Our Daily Bread: A History of Cereals

Although most applied plant geneticists and plant breeders are immersed in a version of art in their choices of parental lines and selections of new cultivars, few of us demonstrate our literary talents and historical perspectives in the eloquent manner displayed in Our Daily Bread. This magnificent book by wheat breeder and geneticist Åsmund Bjørnstad of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences provides a fitting and practical history of cereals, as well as a stunning visual chronicle of the crops and the people who selected them. The book describes the long histories of the cereal crops– and a brief description of potatoes– on which nearly all of humankind depends for the bulk of their nutrition and caloric energy, as well as the rich context of their development. This plural emphasis reflects many complex anthropologic, cultural, political, religious/spiritual, and biological relationships among plants, local environments, and humans that have shaped and continue to impact agriculture. Seeds of major cereals, in fact, provide a biological and cultural link across generations of plants and people, and, consequently, have also shaped and are continuing to impact our civilizations. Co-evolutions of plants and people, from wild plant races and hunter-gatherers to mutually co-dependent species, occurred in Southwest Asia with wheat, in Southeast Asia with rice, and in Central America and the Andean Zone with maize. In “The Diversity of Grains,” the author provides short histories, photos, and drawings of the major cereals, along with the sources of their names and their genetics. In this elegant and well illustrated section, there is detailed description of the history of grains and their relationship to the origins of organized farming. Then, in “Grains and Civilization,” there is historical perspective on the importance of each cereal species in the social and religious lives of people, while being central, as well, to their nutrition. Reproductions of historical woodcuts, important paintings, and photos of museum pieces add to the artistic illustration of the text, and frequent sidebars with poems and literature quotes broaden the integration of science with the arts and their descriptions of life. The origins of wheat, rice, and maize receive particular attention because of their importance in the global human diet. One highlight of the book, and a theme that persists, is Bjørnstad’s attention to biodiversity and its importance to the well-being of humans and the ecosystems in which they are imbedded. Too often, we think of biodiversity as merely the multiplicity of species occupying an ecological niche, as, for example, we think about the charismatic mega-herbivores on the plains of Africa, in the U.S. Great Plains, or the rain forests of the tropics. While that biodiversity is critical to health of our global ecosystem, it is equally important to understand and maintain the genetic variability within our major crop species, because it is this diversity that provides the essential raw genetic material that enables nature and our human efforts to change crops to meet changing needs and environments. This requires a whole different level of commitment to retaining large populations in nature, as well as in gene banks, of important species. The author makes a compelling case for looking beyond how we exploit diversity for our short-term wants and needs. Ironically, this demands that humans must simultaneously increase agricultural productivity in regions already developed for farming, and at the same time