The nature of crops : how we came to eat the plants we do /

• Main Author: Warren, John, 1962- (Author)
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK : CABI, 2015.
• Subjects: Food crops > History.; Plant Production.; Biological Resources (Plant); Crop Produce.; Food Contamination, Residues and Toxicology.; Food Composition and Quality.; Diet Studies.; Ancestry.; Case studies.; Chemical composition.; Diets.; Domestication.; Edible species.; Food safety.; Plant composition.; Toxic substances.
• Online Access: View fulltext via EzAccess

 This book, containing nine chapters, aims to try and ascertain why we eat so few of the plant species that are available to us on Earth. The first chapter suggests that our ancestral diets differed greatly between cultures and although some of these may have been more diverse than our own, many others would have been more monotonous. Throughout this book, different elements of the problem are tackled by exploring crop biographies as case studies. In the first chapter, this approach reveals that over the history of crop domestication, humans have successfully and repeatedly solved one of the most significant problems involved in transforming wild plants into crops, which is how to avoid being poisoned. The subsequent chapters cover in greater depth issues on how this was achieved using a number of methods, such as selecting plants that contain lower levels of toxic chemicals, adapting our own biology to be better able to digest these new foods stuffs and finally inventing methods of processing plant materials which make them safer to eat.