p 33 Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the tubes can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots… Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott (Beth, in 1985, a botanist in her 60s who at Monash University dedicated a garden to Aboriginal wild plants – she catalogued more than 1,000 different species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones pickled from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks) realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape.From the journals and diaries, it is clear Aboriginal people were aware of this, which is why some argue they should be considered the world’s earliest farmers.
p. 34 Fire also played a role. The plant needs direct sunlight, and so in the dry season Aboriginal people would set the bush alight. They did this with prevision, knowing exactly when and where to start a fire, and where the fire would end. This cleared away dead vegetation, but left murnong, with its tubers underground, unharmed. Harvesting was also easier on open ground, and the ash left from the fire would fertilise the soil… Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts … these sweet, nutritious roots were eaten with seeds, shellfish and possum… across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never ending.” BEFORe ” sheep started eating their way through the landscape… In the first decades of European settlement, farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years… the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hooves compacted the soil”
p. 35 “In 1839, just five years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tongeworong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. “Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],” Moonin said “plenty eat it myrnyong, all gone the murnong.”
p. 48 “In northeast India, close to the Himalayas and the border with Myanmar, Bangladesh and CHina, is the state of Meghalaya, home of the Khasi, a matrilineal tribe in which property and family names are passed down from mother to daughter. In this area of exceptional biodiversity there are orange-scented villages and forests of wild citrus … p. 49 over thousands of years, people from across Asia moved into Megha;aya and settled, creating an extraordinarily rich cultural diversity… Wild citrus holds a special kind of status: it is a medicine, a fruit to cook and preserve, and a sacred plant… Surrounding the Garo tribes are forests of a wild citrus they call memang narang (Scientific name Citrus indica), which means “the fruit of ghosts”. The name originates from the fruit’s use in a death ritual in which the freshly picked oranges are placed over the body of a dying relative… p. 50 “to most of us the taste would seem pretty extreme. “There’s an appreciation of sourness and bitterness in these communities the rest of the world has lost,” says Roy. In fact, we didn’t just lose sourness and bitterness, it was methodically removed from our food. Plant breeders in the 20th century, particularly after the juice industry took off in the 1950s, focused on producing larger and sweeter oranges that could be transported around the world. The orange varieties selected had low levels of phenols, bitter-tasting (but also health-giving) compounds. This meant they appealed to the increasingly sweet global palate, but left the global crop more vulnerable to pests and diseases, because the bitter chemicals … are a big part of the plant’s natural defenses. As we reduce these compounds in our quest for more sweetness, farmers have to compensate and protect the fruit with more chemical sprays.”
p. 85 “In july 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled “the Genetics of Disaster”… crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. … “We can survive if a forest of shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice or maize were to be destroyed. We are taking risks we need not and should not take.”
p. 87 Franklin Hiram King … Farmers for Forty Centuries – “In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the US DEpartment of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansioh the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientist in Washington, King left the US in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia ,…died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next 20 years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour.” in China now at the CEntre for Rural REconstruction crops and methods are being revived.
p. 93 “The mulpa system has been described by the maize scholar Garrison Wilkes as “one of the most successful human inventions ever created”. To outsiders, a milpa looks like a busy hotchpotch of competing plants, but this mess of diversity is in fact a complex system that creates balance, not just notanically but also nutritionally. In the milpa system, maize is planted with its companions, beans and squashes, its stalks creating a frame for the beans to climb and the broad leaves of the squash giving ground cover, conserving moisture in the soil and suppressing weeds … below ground; the leguminous roots of the bean are host to microbes which fix nitrogen into the soil and help fertilise other crops. Combined on a plate, these plants also add up to a nutritionally complete meal. Maize provides carbohydrate, the essential amino acids such as lysine and tryptophan (without which we’re unable to synthesis proteins) and the squash lots of vitamins. Once harvested, indigenous farmers would then take maize through an ingenious process call nixtamalisation…. evidence dates back 3,500 years.”
