Amber Waves
The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ecologist Zabinski debuts with a pleasant but cluttered account of the long history of humans and wheat. She goes back to the point when, 13,000 years ago, settlers along the Euphrates first harvested, charred, and ground wild seed for food. Musing that "as with most relationships, our relationship with wheat has grown more complex with time," Zabinski notes how agricultural practices have driven social and political organization, and speculates that wheat cultivation led to militarization, as armies were used to keep laborers in the fields and to protect farmers from outside raiders. In elaborating on the interconnections between wheat production and culture, she shares some worthwhile historical tidbits, such as how the need to grow wheat across North America's "wide temperature and precipitation gradients" gave rise, in the 19th century, to breeding as a modern science, or how Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was motivated by his desire for Ukraine's fertile soils. However, on the whole, her historical analysis is overly generalized, especially alongside off-puttingly involved and complex technical and scientific discussions, such as of the workings of photosynthesis, or of different farming techniques irrigation, crop rotations, and use of fertilizers and pesticides. Nonspecialists will have a hard time sifting through this scattered collection of wheat-related topics.
