Episodes
97
Latest episode
Jun 2026
Language
EN-US
Steve Alexander reports on the agriculture industry with stories of how what we eat goes from farm to plate and profiles of the people and companies who make it all happen.
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8446811/8446811_2026-06-11-230911.64kmono.mp3 College isn’t for everyone, and some Chicago high school students are now getting the opportunity to get started in a well-paying job as a forklift driver. In the audio clip above, Olive-Harvey College President, Dr. Kimberly Hollingsworth, tells WGN’s Steve Alexander that for the first time, a credit course is being offered at its […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8446732/8446732_2026-06-11-224332.64kmono.mp3 Without agriculture, there’d be no FIFA World Cup games at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The natural grass turf, installed just for the World Cup, is one example. Another example is in the stands. Thanks to farmers, a company called PlantSwitch has replaced cups and lids and utensils made with petroleum with a plastic […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8434203/8434203_2026-06-05-144703.64kmono.mp3 If you’re a parent or grandparent, you may consider those plastic pouches of food your toddler sucks on contentedly while you drive down the road as the best invention ever. But Lincoln Park mom and baby food company founder Erica Bethe Levin is alarmed by a Greenpeace study finding as much as 11,000 microplastics […]
Our gardening guru Mr. Fizz, Jim Fizzell, talks about how to keep those “wascally wabbits” out of your garden without resorting to the way Elmer Fudd tried to deal with bugs. Jim also says it’s not to late too plant, even from seed, and talks about the proper amounts of water to put on your […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8399412/8399412_2026-05-20-164212.64kmono.mp3 If you like your Italian Beef “dragged through the garden,” you can thank Vincent Formusa. More than a hundred years ago, he started packing chopped veggies in the tradition of his native Sicily–in olive oil. Not only did other Italian immigrants love it, popularity spread, and the V. Formusa Company is still in business […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8383204/8383204_2026-05-14-210004.64kmono.mp3 For those of us who love to raise food and flowers and anything else that we can grow, this is a difficult time of year. We’re itching to get out in the garden and plant, but the soil temperature isn’t quite warm enough. Even in the middle of May, Chicago-area weather can be unpredictable. […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8372305/8372305_2026-05-11-165505.64kmono.mp3 Forgetting to eat is a real thing for people taking the GLP-1 magic weight loss drugs. But before we get to that, let’s talk about TV dinners. In the 1950s, televisions were a new thing and rapidly became prominent in American homes, so people decided that rather than sitting around the dinner table, why […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8356576/8356576_2026-05-04-171816.64kmono.mp3 Guacamole, the Cinco de Mayo (and Super Bowl, and general party of any kind) staple, wasn’t as common, nor available year-round, prior to 1997. That’s the year a ban on avocados from Mexico was lifted, thanks in large part to the North American Free Trade Agreement approved during the Clinton administration. Now, we have […]
https://serve.castfire.com/audio/8337452/8337452_2026-04-27-164752.64kmono.mp3 Synthetic fertilizer is arguably the most important life-saving innovation of all time, credited with preventing 2.7 billion premature deaths. In the audio clip above, Susan Stroud, the founder of No Bull Agriculture, tells WGN’s Steve Alexander we have a couple of Germans to thank for that. In the early 1900s, Fritz Haber, a German […]
Whether you pronounce it “NUT-tella” or “NEW-tella” doesn’t matter. “We are very accepting of both pronunciations,” says Seth Gonzales, Senior Director of Marketing for Nutella in the Ferrero candy group. In the audio clip above, he tells WGN’s Steve Alexander the origins of Nutella go back to post-World War II Italy, where poverty was rampant, […]
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