Oh, golly, it seems the question I asked in a post a few months back entitled “Is modern plant breeding bad for your health?” may be about to receive an answer…
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Oh, golly, it seems the question I asked in a post a few months back entitled “Is modern plant breeding bad for your health?” may be about to receive an answer…
I hope they know what they are doing. Probably a million years of plant gathering rejected thousands of species with nasty phytochemicals that killed people and then 10,000 years of domestication took out most of the remaining problems from many hundred crops (and we still have problems with Lathyrus sativus). And now a few people in a few labs are trying to find some good bits. This sounds a lot more dangerous and expensive than safety-testing of GM crops. Was it the crop botanist Wilson Ponenoe’s wife killed herself eating the edible akee (Blighia sapida – not quite ripe)? I have had stomach cramps after eating several of the supposed edible fruit species in the large collections in CATIE. They’ll need more than a cage full of monkeys.