seed breeding and that kind of thing?

Speaker 19 I have but you know what also I've I've seen yields drop because of drought

Speaker 12 and believe me boy have I seen them drop.

Speaker 1 According to U.S.

Speaker 1 drought monitor data going back to 2000, Paul's County has experienced more frequent and severe droughts over the past 15 years, with especially bad years in 2012 and 13, 2018, and 2023.

Speaker 19 You can do everything right and you still have

Speaker 19 a disaster waiting, you know.

Speaker 1 Seems like there's a lot of heartbreak in farming.

Speaker 12 Oh, oh, there is.

Speaker 19 And you do it for the love of farming, but also, you know what? I'm a businessman, too.

Speaker 19 I got to make money.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 I get really angry at myself when I don't make money, you know.

Speaker 1 To try to keep making money in drier conditions, Paul has adapted. Around 20 years ago, he started practicing no-till farming.

Speaker 1 After a harvest, instead of turning the soil over for the next crop, he leaves the stubble, reducing erosion and evaporation and preserving the moisture in the soil.

Speaker 1 We drive out to one of his cornfields to check how close it is to harvest.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 you see all the evidence of, look, you can see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's wheat stubble under our feet, right?

Speaker 19 And you see corn cobs

Speaker 19 from the previous corn crop. Yep.
And in between, I don't know, maybe you can

Speaker 23 look.

Speaker 19 Here's a soybean stock.

Speaker 1 The corn is high above Paul's shoulders. He tears off an ear and shows me how you can estimate yield by counting the kernels.

Speaker 19 You can

Speaker 19 break it like that. And now you can count.
So let's start with this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

Speaker 1 How's the yield looking based on this?

Speaker 19 I'm not going to stick my neck out here.

Speaker 19 But it it is better than usual because, you know,

Speaker 19 you you've heard the definition of

Speaker 19 an expert farmer, right?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 19 He's 50 miles away from home.

Speaker 19 He can brag over there.

Speaker 12 I see.

Speaker 1 But at home, someone's going to call him on it.

Speaker 12 You're right, right.

Speaker 19 Yeah, we know your fields. It ain't that good.

Speaker 1 Paul believes this practice of planting in layers of stubble has saved his crop during times of extreme drought. There have been times he's produced a decent crop when his neighbors had zero.

Speaker 1 This year, though, Paul says has almost been too wet. He pulls up a rainfall app on his phone.

Speaker 19 You see that line? That line has averaged for 30 years.

Speaker 1 The average is about 36 inches.

Speaker 19 And this year we've already done 42.

Speaker 1 By September, Paul's already had six more inches of rain than in an entire normal year. Much of it has come in short, intense bursts where only a fraction soaks in, leaving crops crops stressed.

Speaker 1 But one wet year doesn't change the trend line toward a hotter, more arid future.

Speaker 1 So, if Kansas gets a lot drier, you know, generally speaking,

Speaker 1 or just has a lot more like wide swings and variability,

Speaker 1 how does that impact the rest of the world and our ability to feed a growing population?

Speaker 19 Well, that would be a serious concern.

Speaker 20 Obviously, number one, it's going to impact the amount of wheat available production.

Speaker 20 It could impact quality depending on how the rainfall patterns are.

Speaker 20 We have to have a consistent form of moisture so that the nutrients that are needed can be absorbed and taken up by the roots and produce a crop.

Speaker 1 But for Paul, there's a challenge more immediate than climate change.

Speaker 28 Farmers in Missouri and Kansas say they're about to feel a big crunch from the ongoing trade war with China.

Speaker 7 Retaliatory tariffs from other countries will make selling goods like wheat and corn more difficult.

Speaker 1 The squeeze is clear when Paul pulls up the numbers on his phone. To break even, he needs to bring in about $7.50 a bushel for wheat.
But right now, the market is offering less than $5.

Speaker 1 What is causing the low prices?

Speaker 23 Tariff.

Speaker 19 Trade war.

Speaker 19 I could use some other expletives, but I won't.

Speaker 1 We can bleep them out.

Speaker 18 Let me have it. Okay.

Speaker 23 Finging off our trading partners.

Speaker 19 And that's what it is.

Speaker 1 Before the tariffs, Kansas had a rhythm. Roughly half the wheat moved overseas to countries along the Pacific Rim and in Africa.
China bought a lot of the soybeans, as well as corn and Milo.

