From campfire sparks to seed vaults, discover how food shaped humanity.

Explore a story stretching from early hunter-gatherers to the future of seed storage and food production. This series connects cooking, agriculture, preservation, industry, and emerging ideas about what we eat next. Sign up to see how every meal carries the history of human survival, ingenuity, and change.

Episode guide

5 episodes

1The Invention of Cooking

Humans have depended on fire for millennia, but do we fully understand the impact it has had on our diet? When our hunter-gatherer ancestors learned to harness this tool, it ignited a culinary and cerebral revolution believed to be one of the most important factors in our evolution.

30 min

2The Agricultural Revolution

From the first row of planted crops, the practice of agriculture rendered man's hunter-gatherer lifestyles obsolete in favor of settled life and stable food supplies. This led to a skyrocketing population and enabled humans to develop skills outside of gathering the food needed to survive.

34 min

3Fermentation, Preservation and Exploration

Just as humans have always sought food to survive, we have also sought the means to preserve that food. Right from the very moment of a kill or a harvest, food begins to break down. With preservation, we can plan for times of scarcity during times of plenty.

34 min

4The Industry of Food

Industrialization brought the second great food revolution. Over the brief span of the 20th century, agriculture underwent greater change than it had since it was first practiced some 12,000 years ago.

28 min

5The Future of Food

Industrialized and processed food has dominated the last century. Now, the question is, what's next? We go around the world to meet pioneers in urban farming, veganism, and insect protein production to find out what will be the future of food.

32 min

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