Download or read book Endangered Maize written by Helen Anne Curry and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect crop plants they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative about the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to trace the motivations behind these hidden extinction stories and show how they shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how conservationists forged their methods around expectations of social, political, and economic transformations that would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity"--

Download or read book Eating to Extinction written by Dan Saladino and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." —Molly Young, The New York Times Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: The source of much of the world’s food—seeds—is mostly in the control of just four corporations. Ninety-five percent of milk consumed in the United States comes from a single breed of cow. Half of all the world’s cheese is made with bacteria or enzymes made by one company. And one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. If it strikes you that everything is starting to taste the same wherever you are in the world, you’re by no means alone. This matters: when we lose diversity and foods become endangered, we not only risk the loss of traditional foodways, but also of flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And the consolidation of our food has other steep costs, including a lack of resilience in the face of climate change, pests, and parasites. Our food monoculture is a threat to our health—and to the planet. In Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods before it’s too late. He tells the fascinating stories of the people who continue to cultivate, forage, hunt, cook, and consume what the rest of us have forgotten or didn’t even know existed. Take honey—not the familiar product sold in plastic bottles, but the wild honey gathered by the Hadza people of East Africa, whose diet consists of eight hundred different plants and animals and who communicate with birds in order to locate bees’ nests. Or consider murnong—once the staple food of Aboriginal Australians, this small root vegetable with the sweet taste of coconut is undergoing a revival after nearly being driven to extinction. And in Sierra Leone, there are just a few surviving stenophylla trees, a plant species now considered crucial to the future of coffee. From an Indigenous American chef refining precolonial recipes to farmers tending Geechee red peas on the Sea Islands of Georgia, the individuals profiled in Eating to Extinction are essential guides to treasured foods that have endured in the face of rampant sameness and standardization. They also provide a roadmap to a food system that is healthier, more robust, and, above all, richer in flavor and meaning.

Download or read book CIMMYT in written by International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book IFAR Country Report Series written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Evolution Made to Order written by Helen Anne and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plant breeders have long sought technologies to extend human control over nature. Early in the twentieth century, this led some to experiment with startlingly strange tools like x-ray machines, chromosome-altering chemicals, and radioactive elements. Contemporary reports celebrated these mutation-inducing methods as ways of generating variation in plants on demand. Speeding up evolution, they imagined, would allow breeders to genetically engineer crops and flowers to order. Creating a new food crop or garden flower would soon be as straightforward as innovating any other modern industrial product. In Evolution Made to Order, Helen Anne Curry traces the history of America’s pursuit of tools that could intervene in evolution. An immersive journey through the scientific and social worlds of midcentury genetics and plant breeding and a compelling exploration of American cultures of innovation, Evolution Made to Order provides vital historical context for current worldwide ethical and policy debates over genetic engineering.

Download or read book Ploughing Up the Farm written by Jerry Buckland and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, farmers' livelihoods and food security have eroded in the past 20 years. Increasing reliance on markets and modern technology has not generated universal farm affluence. Neoliberalism has brought about rural depopulation in the northern hemisphere, rising rural poverty in the southern, and environmental problems all around the farming world. Farmgate prices have stagnated since the 1980s, while market-driven growth has encouraged production of agricultural exports and increasing use of chemical inputs. Trade liberalization is often biased against southern and small farmers, while the power of transnational corporations in agricultural trade and farm technology has grown by leaps and bounds. The corporate-driven GM-food revolution has had little positive effect on farm livelihoods or food security. The book calls for farm policies founded on farmer-led food security and a democratization of the global institutions that have had such detrimental effects.

Download or read book The Threatened Famine written by Frank Watkins and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book New Approaches to the Economics of Plant Health written by Alfons G.J.M. Oude Lansink and published by Wageningen UR Frontis Series. This book was released on 2007-03-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world trade of plants and plant products is gradually increasing in both quantity and variety. Also, as more and more citizens are nowadays travelling to distant destinations, there is an increased risk of unintentionally importing harmful organisms and invasive species. Governments respond to increased phytosanitary risks by imposing trade-restricting measures. However, they are under increasing pressure of the private sector and the World Trade Organization to justify costly and trade-restricting phytosanitary policies. On the other side, current phytosanitary policies are required to account for impacts on the environment. This book presents a number of recent scientific developments regarding the economic analysis of impacts that harmful organisms have on agriculture and the environment, and of measures to control these organisms. It also contains a number of new approaches that integrate economic and epidemiological modelling and economic approaches for measuring these impacts.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Endangered Species written by Mary Emanoil and published by Gale Cengage. This book was released on 1994 with total page 1270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedia of endangered species organized by geographical region, subdivided into classes, orders, and families.

Download or read book Research in Domestic and International Agribusiness Management written by George M Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business Emeritus Ray A Goldberg and published by JAI Press(NY). This book was released on 1995-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Extinct and Endangered Plants of Australia written by J. H. Leigh and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book AgBiotechnology News written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Renewing America s Food Traditions written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents a dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that give North America the distinctive culinary identity that reflects its multi-cultural heritage. Included are recipes and folk traditions associated with 100 of the continent's rarest food plants and animals.

Download or read book Principles of Cultivar Development Theory and technique written by Walter R. Fehr and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Diversity written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Maize for the Gods written by Michael Blake and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-08-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maize is the worldÕs most productive food and industrial crop, grown in more than 160 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. If by some catastrophe maize were to disappear from our food supply chain, vast numbers of people would starve and global economies would rapidly collapse. How did we come to be so dependent on this one plant? Maize for the Gods brings together new research by archaeologists, archaeobotanists, plant geneticists, and a host of other specialists to explore the complex ways that this single plant and the peoples who domesticated it came to be inextricably entangled with one another over the past nine millennia. Tracing maize from its first appearance and domestication in ancient campsites and settlements in Mexico to its intercontinental journey through most of North and South America, this history also tells the story of the artistic creativity, technological prowess, and social, political, and economic resilience of AmericaÕs first peoples.

Download or read book Widening Perspectives on Biodiversity written by Anatole F. Krattiger and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: