Title
Never out of season : how having the food we want when we want it threatens our food supply and our future / Rob Dunn.
Edition
First edition.
ISBN
9780316260725 (hardcover)
031626072X (hardcover)
Published
New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
Copyright
©2017
Language
English
Description
vii, 323 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Call Number
TX353 .D88 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification
641.3
338.1/9
Summary
The bananas we eat today aren't our parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out. That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance--once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food. But our crops themselves remain susceptible to nature's fury. And nature always wins.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-310) and index.
A banana in every bowl
An island like ours
The perfect pathological storm
Escape is temporary
My enemy's enemy is my friend
Chocolate terrorism
The meltdown of the chocolate ecosystem
Prospecting for seeds
the siege
The grass eaters
Henry Ford's jungle
Why we need wild nature
The Red Queen and the long game
Fowler's ark
Grains, guns, and desertification
Preparing for the flood
Epilogue: What do I do?
