“There’s a reason why monocultures do not exist in nature.”
Remarkable.
if you are seeking something positive & restorative to a faith in human capacity in this dross drenched downfall of a moment on the species calendar, why not try this sublime & beguiling belter from broadcaster & journalist Dan Saladino.
Behind the devastating & minatory threat of agricultural collapse due to excessively narrowed & precarious crop varieties – & insanely reckless & reductive agricultural productivity management & over-homogenization – there is a surprisingly uplifting & inspiring barrage of resilience & eclectic mega-diversity from across the world demonstrated within these dedicated pages.
The book is intensely varied, with Dan roaming far & wide across the Earth’s breadth to beautifully investigate & document rare, & often resurgent, crops & edacious strains & customs.
Historically immense, intrepid, & geographically sprawling, the book is just as rich in its exploration of ethnographies as it is agriculture, with an extremely rewarding & fascinating cornucopia of casts.
The author is not lazy in his research, neither reticent in his forwardness & fondness for travelling to & unravelling the minutia of his vast & versatile subjects.
Its all heartening as fuck, as well as being densely informative & through.
the resulting optimism – without eschewing the formidable destruction, waste & threat that the current travesty-of-a-system embodies – is utterly inspirational.
“We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can’t continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems. It isn’t working. How can anyone claim it is when so many humans are left either hungry or obese and when the Earth is suffering.”
“This is public money, our money, and it is supporting a system that isn’t resilient, healthy or sustainable. These subsidies, between $700 billion and $1 trillion a year, can too easily distort decisions on what the word grows and how it eats.”
the book is also reads like a dream, almost a novel, with a wise & almost ruggedly-sumptuous quality of writing & style that makes the pages glide by with ease.
“ – a relentless kind of reductionism; convinced by our own cleverness, we believed we were capable of deciphering nature in all its complexity and then overriding it.”
“We thought with science we could change the cycle of life and its rules,”
“We’ve been killing life and now we need to restore it.” – Emmanuel Faber, Danone (yup!) CEO
historical details of what would now be classed as “alternative”, small -scale farming, with harmonised & natural-cycles, plant specimens, techniques & geo-acumen that did not rely on chemicals & industrial machinery – are fully integrated & explored.
Ancient grain varieties, ingenious & novel methods of pre-industrial-revolution food production, & a riot of droll & even eccentric culinary practices & cultures are the course.
“[Norman] Borlaug said the Green Revolution was only buying us time, twenty to thirty years at most. He hadn’t intended it to be a long term-fix for feeding the world but the world became locked into this intensive system.”
“Across the Andes, Emshwiller has seen other farmers abandon rotation systems for monocultures in which they attempt to grow the same crop on the same land year after year. This usually results in them using more pesticides, as the soil becomes exhausted, they have to bring in fertilisers in this way, they have lost the ancient varieties of oca, but also the complex system that had given them self sufficiency.”
Eating to Extinction has been a massive success, & has been heaped with praise.
this is pleasing, as it absolutely deserves the encomium.
Totally brilliant & enriching.
“The pistachio is the lung that allows the our villages to breath’, said one of the farmers who was driven off his land by the war. ‘I will only be fine as long as my orchard is fine’.
Dan Saladino, 2021, Vintage, 377 pages