Innholdsfortegnelse for May-15 i National Geographic Magazine

Russia is a major exporter of grains, including wheat. In the face of sanctions and import bans, the country has recently focused on growing more of its own food and has boosted government funding for agricultural technologies that increase production. These efforts must take into account predicted shifting temperatures. A warming climate and increasing precipitation will likely expand the amount of land that could be cultivated in coming years. But economic models predict that—largely due to floods, droughts, and heat and cold waves—wheat production could decrease by up to 15 percent within five years. To combat the negative effects of climate change, Russia is looking to conservation agriculture. Inexpensive, low-tech solutions such as no-till farming could reduce soil erosion in the country’s steppe regions. Siberia’s arid Kulunda Steppe, for example,…

Pheasant dumplings. Ostrich stew. Roasted flamingo. Recipes surviving from ancient Rome suggest that such delicacies may have been served at posh banquets. However, archaeologists who’ve picked through the trash heaps of history—dumps, sewers, and cesspits—say such exotic treats were rare then, and Romans generally ate locally sourced foods very similar to what Italians eat today. At the coastal site of Herculaneum, in a sewer that was in use until the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, archaeologists have found a wealth of clues to the locals’ diet. Sifting through the remains of scraps flushed down the drains of shops and apartments, they’ve identified 114 different foods—45 species of fish alone, as well as traces of pigs, sheep, and chickens and a variety of herbs, fruits, nuts, and…

Even though many farmers struggle to meet their crops’ demand for water in places such as drought-stricken California, every year they send billions of virtual gallons to other countries—in the form of the food and feed grown with that water. According to Arjen Hoekstra of the Netherlands’ University of Twente, the issue of agriculture’s water footprint—all the water used to produce a commodity and get it to a consumer—is contentious, since many farmers use scarce water to produce low-value export crops. Water is a public good, he says, so allocation systems ought to support its sustainable use.…

Food. Sex. They’re primal preoccupations for humans and our close relatives, chimpanzees. For years Homo sapiens scientists have watched those appetites play out among Pan troglodytes with mixed results. Female chimps average five to six years between births, one of the longest intervals of any mammal. To raise the odds of reproducing, a female will mate “with most or all of the males she knows,” says primatologist Melissa Emery Thompson, while a male will compete or fight with other would-be sires. Some studies report cases of male chimps trying to sweeten the deal: sharing game they killed, or crops they filched, with females that mated with them. In a 2007 West African chimp study, a female consorted more frequently with a male that gave her stolen papayas, leading researcher Kimberley…

In less than five decades the once vibrant Motor City lost more than half its population and gained a reputation as a failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. But photos of derelict homes and empty lots can create a misleading impression. The city ranks 69th in population density—people per square mile— among U.S. cities with more than a hundred thousand people, ahead of Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, and Portland, Oregon, to name just a few. Detroit is still losing inhabitants, but neighborhoods such as Woodbridge are rebounding. Detroit Up Close Detroit’s population plummeted, in part due to the growth of the suburbs in the 1950s, race riots in 1967, the decline in auto manufacturing, and the 2008 financial crisis. Over the decades each neighborhood has responded…

Some 60 million people rely on fish caught in the Mekong River and on rice grown in its fertile delta. But the river is changing. China has built seven major dams in the past two decades; it has 21 more under construction or planned. This so-called Mekong cascade is now headed downstream, with 11 new dams expected along the main stem in Laos and Cambodia. Those plans are pitting the region’s need for electricity against its need for food and against the livelihoods of fishermen and farmers, who depend on the river’s free-flowing waters. The tallest dam of the cascade, China’s Xiaowan dam began operating in 2010. Nuozhadu dam began producing hydroelectric power in 2012. Laos is building the Xayaburi dam despite objections from Cambodia and Vietnam, which fear its…

Detroit I’m crisscrossing a careworn street on Detroit’s west side, looking at the house where my mother lived in the 1930s. I walk up driveways, down sidewalks, peer around bushes. A neighbor, understandably curious, bounds over. “I’m the king of Glendale,” Keith Harris says. Harris loves Glendale Street—so much so that he’s purchased nine properties for $42,000. That sum got him six houses in varying states of repair and three empty lots. “I’m not done yet,” he says. “I’m going to buy more and rent them.” I’m glad to hear this. Glendale could use more investment. So could Tuxedo Street, a few blocks away, where my father grew up. So could Detroit. I’ve seen all the ruin-porn photos. Now I’ve come to see for myself what’s happened to what was…

