Like Water in the Desert

Canned tomatoes are a perfect winter food. As you'll know from our tomato episode, the beautiful fruits in fresh aisle of the supermarket are mostly flavorless outside of the summer season—but the tomatoes that get packed in a can are cheap, readily available, and, most important ...  Show more

The season for holiday baking is upon us, and before you spice up your cookies and pies, you’ll probably want to know: is most of the cinnamon on grocery store shelves actually fake? That’s one question we’re investigating this week on behalf of you, dear listeners, in the latest ...  Show more

Over the past century, we've transformed the arid lands of the American west into year-round, well-irrigated agricultural powerhouses. Today, fruits, nuts, and nearly all of our leafy greens are grown in the desert, using water diverted, stored, and supplied at taxpayer expense. ...  Show more

“We should also harvest the water, store it in the soil. Grow our crops and grow our trees. Because the storage in the soil is much, much bigger than any store we can ever put on the surface. God has already given us a huge reservoir where we can put our water.” Kenya has been ra ...  Show more

From Lawrence of Arabia to Star Wars via tales of intrepid adventurers traversing lonely sand-swept landscapes, deserts have always had a powerful pull on the popular imagination. But if a desert is full of sand, where did all that sand come from in the first place? That is wh ...

The Sinai desert in Egypt is a dry, barren place where not much grows. But Ties van der Hoeven has come up with a scheme to turn it into a green and fertile land. It’s a plan on a huge scale which involves dredging a lake, restoring ecosystems, and even bringing back rain to the ...  Show more