An informative and comic exploration of the history of plant domestication, the evolution of our modern agricultural choices and the potential for new crops to appear on our tables in the future.
An informative and comic exploration of the history of plant domestication, the evolution of our modern agricultural choices and the potential for new crops to appear on our tables in the future. Why is it that, of the hundreds of thousands of plant species out there that are potentially edible to humans, we grow and eat just a relative handful? And why has most of our plant-based nutrition come to be dominated by the 'big four' crops: wheat, rice, potato and cassava? That's the question at the centre of John Warren's book and it's not a simple question to answer. You might think that these plants were simply the most tasty and productive ones out there. However, as Warren describes, when one looks at the wild relatives of our favourite food crops, they can seem like the least likely candidates for the dinner table. Some, like manioc and almonds, contain high-levels of poisonous chemical compounds, while others, like the wild ancestors of maize or the beloved carrot, have scrawny, tough edible parts, that you would think an early agriculturalist wouldn't look twice at.
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AuthorJohn Carson is a palynologist working mostly in the South American tropics and currently based at University of Reading. Archives |