Speaker 1 But when I visited Paul in mid-September, those markets were drying up in response to U.S. tariffs.
And tariffs have also raised prices for farmers, for fertilizer and equipment.

Speaker 1 Paul says some farmers won't make it.

Speaker 19 I think

Speaker 19 you will see evidence of

Speaker 19 foreclosures.

Speaker 19 That is on the rise.

Speaker 19 If you've seen the numbers, and also farmer suicides are on the rise.

Speaker 1 And that's the nightmare. Even if farmers adapt to hotter, drier seasons, what good is all that if the world has already found someone else to buy from?

Speaker 1 Shifting now from farming in rural America to farming in cities, many small-scale farmers are facing another challenge these days.

Speaker 1 Federal funds that helped them find markets for their produce went away this year. Reporting from an unlikely hub for local farming, Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval, has this one.

Speaker 22 When some people think of Houston, they think of chemical plants, humidity, and highways.

Speaker 22 And those people would be right.

Speaker 22 But the things that make Houston Houston-its infrastructure, a thriving energy industry, and a warm, wet climate, make it fertile soil.

Speaker 22 Fertile soil for newcomers from all over the world, like Toto Alamasi.

Speaker 29 I'm from Congo, Kinshasa, Congo Democratic.

Speaker 22 Alamasi shows me around his small business, an acre or so farm off Highway 90 in southwest Houston.

Speaker 22 He's wearing a bucket hat and a red button down and points to one yellow cucumber plant that's struggling.

Speaker 29 It is cucumber.

Speaker 29 Can you see?

Speaker 29 I will need some fertilizer to make it happy. And this is the language, the language of the the plant it doesn't feel good

Speaker 22 we walk around and he holds up a plant with little magenta pods this is rose

Speaker 23 hibiscus for

Speaker 22 we grow this in africa back home home the democratic republic of the congo is the second largest country in africa located smack dab in the middle of the continent they provide much of the world's cassava a starchy root vegetable which alamasi also grows here

Speaker 29 We have cassava, you see. We eat the leaf, we use like a wood fire, the stick, under the soil we have cassava.

Speaker 29 Everything is consumable.

Speaker 22 Everything is consumable. There is a use for every part of the plant, he says.
Back home, the agricultural sector provides jobs to more than 60% of the Congolese, though most is subsistence farming.

Speaker 22 You grow food for your own family.

Speaker 29 Yeah, in Congolese, I had cows, I was farming, I was a teacher, and there was an activity of human rights.

Speaker 22 Alamasi used to work in human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the past 30 years, the country has been decimated by war that has killed some six million people.

Speaker 22 Conditions remain challenging.

Speaker 29 In that human rights, I have a problem.

Speaker 29 Now we flew from Congo to Uganda, Uganda to Houston.

Speaker 22 After fleeing his home in 2011, Alomasi came to Houston through the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, a program that has since been mostly halted by the Trump administration.

Speaker 22 After he got here, Alomasi was connected to a nonprofit called Planet Forward, which was created to help refugees learn to farm in Houston.

Speaker 29 To farm here, it looks like back at home. Only back at home, we have only two seasons.

Speaker 22 He and his wife have adjusted to farming the four seasons here in Houston. It's a full-time job for them.
They're out here even on Houston's scorching humid summer days.

Speaker 22 I ask if he ever gets lonely out here with his crops.

Speaker 29 When we became

Speaker 29 a farmer it's like we are talking to the plant. We cannot feel alone

Speaker 29 when we are in the bush.

Speaker 29 We talk with the plant. When you see your plant is good, you feel good.

Speaker 22 Running a small-scale farm isn't lucrative, but it's been enough for Alomasi and his wife to pay their bills.

Speaker 29 We sell to the farmers market, and

Speaker 29 our big customer is Planet Forward, the organization.

Speaker 22 Planet Forward buys a lot of produce from Alamasi and other refugee farmers and sells it to wholesale purchasers like the Houston Food Bank.

Speaker 22 But this year, the Trump administration ended the USDA funding that food banks use to buy produce from Planet Forward's farmers and other local small-scale growers.

Speaker 22 It's left food banks with less produce and farmers like Alamasi without buyers for their crops.

Speaker 8 It's a problem.

