We grow fewer than 20 crops to feed 8 billion people. Meanwhile, thousands of nutritious, climate-resilient crops are sitting in the ground: forgotten, stigmatized, and completely ignored by the market. Why?

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Mustafa Durgun, founder of the Sovereign Yields Initiative, to expose one of the most overlooked blind spots in our food system: the crops we stopped growing not because they failed us, but because we built an entire industrial machine around the ones that did.

Mustafa grew up in Istanbul, obsessed with what food represents culturally, historically, and politically. That obsession took him from selling potatoes in Germany to designing climate-resilient food projects in Angola, to now working on transforming his own family's stagnant goat farm in Turkey into a regenerative system. Along the way, he learned something most food system thinkers avoid saying out loud: farmers don't grow what's good for the planet. They grow what pays.

In this conversation, Mustafa reveals:

Why neglected crops carry a stigma of poverty and how that shame is the real barrier to adoption
How to reintroduce forgotten crops without asking anyone to consciously choose them
Why the knowledge gap, the value chain gap, and the financial clarity gap are the three locks keeping these crops out of the market
What ready-to-use therapeutic foods could unlock for global nutrition, and why his best proposal never got funded
Why "fully local food systems" may be more of a feel-good myth than a resilience strategy
How to navigate EU grant applications when you're working on crops nobody has researched yet
And what food sovereignty actually means when you strip away the buzzwords

And much more...

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😊 The Guest: ⁠Mustafa Durgun

Mustafa: How Forgotten Crops Could Fix the Food System & Why Nobody Is Growing Them Yet — with Mustafa Durgun, Founder of Sovereign Yields Initiative

Tomorrow's Bites with Andrés and Sjacco

Mustafa: How Forgotten Crops Could Fix the Food System & Why Nobody Is Growing Them Yet — with Mustafa Durgun, Founder of Sovereign Yields Initiative