Bicolor Sweet Corn, Fairfax City Farmers Market, 14 August 2010
©EOP
Since the beginning of summer, I have devoted most of my available time to the fall term class on World Water Resources. Planning to leave the country in a few days, I realized that I need to give a little attention to the spring term course on World Food Resources, so I have been doing some thinking about what materials to include and how to organize the course. As with the water course, the prospect is a little daunting in the details. The subject is a big one, and it is full of fascinating bits of information, most of which cannot be featured in eight 90-minute sessions.
The single thing I find most fascinating, and troubling, about human food is how remarkably narrow human food choices are. Fewer than fifty species of plants and animals account for the vast majority of calories and other nutrients ingested by people, and an even smaller subset is dominant amongst those (rice, wheat, and maize amongst plant foods; cattle (including milk and milk products), chickens (including eggs) and pigs amongst animals). Humans do not consume as food the overwhelming number of the multiple millions of species of plants and animals. There are, of course, good reasons some species are not used: they are poisonous, they contain almost no nutrients in forms useful to people, they are extremely difficult to obtain, they are not amenable to agriculture, they are extremely difficult to process or to store, etc. With very few exceptions, those species used for food today have been used as food for the length of written history, and many of them can be traced by archaeologists to cultures living long before writing evolved.
Over time a few things have become more or less common as foodstuffs, though much of that is explained by just two variables: the evolution of agriculture and the migration of people and species. The evolution of agriculture led to the displacement of larger variety of foods gathered in the wild by that hand-full of species easier to propagate, notably grains and a few tree crops and animals that could be herded instead of a motley of wild species. Migration brought new world food species (for example potatoes and tomatoes) to the old world and vice versa. In those processes some foods once important, species of wild game for example, became inconsequential. Migration of species radically altered food production and consumption such that old world species dominate much of the agriculture of the U.S., though maize is crucially important, while national cuisines in the old world are linked to new world crops (potatoes and northern European countries, tomatoes in Italy).
The range of food indeed has become narrower over the past few generations. In much of the world beef has displaced other meat, and baked and yeast leavened wheat bread is becoming common in places like China where not long ago it was unknown. Maize, corn, has become a dominant grain in all kinds of food products including ones like sweet sodas where the sweetener is corn syrup.Along with soya (soy beans) corn has become a dominant crop in world agricultural trade. All of this needs to be examined in more detail as I work on the outline and lecture materials. These topics and lots of others!