Speaker 22 That's top of mind for Planet Forward CEO Najeor Rothman, who I meet at the nonprofit's headquarters and food hub where produce is prepared and stored. Rothman shows me around.

Speaker 30 You can see it's sort of a micro warehouse where the farmers can come in, they could sort out the produce, they could weigh it, they could wash it, they could dehydrate it if they wanted to, they could put it into coolers.

Speaker 22 Planet Forward is under a major overhaul right now to help keep farmers like Alamasty in business.

Speaker 22 They're looking for new buyers and shifting to a more cooperative model because Planet Forward's farmers historically worked more independently.

Speaker 22 Sure, Planet Forward would buy from them and offer support, but they weren't always strategic or centralized about maximizing revenue as a collective.

Speaker 6 Can we come together and can we prioritize which produce to grow based on what the market demands are?

Speaker 6 You know, if one farmer is very good at one particular crop, let them do more of that and let the other farmers do less of that.

Speaker 22 They're also trying to expand their educational mission beyond refugees, working with schools and the formerly incarcerated.

Speaker 22 And they want to help farmers get special certifications that would allow them to sell to new buyers, like cafeterias.

Speaker 22 Back at Toto Alamasi's farm in southwest Houston, a sprinkler is running, one of those everyday ones you'd use at home. It's been unseasonably dry in Houston.

Speaker 22 Here at the farm, I catch up with Trinidadian chef Keisha Griggs, who is trying to help farmers like Alamasi.

Speaker 22 She's one of Planet Horde's board members and has been buying from refugee farmers for years.

Speaker 31 I created a dinner series called Black Chef Table.

Speaker 22 Her meals featured black chefs and growers.

Speaker 31 So all all the food, the meat, the honey, the eggs came from African-American farmers or immigrant farmers that are located here in the city.

Speaker 31 And chefs from all over the country came in and we did dinners.

Speaker 22 That's when her relationship with Planet Forward took off. Every week she'd shop around for fresh ingredients from farmers.

Speaker 22 She did pay a little more for the produce, but she says the real challenge was being able to regularly find the amount of vegetables she needed that week.

Speaker 31 It was the accessibility and the consistency

Speaker 31 that was kind of like, hmm, I don't know, I know I can get it on Tuesday, every Tuesday, you know, my five pounds of whatever.

Speaker 22 She was able to make time to shop from different small farms each week for her black chef table dinners. But that's not realistic for most chefs.

Speaker 31 When you're running a business, you don't have time to do that.

Speaker 22 That's why it's critical Planet Ward becomes more strategic about what their network of farmers grows so they can have the quality and quantity a restaurant needs.

Speaker 31 Having the consistency to that model is, I think, where that process will shine.

Speaker 22 Now she's pitching her colleagues on working with their farmers more intentionally.

Speaker 22 At a recent meeting of Houston chefs, she asked them about sourcing herbs for things like mocktails, a growing trend in restaurants.

Speaker 31 I mean, that led me into saying, hey, you know, I'm working with a farm to start the concept of having an exclusive place for chefs to source locally.

Speaker 31 But what do you guys think about the fact that you can have a place where you can consistently get your product and produce from?

Speaker 22 The overwhelming response from chefs.

Speaker 31 If they can be at my place Tuesday at three o'clock every day with the things that I need and it's from the local source, I'm down.

Speaker 22 A lot of the food that makes up Houston's international culinary scene can be grown right here.

Speaker 22 But organizational change and growing food ecosystems takes longer than a harvest season. And Alamasi has produce he needs to sell now,

Speaker 22 this year. He can't count on the food bank.
He fears what this means for his business.

Speaker 29 If even Food Bank cannot come back,

Speaker 29 we are afraid how we will continue. Food Bank was our bigger customer.
The market cannot finish all.

Speaker 22 He's not sure what he's going to do. He's not selling enough produce right now to cover his mortgage.

Speaker 29 Now,

Speaker 29 we we suspect if Food Bank cannot come, we are losing our time.

Speaker 22 For now, he keeps tending to his farm. In Houston, I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 We know the holidays from the lead-up to Thanksgiving all the way through New Year's is a busy time for anyone who loves to cook and cooks a lot.

Speaker 1 Well, it's especially busy for restaurant chefs and their families. So we wanted to know, how do high-end chefs with fully booked restaurants and specials on the menu deal with all that pressure?

