Never out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future
Never out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future
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Publisher's Hardcover ©2017--
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Little, Brown & Co.
Annotation: A biologist explains how the scientific breeding of our food supply into only the hardiest and tastiest varieties has made these crops susceptible to Mother Nature and discusses how a single bug or virus can now cause a massive collapse.
Genre: [Cookbooks]
 
Reviews: 1
Catalog Number: #160364
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Copyright Date: 2017
Edition Date: 2017 Release Date: 03/14/17
Pages: vii, 323 pages
ISBN: 0-316-26072-X
ISBN 13: 978-0-316-26072-5
Dewey: 641.3
LCCN: 2016958939
Dimensions: 25 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

A convincing argument that the agricultural revolution that has made food more readily available around the world contains the seeds of its own destruction.Dunn (Applied Ecology/North Carolina State Univ.; The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery, 2015, etc.) takes a popular science route to his subject, summarizing and consolidating the work of others to make his point: that we have gotten ourselves into trouble by thinning the number of species of our most basic foodstuffs so that around the world, there are typically fewer than a handful of species of staples like wheat, rice, corn, and cassava, the plant that provides the greatest number of calories in the African diet. These are usually highly productive species for which effective pesticides have been discovered, but the downside is that once pests learn how to override the pesticides, crop failure and famine are likely to follow. Dunn goes back through history to one of the earliest, and most disastrous, examples of modern agriculture, the introduction of the potato to Ireland from the New World, which succeeded until the potato blight decimated the crop and caused the death of millions. The author chronicles his travels around the world investigating the successes and failures of attempts by scientists and farmers to stave off natural attacks against crops, including a remarkably successful one to introduce wasps to kill off the mealybugs that were destroying the cassava crop in Africa. Dunn also celebrates the Russians who, during World War II, gave their lives to protect a seed bank in Leningrad, and he writes at length about a "doomsday vault" in Norway in which seeds are preserved against apocalypse. An alarming account but one suggesting that, armed with knowledge, we can reverse this way of treating the plants that feed us and find a way toward a more sustainable diet.

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Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography Index/Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-310) and index.
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+

The bananas we eat today aren't your parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out.

That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food.

But our crops themselves remain susceptible to the nature's fury. And nature always wins. Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.


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