The bread we eat, our corn on the cob and breakfast, come from domesticated crops that have lost their seed dispersion mechanism and can no longer naturally survive.
How we domesticated crops that won’t grow unless we sow, and fed the world
We all know cereals. What we have for breakfast, right?
The word cereal comes from name of the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres.
The origins of agriculture
Towards the end of the stone age, Neolithic people started living in larger, less-nomadic groups.
Cultivating ancient grasses, the origin of modern crop farming, played a vital role when humans first began establishing settlements.
As these settlements developed, and the population increased, people needed more food.
So early farmers selected grasses that produced more yield, and began changing these plants.
Today, we call this change genetic improvement, part of the crop domestication process
Crop domestication
Neolithic culture developed quickly in the Fertile Crescent (Jordan, the Damascus Basin and the Central Euphrates area) during the last period of the stone age. Farmers began gathering and sowing the seed of ancient grasses. The seeds (or grain) of these herbaceous plants are rich in carbohydrates. When dried, grain is a valuable food source, also for the winter. It can be stored, transported, or ground into flour.
These early grain gatherers were not the farmers we know today, but just like modern farmers they almost certainly chose to gather the most grain as quickly as possible. This is why we grow wheat, as the seeds are large and heavy.
Genetic improvement
Around 1,000 years after we started growing wild wheat we made another choice. We began gathering grain and choosing plants with the least fragile ears, and types with naked kernels. Gathering less fragile ears means you can harvest more grains at once. Naked kernels need less work; they are quicker and easier to shell.
Like wild grasses today, wild wheat has fragile ears that break up into individual spikelets when mature. These spikelets help the seeds disperse and penetrate when they fall to the ground.
Gathering wild wheat would have meant a lot of work picking loose spikelets off the plant or ground.
Plants with stronger ears were selected, the seed gathered and sown. And in time plants with ears that don’t split became the dominant crop.
Plants with ears that don’t split can’t disperse their seeds; they can only survive if we sow them.
If the ear doesn’t split, very little seed is released. This is why domesticated crops need to be sown. We selected and chose plants that eventually lost their seed dispersion mechanism.
Domesticated wheat also lost its protective mechanism (glume around the seeds) because we chose to gather and sow the seeds of plants with looser husks. It’s quicker and easier to remove the husk (glume) if it doesn’t adhere to the seed.
Seed dormancy
As it doesn’t rain all the time, plants naturally developed a mechanism called seed dormancy. The seeds of wild plants don’t germinate all at the same time. Wild seeds germinate over a period of time so when it rains for a longer period some plants get enough water to grow, mature and produce seed.
Farmers prefer plants that germinate at the same time to harvest the whole crop at once, so sow seeds from plants that all germinate shortly after sowing.
Domesticated crops need to be watered if there isn’t abundant rainfall after sowing, otherwise the whole crop will fail. It takes a lot of water to grow domesticated crops; 127 gallons of water to produce one pound of corn.
It takes even more water to produce one pound of meat, about 16 times more water to produce meat than to produce crops. It takes about 127 gallons of water to produce one pound of corn, around 2,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat.
Water is a vital resource now, and will be even more so as our world gets hotter.
Ancient wheats
Ancient wheats like einkorn, emmer and spelt have mostly been spared genetic improvement.
The glume adheres to the seed of ancient wheats, protecting them from disease and pests.
They are quite similar to the ancient grasses they derive from. They are less productive than their domesticated cousins; but ancient wheats can produce more nutritious and healthier food, even when conditions aren’t optimal.
Ancient species:
- offer superior nutritional qualities;
- can survive in difficult weather conditions;
- are more resistant to disease so no pesticides are needed;
- are less likely to fail as they benefit from greater genetic diversity.
As temperatures rise and rainfall drops, these ancient species may provide a more viable, healthier alternative to domesticated crops that need to be sown, sprayed with pesticides, and abundantly irrigated to survive.
We’ve domesticated crops, “improved” them, and selected ones that cannot grow unless we sow them.
These domesticated plants are prone to disease and pests as they lack biodiversity. To kill pests we dust our crops, spraying poison on the food we eat. These pesticides kill bees and other pollinators vital to the life cycle of plants.
We selected these plants to produce more food, to feed the world’s growing population with food of a lower nutritional value.
And since the industrial revolution we’ve refined that food to make it prettier, more sellable, less nutritious, and caused a global health problem.
White flour and other refined foods cause high blood pressure, obesity and heart disease. In the early 20th century cardiovascular disease was an uncommon cause of death. Since the 1960s it has become the primary cause of death in the modern world. It kills more people every year than war, cancer or covid.
We made these choices to feed growing populations. And modifying mechanisms that work in nature may have seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s something we did without thinking or knowing. But mother nature doesn’t need to think to know what works. And if something doesn’t work, she knows what to do with it.
Natural selection is a ruthless mechanism. If something cannot naturally survive, it simply doesn’t.
We did feed the world though, didn’t we?
Today we produce enough food to feed everyone in the world. But over 800 million, one in every nine people, still go hungry or are suffering from malnutrition.
And the crops we choose to grow to feed our world lack biodiversity and can’t survive without human intervention.
Perhaps it’s time to think about the choices we’ve made in the past, and the ones we should make for the future, before it’s time to reap the crop we’ve sown.
Ancient grains and biodiversity-friendly practices have a fundamental role to play as we look for a more life-friendly future, to make healthier and more sustainable food choices.
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