Speaker 1 How do they balance the expectations of delivering a stellar restaurant experience and meeting their own expectations for family time and family feasting?

Speaker 1 To find out, Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman grabbed some quality time with a power couple in Portland, Oregon's restaurant scene.

Speaker 5 I slipped into a booth at the back of the couple's two-time Beard Award-nominated restaurant.

Speaker 5 It's in an urban mini-mall with a covered patio outside, warm lighting, and a heady aroma of spices inside. Tropical fruit and seafood prints cover the tables and walls.

Speaker 13 I'm Thomas Pishaduffly.

Speaker 1 And I'm Mariah Pisha Duffly.

Speaker 13 We're at Gatta Gada Restaurant in Portland, Oregon.

Speaker 5 And yeah, they often finish each other's sentences. They're originally from the Boston area.
Mariah has decades of experience running the front of the house. Tom's been a line cook.

Speaker 5 He's classically trained in French and Italian cuisine. About a decade ago, the couple started traveling to Indonesia.

Speaker 13 Yeah, my family is both Dutch and Indonesian. They have like a rich shared history for good and for worse, and there's a lot of Dutch influence in parts of Indonesia.

Speaker 5 The Indonesian cooking Tom knew from growing up.

Speaker 13 When there was family around, we'd either be doing, you know, lobster boil or when my grandmother came to visit having gato gado. It means mix mix.

Speaker 5 It's a classic Indonesian street food, a messy pile of vegetables, shrimp crackers and eggs topped with spicy peanut sauce. Through multiple trips to Jakarta they became street food connoisseurs.

Speaker 5 Mariah was blown away by the intense smells.

Speaker 1 I'm having the steam from it all over my face.

Speaker 5 Tom loved the direct connection between food stall cook and customer packed together on a hot sidewalk.

Speaker 13 Your goal is to create this delicious thing and get it into my mouth. And there's not the server finding a table, and it becomes distilled down to that one experience.

Speaker 5 The couple moved to Portland in 2016 and began planning their new restaurant, inspired by Jakarta street food, but with a higher concept menu featuring Indonesian Dutch Pacific Northwest cuisine.

Speaker 5 Gato Gato opened in 2019 and was an instant hit. As we're talking, a waiter delivers our sampling menu.

Speaker 30 We got our beef rendong, candied anchovies, some Malaysian flatbread.

Speaker 5 And as we dive in, Tom describes a specialty of the house, a sauce called gula jawa.

Speaker 13 Palm sugar, sweet soy, and we steep it with chilies and lime leaf, ginger, lemongrass.

Speaker 13 But the constant grilling and dipping of the chicken imbues it with this like smoky little bit of the original sauce that we made however many years ago.

Speaker 13 We keep it so it just builds in depth and flavor. It's almost like a sauce mother.

Speaker 5 Mothers actually come up a lot with Tom.

Speaker 5 In fact, the Pisha Duffly's second Portland restaurant, which specializes in Malaysian Singaporean street food, is named Oma's Hideaway for Tom's grandmother, Kyong Tian Tina Vandenberg.

Speaker 13 My Oma, my mom's mom, and my mom's grandmom, who all lived in the same house in Oxnard, California, they were these like big figures in my life growing up. Cooking, they made the rules.

Speaker 1 Yeah, your family is very like matriarchal. You have some powerful mother figures.

Speaker 13 My mother was the cook. She did the shopping and the planning.

Speaker 13 And you know, all this while she juggled a job, she was a Supreme Court justice in Massachusetts, the first Asian woman judge, but she'd always come home and make us dinner.

Speaker 13 Fresh pasta, lasagna with artichokes and mushrooms.

Speaker 5 Now, you might think that running two restaurants open seven nights a week, the Pisha Dufflies wouldn't have time for a lot of home-cooked meals, the kind Tom grew up with.

Speaker 5 But this is where Tom and Mariah buck the restaurant world trend of extreme work-life imbalance, as depicted in the culinary press and top chef-type reality TV.

Speaker 5 With a five-year-old daughter, they've prioritized home cooking and dining as a core family value. They've got a particular division of labor, says Mariah.

Speaker 32 Tom's the chef. I do the other stuff, strategic business decisions.

Speaker 13 Being a little, I mean, Mariah runs the show, and I just warm things up in a pan, basically.

