Poop to Food

Latrines are merely one of the many places where we accidentally sow the seeds of wild plants that we eat. As parts of fruit that we actually take into our mouths, strawberry seeds are tiny and inevitably swallowed and defecated. Thus, our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories."

That passage caught my eye because I realized the first humans did not even realize the experimentation that was taking place in the pooping places of humans. But even before that, I learned the history of berries and nuts, first starting from the almond. Most wild almonds were bitter and it contained a chemical called amygdalin that breaks down to create the chemical cyanide. (This is one deadly nut) Other ancestors that were bitter or poisonous was the watermelon, potatoes and cabbages. Watermelons? Watermelon's bitter cousin

So how did people get to domesticate these crazy nuts so that it became edible and crunchy?

Jared Diamond explains that individual almond trees has slowly mutated over the years to prevent them from creating such bitter nuts. Then people would have collected these non-bitter nuts and thus cultivate and grow them unintentionally (from poop) and later intentionally. Same goes towards other berries or nuts. People would unconsciously try to pick the largest berries, so size obviously matters. In addition, many plants were selected for its oiliness, especially in the Mediterranean area of the birthplace of olive oil. Crops that contained oily seeds were selected for growth just as the sweet and tasty nuts were cultivated.

I especially liked Jared Diamond's chart that describes the various crop types across the ancient world. One can see from the chart how foods that have been at a specific region for an extremely long time became the stable food that people eat today. For example, in the Mesoamerica region, ancient crops consisted of corn, beans and squash, which are extremely common in hispanic cuisine. Likewise in ancient china where their crops were rice and soybeans, rice is the number one grain in asia along with soybeans that are used to create tofu, miso soup and much more.
Staple foods of the world today

This chapter that talks about nuts and grains is probably one of the last that will talk about farming and its virtues. Skimming over to the next few chapters, I can see that Diamond finally fixes his focus to geography and how it affected the growth of socities. Yes, it is still a little tedious, but this chapter that was full of various informative and intruiging facts brought me back into the novel.

Word Count: 430