Archaeologist Revives Ancient Plants

[Epimethean]

The Jesus Palm lives again!

[KichigaiNeko]

Great find Min!!

Always good to hear of ancient or "feared extinct" plants being brought back into usage again.

I wonder if they banked the seeds???

[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.

[thesummerqueen]

Plants are WAY heavier shit than people give them credit for but only we greenies ever know it.

Remember, Rhythm? Every bush is burning.

Well, certainly after you've been through them, but I meant shrubbery of course.

[Autumnlicious]

Since we're on the topic of foo-ood...

Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" (http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Scien...0684800012) is highly recommended.

Nothing like a combined history, chemistry, biology and cooking book for the curious minded.

[KichigaiNeko]

I object to the word "Greenie" unfortunately here in Oz is means something rather sinister and nothing to do with Horti/Agri Culture.

I do find it curious that so many object to G-M food (focusing on the genetic part) when in reality ALL of our food crops have been genetically modified as Rhythm points out.

It is always nice to find an ancient strain of a food crop and "bring it back to life" one never knows... it just may have the genes to help out in a current situation or feed those where no other food crop will grow??