Speaker 5 So I wanted to know what he warms up in a pan when he's working as home chef. A few days later, we were standing around the kitchen of the Pisha Duffley's modest two-bedroom house.

Speaker 5 Daughter Loretta was at elementary school, and Tom was setting up the family dinner.

Speaker 4 Where's that chili crisp?

Speaker 5 Chopping peaches and fresh herbs for a spicy salad.

Speaker 4 I'm pretty hungry. I'm gonna get eaten.

Speaker 18 They're still good. You know, that peach is a little, they're really good.

Speaker 5 And prepping his own version of Thai Indonesian chicken.

Speaker 13 I'm gonna fry it and then I'm gonna smash it a little bit, the fried chicken in that mortar and pestle with some sambal and then fry it again.

Speaker 13 And this is my grandmother's Indonesian mortar and pestle. For making spice pastes, you're expressing out the flavors and the juices.

Speaker 5 He was frying up a piece without the spicy Indonesian sauce for Loretta, who's a picky eater.

Speaker 5 Now, to me, this home-cooked family meal Tom is preparing seems pretty fancy, like restaurant fancy. He says they've actually gone a lot more down market than this.

Speaker 13 There have been times we opened two restaurants, had a kid, we were ordering takeout a lot.

Speaker 5 Pizza, Chinese. Tom says it was nice not to cook for a change, but then like it kind of sucked because

Speaker 13 it removed cooking for somebody, sitting down to eat, doing the dishes.

Speaker 5 And gradually something shifted in their family life.

Speaker 13 As Loretta got a little bit older, we realized the importance of sitting down to eat and we were like, no, no, no, okay, we're going to cook at home. Doesn't have to be fancy.

Speaker 13 It often is like very not fancy. I can get behind a really well done hot dog.

Speaker 32 Sometimes we buy frozen meatballs. This week you were like, I'm going to make meatballs with Loretta.
I'm going to show her that you can use like a little honey and a little cheese in your meatballs.

Speaker 32 And then as we're serving them, she's like, Mama, I made these. These are the juiciest meatballs you've ever had.

Speaker 5 The couple has reassessed their priorities around holiday meals as well.

Speaker 4 I cook a lot.

Speaker 13 I cook for a living. I cook at home.
Sometimes it's hard to dig up the energy, especially around the holidays when the restaurants are busy, to want to commit to cooking 10 things on my day off.

Speaker 5 No more turkey three ways, a dozen mains and sides, breads and pies from mom's original recipe pouring out of a hot, crowded kitchen like Tom's family did for decades.

Speaker 13 Recently, we've kind of done a big about face, at least at Thanksgiving. My sister lives here in town, will host us, and we just, we don't cook, we get takeout.

Speaker 13 And what that has done for us is like much more time with the kids playing, playing cards, hanging out, much more like FaceTime and less like time in the kitchen.

Speaker 5 The first time they did takeout a few years ago, Tom says there was a big feeling of letdown, like they were committing holiday family feast sacrilege. Not anymore.

Speaker 13 I feel like especially food media is just stuffing down your throat. No pun intended, but good pun.
Roast the perfect chicken, 12 sides for your family holiday. What to bring?

Speaker 13 Like that is what we've been taught we have to do.

Speaker 5 Instead, he says, cut yourself a break. Do taco night on Thanksgiving.
Hot dogs with all the fixins for Christmas dinner or a New Year's bash. Whatever keeps your family eating together.

Speaker 5 I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 I don't know about you, but all this has me hungry for some of my family's holiday traditions. We always make a big batch or three of good old-fashioned Chex mix.

Speaker 1 I like to bake Lindser cookies, you know, the buttery ones with jam and powdered sugar. and Christmas enchiladas, New Mexico style, with green chili on one side and red on the other.

Speaker 1 Oh, and don't forget the black-eyed peas for New Year's. I'm Amy Scott.

Speaker 1 You've been listening to to Feeding the Family, a marketplace special about the business and economics of food this holiday season.

Speaker 1 Emma Condon produced this special with help from our senior producer Haley Hirschman, editing by Caitlin Esch, scoring and mixing by Brian Allison. Kelly Silvera is news director.

Speaker 1 Joanne Griffith is chief content officer. And Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.

Speaker 33 Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Mill Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am.
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