Humans use only a mere
200 species of plants for food purposes. This is very meager compared to the
possibly 300,000 edible plants, of an estimated 400,000 of the Earth’s plant species.
John Warren described the use of these few species of food crops in his book ‘The Nature of Crops:
how we came to eat the plants that we do’. This book was published in April
2015 and describes a journey through human history with crop plants. John Warren, Director of Learning
and Teaching at Aberystwyth University, writes stories about 50 crops, including
cereals, spices, legumes, fruit and ‘cash crops’ such as chocolate, tobacco and
rubber.
I have not actually counted
all the plant species that I ate. Imagine trying to write down a list of every
plant or part of plant that you ate in your whole life! No problem starting,
wheat that was used to make my pasta that I had for dinner tonight, tomatoes
that were in the sauce, some garlic and courgette to go in the sauce and some
strawberries for dinner. But it would be near impossible to try and figure out
if you’ve ever had more than a few of the 10,000 species in the cereal family.
And no with that I do not mean Kellogg’s, Fruit-Loops or All-Bran!
According to Wikipedia
(the source of all knowledge) only 15 crop plants provide 90% of the world’s
food energy intake. I can’t seem to find the source of that information, but
the ten staples that feed
the world are listed on this page and include maize (corn), rice, wheat,
potatoes, cassava, soybeans, sweet potatoes, yams, sorghum and plantain. Except
for those last two, I have actually eaten all of them, so I’ve got about 185
more species to go through. Bonne appétit!
