The Nature of Crops: How We Came to Eat the Plants We Do, by John Warren
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The Nature of Crops: How We Came to Eat the Plants We Do, by John Warren
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Have you ever wondered why we eat wheat, rice, potatoes and cassava? Why we routinely domesticate foodstuffs with the power to kill us, or why we chose almonds over acorns? Answering all these questions and more in a readable and friendly style, this book takes you on a journey through our history with crop plants. Arranged into recurrent themes in plant domestication, this book documents the history and biology of over 50 crops, including cereals, spices, legumes, fruits and cash crops such as chocolate, tobacco and rubber.In The Nature of Crops, John Warren reveals:* Why the Egyptians worshipped onions;* Why red-flowering runner beans provide fewer beans than white-flowering;* The inherent dangers of being a pineapple worker; and* Why a bird will always beat you in a chilli pepper eating competition!
The Nature of Crops: How We Came to Eat the Plants We Do, by John Warren- Amazon Sales Rank: #831469 in Books
- Brand: Warren, John
- Published on: 2015-06-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x .60" w x 5.70" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 184 pages
Review "Glorious in breadth and fascinating in depth, all the short stories means that The Nature of Crops can be read and reread in the room where Sterculius is King." (New Scientist)"Written by a natural storyteller, this book is a 'must'....a very readable book, packed with interesting and useful information, exploring and clearly explaining the cool science behind the development of the plants that sustain us." (Dr. Tim Pettitt)"The writing is accessible and good-humoured. At times it almost reads like an audition for QI. It would be easy to see Stephen Fry asking, 'What product, controlled by the Mafia in America in the 1920s and 1930s, would later launch Marilyn Monroe's career?' The answer is, of course, the artichoke." (Alun Salt AOB Blog)
About the Author John Warren is Director of Education at Aberystwyth University. He has an academic interest in the sex-life of plants and a recreational interest in all things edible. Formally a cocoa breeder, he worked on the world chocolate gene bank at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Whilst there he published scientific papers on the unusual sexual practices of Caribbean cocoa and also pried into the private lives of several less familiar tropical crops including the star-fruit and tree cucumber. Prior to working in the Caribbean he spent two years literally sowing wild oats at the University of Liverpool. He has made regular appearances on BBC Scotland’s Beechgrove Potting Shed. The research for this work has relied heavily upon consultations with strawberry pathologists, rhubarb tasters, chocolate scientists and coffee geneticists, better known to the author as friends.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Full of dry British humor and wonderful bits of information, this book shows crops to be of many natures--wonderful variety. By lyndonbrecht I think this is a wonderful book, but I suspect that readers will have opinions all over the map. For one thing, this book has long paragraphs with little to relive the eye--maps and some illustrations would help. The text is dense and the print is not so easy to read. It's not academic in the sense of using a specialized vocabulary but it does assume an educated reader. There's also the fact Warren is British and has the quite wry British academic sense of humor and playfulness, which is not always to an American taste, although that's one of the things I like about this book. It's possible that some readers will be offended by a couple of his wry jokes, as several are mildly--really, mildly--sexist.The title is ambiguous, but the book covers all kinds of aspects of very many crops--not just the usual, but root crops, fruit, nuts, spices and more. It centers around domestication, plant breeding and different ways crops might have been domesticated. He says that rather than calling ancestors "hunter gatherers," we ought to call them "gatherer hunters" to reflect that gathering plants, fruit and seeds was more important in what those people ate--and how gradually crops came about. In describing the nature of crops he is really showing that their nature is extremely varied, in form, use, domestication and other ways. Rather than try to describe Warren's dryly witty prose, I'll do a shotgun approach in what follows.In Chapter 1, he considers the "nature of the natural." Peanuts, for example are not known in the wild. Ergot, a fungus of rye, is natural but often poisoned eaters--so, is a natural contaminant better than a manufactured one? This last is a bit loaded because he seems to have no trouble with the idea of genetic modifications. Nicolai Vavilov, a Soviet scientist, developed the idea of hearths of domestication, and his seed collections were saved during the siege of Leningrad, while he died of starvation in the gulag. The idea, now accepted by science, is important in this book.Some plants that were once crops have been abandoned. Teasels once were used to raise the nap on woolens, nettles were once grown for use in making cloth, and fat-hen, apparently similar to quinoa, was once eaten. Quinoa was important to some aboriginal American groups but the Spanish discouraged it on account of associations with what they saw as pagan religion. The ancient Egyptians liked onions--some mummies have onions set in the eye sockets. The nature of our crops in a cultural sense is not just crop yield, response to soils and climate, taste or ease of growing, it also involves a welter of peoples' traditions, religions, patterns of drug use, medical utility and more.He discusses the peculiarities of different crops, in the sense of what we value them for may have had specific purposes but certainly not to feed humans. He says that chillies (note the British spelling?) developed capsaicin to discourage mammal foraging but it's not hot to birds, which disperse the seeds. He also describes several crops that are edible after processing but poisonous in their natural state--how did people decide to make such plants into crops?Warren is concerned about global warming. It could increase the prevalence of diseases of plants
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful. I was not overly impressed with this book. It ... By Davie I was not overly impressed with this book. It was somewhat disorganised and the author seemed to obsessed with sex. Plants didn't reproduce, they "had sex". He was also remarkably ignorant about beans — particularly Scarlet Runners. I doubt if he's ever grown them.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five Stars By Mr S. Fantastic book for botanists, foodies, allotment growers
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