food crops basics: a wildcard, a zoomed-out view...

19 Dec, 2024

I've been whittling away at trying to make a food-crops-basics post on palms, which has proven to be a battle. there's just... so much! but I plan to persevere.

preamble:
at the moment I'm taking a course by the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC or Eurovia), the "European chapter" (in a way) of Via Campesina, a for-peasants-by-peasants movement that has done brilliant work. "peasants" here are people who work the land w/o using paid labour, so it includes families, communities, etc, doing things like farming, fishing, hunting, gathering, so on...
peasants are people who are fundamental to food security, ecological health, and more. so the privatization of things like land and plant-genes imperils them, & imperils these greater benefits as a result. the Eurovia course is a whirlwind introduction to the challenges peasants face, and the UN declaration on the rights of peasants which can be used to help overcome them. so a lot of this is about food crops: which ones, which varieties, grown how-so, when, where, by whom...

...

The State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture , FAO , 1997

note the publication date. though, there hasn't been a huge shake-up of the agricultural system since 1997, so I wouldn't expect the numbers here to be way off.

The first chapter talks about which plants are food crops, and to what extent/scale (in the context of crop genetic diversity). It's pretty interesting stuff.

out at the global scale, there are a suite of plants that provide most of our food. Wheat, rice, and maize (which I covered in the cereals post) account for >50% of plant-derived food globally (fig. 1.2).

(note on fig 1.2, the percentages are of total plant-derived food, that's why they don't add up to 100 percent. the remaining portion is all other food plants)

However, on a sub-regional level, things can look really different, with the example given being cassava: not even present in fig. 1.2, yet it provides >50% of food calories in Central Africa. Food systems with staples like cowpeas, lentils, and others not in fig. 1.2 are widespread, are the systems of the poor, are the systems neglected by Western research and attention.

here are many other species that are important to large numbers of people at sub-national levels, which fall outside the list when aggregated at a national level. These include local staples such as oca, teff, fonio or bambara groundnut, all of which tend to be neglected in terms of conservation and crop improvement programmes.

there are hundreds of these cultivated-and-wild plants which are disregarded by the larger agricultural community yet which are of incredible importance. and similarly, smaller communities cultivate hundreds of varieties of crops (including major ones like potatoes) which are also sidelined in the dominant international food system.
& that blame is not assigned arbitrarily by myself.

This exchange [of crops overseas] also led to the marginalization of many traditional crops when these were replaced by introduced ones. In some areas more crop diversity existed historically than is generally acknowledged. A number of crops domesticated in North, South and Central America, for example, were lost with the demise of indigenous societies.

fig 1.2 looks like that because of extractive colonial processes, which prioritized the ability to ship well, to be harvested by machines, to be appealing to Western culture, to be addictive.

...

This kind of thing is why I started writing those "food crops basics" posts. Many of us live lives that are detached from the living things that support us. It takes a startling amount of effort to even become acquaintances with them. sometimes on purpose; Nestlé and Unilever and their ilk really, really don't want you to know about the child slavery, the violence, the poison. Because of them, we lose more than I think I can articulate. so I wanted to learn the stories of these plants. I wanted to learn why wheat/rice/maize are so much of our diets, why the price of vegetables makes me wince, why I can easily buy sugarcane-sugar and not sugarbeet-sugar despite living in a cold climate. & every single food-plant represents hundreds and thousands of years-worths of stories, human lifetimes, the people who have worked with that plant, the knowledge they have passed down. when the food-world homogenizes into fewer and fewer crops, into only 30-ish out of about-7,000, the loss is tragic...

if you have read through the food crops posts, if you also find this all interesting, thank you! we will refuse the story-loss together. & , it is a special kind of encouraging to know there are others who get emotional about things like