Archaeologist Revives Ancient Plants

[The Grand Nudger]

News like this is always more exciting than it seems. Isolating food crops for any given culture gives us a window into that cultures lifestyle, as well as a point of reference for many other observations of that culture. Cities rise or fall on the status of the granaries, armies march on their stomachs. A considerable amount of time has been spent recently in elaborating upon the long family tree of our modern food corps, to the point of isolating many of the wild cultigens that were a part of the original "green revolution". This sort of thing has benefits beyond a fuller understanding of our history. The broader the selection pool when developing hybrid crops the better. Traits found in wild and hybrid varieties of agricultural crops have been leveraged to provide resistance to disease, increase in production, tolerance to environmental factors such as heat and drought and pests, honestly the list is endless. Projects such as these not only grant us a much deeper understanding of the past, they increase the number of tools available to us in the effort to ensure security of agricultural production. Kind of heavy shit when you give it a moments thought.

Our burger, for example, is covered in hybrid bulbs, squash, grain so well tampered with as to be unrecognizable when considering it's earliest origins. Seed crops, heavily modified fruits. The beef itself is also altered, and the feed for the beef is not only the product of this sort of tampering, but in many cases further enhanced by discoveries in other areas of science. The french fries are made of a root which has played a massive role in the history of the west, and was originally intended as pig food. None of this visible from our lofty perch at the grocery store, of course.