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Where Our Food Comes From
By:
Amanda Bensen
Published: March 2nd, 2009
I just finished reading a new book by the prolific Gary Paul Nabhan , whose resume astounds me: He landed a half-million-dollar MacArthur Fellowship (aka “genius grant”) early in his career, and has written some 30 books since then, in addition to several teaching gigs and founding a movement or two. Heck, he even dabbles in folklore and poetry; this man is diverse! Fitting, then, that one of his obsessions is biodiversity.
The book is called Where Our Food Comes From : Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine . Vavilov was an early 20th-century Russian plant geneticist whose work with seed collection and crop breeding was truly, well, seminal. He discovered that a given crop's wild origin could be traced back to wherever that plant grew in the greatest diversity. This “centers of origin” idea helped him locate strains with inherent resistance to pests and diseases.
He established some 400 research institutes and trekked to five continents to collect samples of thousands of wild plant species for a seed bank which he hoped would improve food security for his countrymen and others in years to come.
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Drama in the skies, a heroic botanist and green groups gone bad
By:
Adrian Higgins
Published: January 4th, 2009
Nikolay Vavilov anticipated his demise at least four years before the KGB starved him to death, but he knew then that his pioneering work as a botanist would endure. "We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions," he said defiantly in 1939.
Vavilov was one of the first scientists to see that modern agriculture's reliance on a handful of crops would endanger biodiversity. Before Stalin's regime decided to use him as a scapegoat for disastrous farming policies, Vavilov conserved seeds on five continents, organizing more than 100 expeditions through 64 countries.
In Where Our Food Comes From , ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan retraces Vavilov's footsteps in 10 countries, from the haunting apple forests of Kazakhstan to the montane corn fields of the Sierra Madre.
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Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest To End Famine
By:
Janet Raloff
Published: Dec. 20th, 2008
Few people give thought to where the tomato, apple or walnuts in their salad came from. Or what grains gave rise to the wheat in their bread or barley in their beer. University of Arizona ethnobotanist Nabhan was intensely curious about these questions—and about the exploits of the man he credits with first traveling the world to find the genetic birthplace of the foods we depend upon.
Born in 1887, Nikolay Vavilov is known for creating the world's first major seed bank. To assemble that living genetic library, which still survives in St. Petersburg , Russia , he organized 115 research expeditions through some 64 countries and collected seeds of food crops from five continents. For this book, Nabhan hiked in Vavilov's footsteps to many of the same centers of agricultural diversity.
Even up to 90 years after Vavilov's journey, many spots remain exotic and little changed.
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Why It's Green:
eco-friendly
gifts that are affordable
By:
Yahoo-Green
Published: Dec. 20th, 2008
In this beautifully told nonfiction narrative, Gary Paul Nabhan shows how climate change, economics, genetic engineering, and tiny seeds all over the world will affect our future.
The future of our food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. But in the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country's famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity and guard against widespread hunger.
Now, another remarkable scientist--and vivid storyteller--has retraced his footsteps. In "Where Our Food Comes From," Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov's extraordinary story with his own expeditions to Earth's richest agricultural landscapes and the cultures that tend them. Retracing Vavilov's path from Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, he draws a vibrant portrait of changes that have occurred since Vavilov's time and why they matter.
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Those who forget history are doomed to re-eat it
By:
Marc R. aka Mental Masala
Published: Dec. 19th, 2008 / 8:00 a.m.
Above the din of the enthusiastic multitude of Green Festival attendees in San Francisco, renowned author, ethnobotanist, food preservationist, and historian Gary Paul Nabhan gave a whirlwind tour of topics with global, regional, and personal scope.
Nabhan started with a big-picture perspective. The current and future food crises, he said, are closely linked with the energy and water crises. At the same time that we are depleting our planet's non-renewable fossil fuel supply, we are also draining ancient water sources much faster than they can be refilled. Nabhan called this “fossil water” to highlight that some groundwater sources, like the Ogallala aquifer in the American southern plains, were slowly filled across the span of many millennia.
One of the causes of this is agribusiness's focus on forcing crops into places where they don't belong. Importing a water-hungry plant into an arid climate leads to a reliance on artificial irrigation, and often other imported inputs like chemical fertilizers. As our water and energy supplies diminish, he said, it is time to start choosing plants and animals that are place-appropriate.
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