National Geographic Magazine August 2019

NAT GEO TV Take Uncharted Food Treks With Chef Gordon Ramsay In the new series Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, one of television’s best known chefs leads viewers on anthropology-through-cuisine expeditions. Each episode follows Ramsay as he meets with indigenous peoples and local food legends to explore cultures, customs, and flavors from around the world, including Peru (above), New Zealand, and Morocco. See Ramsay serve up a taste of adventure when the series debuts at 10/9c on July 21 on National Geographic. ON NEWSSTANDS A Guide to Your Genetic Mysteries Explore advances in DNA analysis, and learn about your genetic legacy. National Geographic’s Your Genes, A User’s Guide: 100 Things You Never Knew About Human Genetics is available now on newsstands. BOOKS Chicken and Your Health, in Plucked Now in paperback, this provocative narrative by investigative journalist Maryn McKenna reveals…

FIVE YEARS AGO I spent a few days with National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek, a writer who is walking around the world, retracing the journey begun when modern humans first left Africa. Salopek’s walking 21,000 miles; I joined him for five miles I’ll never forget. In Şanliurfa, a dusty town in southern Turkey that is reputed to be the birthplace of Abraham, we found ourselves in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. Everywhere we looked, we saw Syrian refugees—in throngs on the streets, in small apartments crammed with multiple families. We saw people unable to find work of any kind, no matter their skills or education. We talked with people scared and scarred by their country’s brutal civil war; we heard stories of suffering, rape, torture, and other horrific crimes. At the…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE VOL. 236 NO. 2…

TROPICAL PLANTS aren’t abundant in the northern latitudes of Montreal, Canada. Nor are the planet’s most diverse animals, insects. Even so, Montreal-based artist and photographer Raku Inoue finds a way to showcase both with his colorful portraits of insects and other animals made from flowers, leaves, twigs, seeds, and stems. “Insects have always been symbolic for me,” says Inoue, who grew up in Japan. Each summer his grandmother would leave the door open to cool their house in the countryside near Hiroshima and welcome in dragonflies, an insect that she believed represented the presence of her late husband. Now Inoue makes dragonflies, beetles, ants, and whatever else inspires him, using materials from his own backyard. He takes leftover rose petals and baby’s breath from nearby florists, and occasionally people will send him…

THE DISCOVERIES OF TODAY THAT WILL DEFINE THE WORLD OF TOMORROW NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 235 NO. 6 ALL OF US ARE DESCENDED from migrants. Our species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve in Lahore, where I am writing these words. Nor did we evolve in Shanghai or Topeka or Buenos Aires or Cairo or Oslo, where you, perhaps, are reading them. Even if you live today in the Rift Valley, in Africa, mother continent to us all, on the site of the earliest discovered remains of our species, your ancestors too moved—they left, changed, and intermingled before returning to the place you live now, just as I left Lahore, lived for decades in North America and Europe, and returned to reside in the house where my grandparents and parents once did, the house where I…

SOME 174 MILLION tons of plastic packaging is produced globally each year. Only 20 percent of it gets recycled, and what’s not disposed of properly ends up in our environment. Single-use plastic containers and wraps protect food in transit and extend shelf life, but do they really need to last hundreds of years? Designers and engineers who think not are devising alternatives that can be easily cleaned and reused, degrade into compost, or—best yet—disappear as the product is consumed. Food packaging that’s not single-use plastic New container materials and forms are advancing from prototype to market. 1. TAKE OUT, TURN IN In a design challenge at New York City’s Pratt Institute, students folded black plastic sheets to make take-out containers that could be returned to a collection point, sanitized, and reused ad infinitum by…