India, the world’s second most populous country, is home to more farmers than any other nation. Water availability is a major agricultural concern there, especially for cultivation of rice. Since only 44 percent of the country’s agricultural land is irrigated, millions of rice growers must rely on annual monsoons. Over the past 30 years, though, India’s farmers have faced challenges as extreme weather events during the monsoon season—including droughts—have become more frequent. Water-use plans are one tool being used to help thirsty regions. In 2009, with support from the World Bank, the Indian government began a national watershed management program to promote more efficient water use through education and technical support. “Engaging farmers and local communities in managing water resources was key to the success of the watershed program,” says…

Diets have shifted in China—and so too has its top crop. Since 2011 the country has grown more corn than rice. Corn production has jumped nearly 125 percent over the past 25 years, while rice has increased only 7 percent. A taste for meat is behind the change: A significant portion of its corn is used to feed chickens, pigs, and cattle. Another reason for corn’s rise: Government incentives encourage farmers near Beijing to grow corn instead of rice to improve water quality. Corn uses less water than rice and creates less fertilizer runoff. This switch has decreased pollution in the city’s major reservoir and made drinking water safer for residents. According to the World Bank, China accounts for about 30 percent of total global fertilizer consumption. The Chinese Ministry…

Prepared as food for eternity, beef ribs in a coffin were buried with King Tut’s great-grandparents in Egypt in about 1350 B.C. Now a study has identified the resin used to preserve the meat: sap from trees related to the pistachio. The sap may also have served as flavoring. “This mummy may show the origins of using it in food,” says study co-author Salima Ikram. Today a type of the smoky resin, called mastic, spices up dishes and drinks in countries around the Mediterranean.…

Each day about 5,000 acres of farmland worldwide become too salty to sustain crops profitably. All land is naturally vulnerable to either sodium or sodium chloride (or both) that accumulates in soil. Poor drainage can make it linger. When salt builds up around roots, plants work harder to grow. In all, a study shows, more than 153 million acres of irrigated land—about the size of France—have become unfarmable. Farmers won’t be the ones to fix the problem, though, according to Manzoor Qadir, a soil and irrigation specialist at United Nations University. Instead, he says, governments need to mandate field drainage on a large scale. A more immediate solution may come from plants themselves. Research indicates that food crops such as wheat and rice could be genetically engineered to resemble plants…

UNDERSTANDING DOLPHINS INTELLIGENCE CAPTIVITY CULTURE a three-part series Head trainer Teri Turner Bolton looks out at two young adult male dolphins, Hector and Han, whose beaks, or rostra, are poking above the water as they eagerly await a command. The bottlenose dolphins at the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS), a resort and research institution on an island off the coast of Honduras, are old pros at dolphin performance art. They’ve been trained to corkscrew through the air on command, skate backward across the surface of the water while standing upright on their tails, and wave their pectoral fins at the tourists who arrive several times a week on cruise ships. But the scientists at RIMS are more interested in how the dolphins think than in what they can do.…

FOOD The Future of Food natgeofood.com This story is part of National Geographic’s Future of Food initiative, a special five-year project that seeks to show how what we eat makes us who we are. Brother Adam must have known he had become a beekeeper at an unlucky time. It was 1915, and he was a 16-year-old novice at Buckfast Abbey in southwest England. Rapid bee die-offs have been recorded for centuries, but the catastrophe that confronted the young monk was unprecedented. A mysterious disease had wiped out almost every apiary on the Isle of Wight and now was devastating the rest of England. Brother Adam found his hives suddenly vacant, bees crawling beneath them, unable to fly. That year he lost 29 of the abbey’s 45 hives. Scientists eventually linked the…

A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com During the summers of 2012 and 2013, I walked more than a thousand miles on the Camino de Santiago. Also called the Way of St. James, or simply the Way, by English speakers, it is a centuries-old Christian pilgrimage path through France and Spain. In each of the past few years, between 183,000 and 273,000 people from around the world traveled the route, which runs through cities, across mountains, and along Roman roads. It ends at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, where the supposed remains of St. James, one of Jesus Christ’s Twelve Apostles, are enshrined. When I walked the Way, I became part of an ancient tradition thriving in a modern world. Though the pilgrimage is rooted in Christian tradition, it has been…

nationalgeographic.com/3Q Chef José Andrés moved from Spain to the United States two decades ago. Known for introducing Spanish tapas to the American palate, he’s also hosted cooking shows and taught at Harvard (as well as blogged for us at theplate.nationalgeographic.com). Andrés, 45, owns 20 restaurants, but his passion for feeding people continues long after the tables have been cleared. You founded a humanitarian organization, World Central Kitchen. What drives your commitment to feed the hungry? My inspiration comes from the unknown names, the people who help, day in and day out, and don’t expect anything in return. One thing I did was go to Haiti after the earthquake to cook for people. I think we all should be committing a part of our time for the betterment of the lives…

