What if you could actually step back in time and taste a bit of history? Steven Apfelbaum has a way.
Apfelbaum is the founder and chairman of Applied Ecological Services, a 40-year-old ecological consulting and restoration sciences firm headquartered in Broadhead, Wis. The company determines what a piece of land historically looked like — what plants were there, what the topography might have looked like — and then uses that information to create a faithful replica of what was once there.
"It turns out these native plants, in addition to having nearly 10% or more protein, they have a very, very well balanced trace mineral and trace nutrient profile. And it's substantially higher than any of the commercial grains," Apfelbaum says. "So, from a human nutritional perspective, these wild native plants haven't lost their nutritional value like the domestic grains have."
In this edition of Radio Chipstone, Apfelbaum tells contributor Gianofer Fields that reinvigorating an ecosystem can also be tasty.
