Original version

BBC World Service

BBC World Service Radio

World Service Radio

CrowdScience

Documentaries

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

Answering your questions about life, Earth and the universe

We take your questions about life, Earth and the universe to researchers hunting for answers at the frontiers of knowledge.

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service East Asia

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

CrowdScience: Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?

Discussion & Talk

Vegetable Farmer

Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?

Have you ever seen a Brussels sprout growing in the wild? Neither has listener Pogo.

Listener Pogo wants to know why there aren’t any cabbages – or any of the other vegetables – in his local forest. Where did they all come from? And could they someday disappear? Presenter Gareth Barlow goes hunting for wild snacks in a city park and unearths the evolution of our most beloved greens. The vegetables on our supermarket shelves today were not always nicely wrapped and tasty. Humans have been selecting for specific genes in plants for thousands of years by choosing to grow those we liked the most. 

Tomatoes have been transformed from a small prickly desert plant in Peru into a water guzzler with round, juicy, sweet fruits. But with breeding – and sometimes cloning – of plants we have also created genetic bottlenecks in many of the crops we rely heavily on. This has left many of our vegetables across the world vulnerable to shifts in climate, natural disasters, wars and diseases. 

To find solutions to this massive breach in food security, CrowdScience heads to the Millennium Seed-bank in England. By collecting and storing our most precious seeds in vaults beneath the ground, scientists are protecting the genetic diversity that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.

Presenter: Gareth Barlow
Producer: Louisa Field

Picture: Man holding  basket of vegetables
Credit: Getty Images/valentinrussanov

Accessibility links

Programme Index

CrowdScience

Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC World Service

About BBC World Service