Got milk? If so, you also may get stomach pain after you drink a glass of it. That’s because most of the world’s adults—an estimated 68 percent—aren’t able to digest it. Their condition is commonly called lactose intolerance. It stems from a lack of lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the milk sugar lactose. Lactase is present in young children but weakens in most people after weaning, says evolutionary geneticist Pascale Gerbault. The enzyme continues to be produced, extending the ability to digest dairy, only in smaller populations of adults around the globe. Though what sparked the digestion divide is uncertain, Gerbault says, one pattern may shed light: Milk tolerance in adults is more common in regions with a history of raising dairy mammals, such as cattle, goats, and sheep.…

Warships use sonar to detect targets and jamming technology to thwart enemy sonar. Mexican free-tailed bats can do both those things with their vocal cords. Bats use echolocation, bouncing sound waves off an object, to navigate and draw a bead on prey. Aaron Corcoran and William Conner, scientists at Wake Forest University, recently discovered that Mexican free-tailed bats also use these signals to interfere with one another’s hunts. When one of the bats is homing in on an insect, it increases the rate of its signals to a rapid “feeding buzz.” If a second, nearby bat emits a jamming signal, that may confuse the reading Bat 1 gets on the insect, giving Bat 2 an opening to steal it. Not to be outdone, Bat 1 may send its own jamming…

This year a genetically engineered potato may hit a grocery store near you. Using a technique called RNA interference (RNAi), scientists have silenced genes that lead potatoes to bruise and to brown when exposed to air—the two characteristics that land roughly 30 percent of harvested potatoes in the trash. These new spuds also contain up to 70 percent less of an amino acid that transforms into a cancer- causing compound at high temperatures. A second version will be resistant to late blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine. The J. R. Simplot Company that created the potato calls it Innate since it doesn’t contain genes from other species. Even so, McDonald’s won’t be serving it. RNAi is a “very routine procedure in research,” says Kent Bradford, a biologist…

In the heart of Detroit, America’s poorest big city, Anthony Hatinger is planting seeds in a reclaimed liquor store, a squat building repainted in Disney colors: supersize white fish swimming through happy green reeds in deep blue water. Wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a gray knit cap, bathed in the glow of greenhouse lights, he holds a pen cap, maneuvering its pointy end to scoop three tiny basil seeds from his palm. He drops them onto moist, cakey plugs of soil—“brownie bites,” he calls them—as he works to give them the potential to sprout. The sweet Italian basil will grow alongside a variety of lettuces. Downstairs, where liquor was once stored, thousands of baby tilapia swim in vats. Their waste, pumped upstairs, feeds the greens, which absorb the nutrients. The…

Pumee Boontom lives in northern Thailand, but he tunes his television to the Chinese weather forecast. A big storm in southern China means a big release of water from the Chinese dams upstream—and, in turn, a good chance his village will be flooded. The Chinese government is supposed to warn downstream countries. In Boontom’s experience, that warning tends to arrive too late or not at all. “Before the dams, the water would go up and down gradually, with the seasons,” he says. “Now the water goes up and down drastically, and we don’t know when it’s going to change—unless we watch the storms.” Boontom is the leader of Ban Pak Ing, a scat tering of cinder block houses and unpaved streets that reach from the precipitous west bank of the…

With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist When a tornado touched down in Vulcan, Alberta, on July 8, 1927, people were taken by surprise. “The crowd gathered in the town streets and eating places and people outdoors suddenly noticed a most peculiar cloud in the southwest,” noted Genevieve L. Sales, a writer for the local Herald Vulcan. Occupants of the open auto shown in the loupe—and even the photographer himself— may now seem unwise to have lingered as the twister neared, but Sales explained why they did: “People in the street watched the monster, with keen interest but no fear. Some even went to take pictures … The lack of panic was probably due to the fact that many, never having experienced anything of this nature, simply failed to realize their…

In four countries with fast-developing economies—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the agricultural sector has become a proving ground for innovation. Juergen Voegele, a World Bank agriculture expert, predicts that “by transforming agriculture, we will not only meet the challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050 but do so in ways that create wealth and reduce its environmental footprint.” Preserving the Amazon rain forest is a top priority for Brazil. The rapid expansion of soybean and cattle farming there during the 1990s and early 2000s led to alarming rates of deforestation. Over the past ten years, however, with government support, activists and farmers have protected more than 33,000 square miles of rain forest—an area equal to more than 14 million soccer fields. Saving these forests has kept 3.5 billion tons of carbon…