p. 95 At the beginning of the 20th century farmers were growing around 1,000 different open-pollinated varieties. After the Second World War, hybrids dominated. As the manufacture of explosives declined, a surplus of ammonium nitrate (an ingredient in fertiliser) became available and Fritz Haber’s invention began to plan a crucial role in the production of food. Applied to vast moncultures of F1 maize, the new supply of ferti;liser bolstered America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent exporter of grain. By the end of the century, American-grown F1 hybrids accounted for 50% of globally traded maize. From the tens of thousands of landrave varieties, just a handful now made up the commercial crop … Garrison Wilkes has likened this to “taking stones from the foundation of the house to repair the roof”
p. 96 After seed companies developed a new generation of hybrids, yields increased again. All the extra maize needed a home. This is whan maize started to turn up in the most unexpected places: as a sweetener in Coke, as a component in the plastic bottles containing that sugary drink; in toothpaste, soap, paint and shoe polish. It also helped fuel the revolution in livestock consumption: if you consume milk or eggs, chicken or beef, the animals is likely to have been fed maize. .. Even the cars people drive to buy these foods are partly fuelled by maize (around a third of the crop produced in the US is now converted into ethanol”.)
p. 106 BY the 1820s, seed merchants Messrs Sutton and Sons were publishing 100-page seed catalogues with prices and descriptions of cabbages (145 different varieties), peas (170 varieties) and onions (74 different kinds). In the 1830s, the US government saw it as a public duty to distribute diverse seeds “of the choicest varieties” for free through the US Postal Service to farmers and homesteaders. In the space of two decades, the Federal Government posted over a million seed packets to American farmers from a selection of 497 varieties of lettuce, 341 varieties of sequast, 288 varieties of beets and 408 varieties of tomato. BY the end of the 20th century, only a tenth of that diversity had survived.”
p. 134 “But in the 1970s, the soy boom reallyh intensified. This boom has a lot to do with a diminutive fish. For decades, vast shoals of anchovy were caught just off the Peruvian coast and used as the major protein in the poultry and cattle industries. But in 1972, a combination of overfishing and El Nino led to Peru’s anchovy harvest dropping by nearly 90%. A protein panic rippled across the agricultural world… the Nixon administration restricted exports of American soy. This in turn had an impact on Japan… there was no other big supplier to turn to, and so it had to create one. Brazil had been a marginal player in the soy business, but with Japanese investment and the clearance of virgin forest, including parts of the Cerrado, it became a giant. In 1960s, Brazil’s soy production was less than 300,000 metric tons. In the 1980s, helped by newly developed sot cultivars suited to the Cerrado’s acidic soil, this increase to around 20 million tonnes. The 2020 harvest, of 130 million tons, broke all records and exceeded the size of the American crop… By 2014, more than 90% of all soy grown in North and South America was GM.”
p. 258 “It’s 10,500 years since we first domesticated cattle and a watershed moment is approaching: the world’s dairy farmers will soon be producing more than one billion tonnes of milk each year. The sharp increases in world milk production seen in recent years are striking (from 690 tonnes in 2009 to 850 million tonnes in 2019”
p. 261 “In Burgundy, in the centre of the country, cheesemaking was for centuries the preserve of monasteries. Here, dark humid cellars, (places where moulds flourish) could be used for maturing cheese. Monks washed these cheese clean using alcohol and brine… IN the Ile-de-France and Normandy, in the north, people lived and farmed on more silty and sandy soils, where building cellars … was less practical. Instead, cheese were matured ion barns, where the flow of air introduced microbes that coated them in a fine, velvety mould. Because these farmers also lived closer to towns and cities, their cheese didn’t need to be hard and long-lasting. The results were soft, moulded coatded cheese including Brie and Camambert. Meanwhile, in the Loire Valley in western France, one of the legacies of the Arab conquest of the 8th century had been the introduction of goat farming … bite into a traditional piece of cheese and you will be eating into history, culture and an ecosystem.”
p. 263 “In the US for example, until the 1990s, most farms had fewer than 200 cows; today, the largest corporate dairies cabn house more than 9,000 cows… the industry focused on one breed: Holsteins. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the genetics of these animals was altered to such an extent that their milk yields doubled. Much of the cheese we eat today, wherever we are in the world, is made from milk processed by a smaller number of companies, sourced from the same breed of cattle, using bacteria created in a handful of labs. We are at risk of losing the diversity created by thousands of years of cheesemaking.”
p. 288 One in four beers drunk around the world are now brewed by just one company, A-B InBev (ABI), which owns Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona and produces more than 88 billion pints a year (it sells the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools of beer an hour – more than its three nearest rivals combined.) The company’s strategy of buying up breweries has seen it engulf big brands as well as seemingly independent ‘craft breweries’.”
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