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Amber Waves - The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop (Paperback)
Loot Price: R407
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Amber Waves - The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop (Paperback)
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List price R463
Loot Price R407
Discovery Miles 4 070
You Save R56 (12%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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A biography of a staple grain we often take for granted, exploring
how wheat went from wild grass to a world-shaping crop. At
breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has
made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins
belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story
of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in
the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered
their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved
their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly
cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating
a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat
spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows
us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure
their own success: from the earliest bread to the most
mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in
producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the
first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming
systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our
species' global mega crops-but at a great cost to ecological
systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face
problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the
world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski's
tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a
now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with
our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as
food, and how our society-our culture-has changed in response to
the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to
gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds
from wheat's wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome
and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow
the food that sustains so much human life.
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