# Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ### Food - A Brief History > Through innovation and experimentation, humans transformed their food in more intricate ways. People in central Europe started preserving milk by reducing its water content and concentrating the fats and proteins, so making cheese; in the Caucasus, grapes were crushed and converted into wine; in China, cooks deployed a wondrous process that turned inedible soybeans into white, silky blocks of tofu; in the Amazon, forest dwellers co-opted bacteria and yeasts to ferment a toxic tuber, cassava, into a safe and delicious food; and farmers in southern Mexico added toxic mineral lime to corn, to extract more nutrients from the grain and make a soft dough for tortillas. ### Part One - Wild > In the late 1960s, the anthropologists Richard Lee and Irven DeVore estimated that of the 85,000 million people who had ever lived, 90 per cent were hunters and gatherers and only about 6 per cent lived as farmers. The barely significant number that remained were experimenting with life in the industrialised world. > Of the 7.8 billion of us on the planet today, just a few thousand people continue to source most of their calories from the wild. > Indigenous farming communities all over the world also still rely heavily on wild food. The Mbuti people in the Congo eat more than three hundred different species of animals and plants in addition to the cassava and plantains they cultivate. Across India, 1,400 wild plant species feature in rural diets, including 650 different fruits. And whereas many indigenous people get the bulk of their calories from wheat, corn, rice and millet, most of their micronutrients (the vitamins and minerals) still come from wild food. Rice farmers in north-eastern Thailand, for instance, forage for a wild spinach found around the edges of their paddies, a food which complements the starchy grain they grow. ### Chapter 4 - Memang Narang There are around one billion citrus trees in cultivation around the world. All citrus fruits come from 3 ancestors: the mandarin, pomelo and citron. These ancestors could fertilise each other, and produced hybrids such as oranges (mandarin + pomelo), lemons (citrons + sour oranges), limes (citron + mandarin), and grapefruit (which emerged 300 years ago in Barbados when a sweet orange and pomelo were merged). Citrus mutates easily. A clementine emerged in nineteenth-century Algeria as a mutation from a mandarin. In 2018, scientists used DNA to reveal 10 older ancestors, which all came from a single wild fruit 8 million years ago. All the ancient citrus species came from north-eastern India and the border of south-western China and Myanmar. Although citrus is capable of great genetic variety, we have cultivated just a few of them, such as the Valencia and Navel oranges, the Lisbon lemon, and the Persian lime. The state of Meghalaya lies on the border of India, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is the home of the Khasi, a matrilineal tribe in which property is passed from mother to daughter. Two-thirds of India's biodiversity is in this region. More than 200 different languages are spoken. In one Khasi community, when a baby is born, the umbilical cord is placed in a basket which is hung from an orange tree. The tree becomes a godparent to the child, and the lives of the child and the plant are intertwined. In the Garo Hills, there is a wild citrus called *memang narang*, which means "fruit of ghosts", because it is used in death rituals. The fruit is placed over a dying person, so that it can absorb the spirit, leaving the person free to move into the next world free of ghosts. The scientific name is *Citrus indica*. It has antimicrobial compounds which act as an insecticide, keeping insects away from dead bodies in hot and humid weather. The word *narang* appears a thousand years ago in ancient Hindi literature. It became the Persian *neranji*, then *naranga* in Spain, *laranja* in Portugal, *arancia* in Italy, and *orange* in France. In the 1590s, soon after the fruit arrived on British shores, Shakespeare referred to an "orange tawny beard" in *A Midsummer Night's Dream*. In the 1990s and 2000s, separatist rebels used the Garo Hills as a base, putting wild citrus there at risk. The world stands to lose genes that might be resistant to disease or climate change. *Huang longbing* (or citrus greening disease) is making its way around the world and could be the deadliest disease known to fruit growers. In 2020, researchers discovered a molecule that could control the disease. It belonged to a relative of *memang narang*. The Indigenous people safeguarding this fruit could help save a billion trees. More than a century ago, **Nikola Vavilov** was the first scientist to make the connection between biodiversity and food security. He was born in 1887 in Moscow. He coined the term "centres of origin", the idea that all our domestic crops originally came from wild plants that were domesticated in the last 12,000 years. He argued that a plant's origin was where its genetic diversity was greatest, and where we could find genetic traits that are resistant to drought, disease, parasites or the ability to grow in poor soils. Vavilov identified 8 centres of origin. This included: - East Asia - 20 percent of cultivated flora, including soybeans and millet in Northern China - Inter-Asiatic - running from Iran to Syria to north-western Iran, where wheat, rye and most of our fruit originate - Central America - southernmost part of USA and Mexico, where corn, beans, pumpkins, cocoa and avocados come from He and his colleagues collected over 150,000 seed samples that were housed in St Petersburg in the world's first seed bank. During the siege of Leningrad, scientists moved the seeds to a basement in sub-zero temperatures and took shifts to protect them. By the end of the 900-day siege, in the spring of 1944, 9 of them had died of starvation, including the curator of the rice collection, who was found at his desk surrounded by bags of rice. Today, Vavilov's work is carried on by scientists at the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex. ### Chapter 5 - Kavilca Wheat > In the late 1960s, the American botanist Jack Harlan set out to experience something of this lost food history. In the Karacadag Mountains of south-eastern Turkey, one of the hotspots of domestication, he became a hunter-gatherer. First, without tools he hand-stripped ripe ears from the wild wheat that grew along the slopes, and then he tried harvesting the grains using a flint blade. Harlan concluded that one family harvesting around the Karacadag for three weeks, ‘without even working very hard, could gather more grain than it could possibly consume in a year’. ### Chapter 6 - Bere Barley In colder northern climates, lower levels of sunlight favour barley, rye and oats. Wheat, which has gluten, grows better in the south, where there's more sunlight. That's why bread gets flatter the further north one goes. Only 2 percent of barley is eaten by humans. 60 percent is used for animal feed. The remainder is used for malt (brewing beer and distilling whisky). A small portion is used for fermenting soya sauce and miso. Barley tends to be eaten in remote and inhospitable places. # Rough Notes Seeds are mostly in the control of just 4 corporations. Half of all the world's cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company. One in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer. Most global pork production is based on the genetics of a single breed of pig. Although there are 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a clone that is grown in monocultures so vast they can only be comprehended from an airplane or satellite. The human diet has undergone more change in the past 150 years (6 generations) than the previous one million years (40,000 generations). Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world mostly eats just nine, of which three – rice, wheat and maize – provide 50 percent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and we have 75 percent of all calories. A body of man who lived 2500 years ago was found perfectly preserved in the Jutland Peninsula of western Denmark in 1950, so much so that it was first thought to be a recent murder. The man's stomach contained porridge made with barley, flax, and the seeds of 40 different plants. In present day East Africa, the Hadza, who are among the last hunter-gatherers alive, eat from a potential wild menu of 800 plant and animal species. # Quotes > Biodiversity is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms – folded them into its genes – and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady. > – E.O. Wilson, *The Diversity of Life* > The question must be raised. Why farm? Hunter gatherers paint pictures, recite poetry, play musical instruments … they do everything farmers do … but they don’t work as hard. > – Jack Harlan, *Crops and Man*