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Amber Waves - The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop (Hardcover)
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Amber Waves - The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop (Hardcover)
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On our breakfast tables and in our 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 is
a biography of a group of species that 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, slowly cultivating what
we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of
cuisines that use wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across
the world, 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 breads to the most mouthwatering
pastas, it is also a story of our own species' ingenuity in
producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the
first harvest of ancient grain, we have perfected our farming
systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our
species' global megacrops--but at a great cost to ecological
systems. Moreover, 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 humble origins and rise of a now
ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our
crops, both how we have transformed those plant species we use as
food, and how our society--our culture--has changed in response to
the need to secure our 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 our species.
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