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Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future

Rob Dunn

3.96 · Rating details · 322 ratings · 65 reviews

A Fast Food Nation for the foods we grow and depend on

The bananas we eat today aren't your parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out.

That's the story of our food today: ...more

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Hardcover, 336 pages

Published March 14th 2017 by Little, Brown and Company

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Mar 04, 2017 Donna Kimball rated it really liked it

I found this book fascinating. As a food historian, I was aware of many of the problems with mono-culture food supply, but Mr Dunn made me realize that this problem is much bigger then I ever imagined.
Mr Dunn also introduced me to many of the people of the past, and present, that have made attempts to save our fragile food supply.

This book is a must read for everyone who eats!

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May 27, 2017 Joanna rated it liked it

Shelves: books-on-food

I agree with other reviewers in the primary complaint about this book- the title is totally not in line with the content. I was kind of expecting something along the lines of Fugitive Denim or Flower Confidential- an insiders look into a commodity/industry, with a focus on our self-indulgence and the lengths to which producers and distributors go to satisfy our desire for fruit out of season, exotic flavorings, etc. I would have enjoyed that book more, I think. This book presents essentially the ...more

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May 03, 2017 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Mr. Dunn is definitely preaching to the choir here, but this is one of the better titles I've read about the need for biodiversity. Not only does the author explain how we've come to this stage --farming primarily monocultures that are all dependent of chemical inputs to maintain production/fight off plant diseases and pests-- but he also gives historical examples of the almost inevitable results (potatoes, bananas, rubber trees, cacao). Fascinating reading about the various scientists who have ...more

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Mar 27, 2017 Benjamin rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, environment, food-cookbooks

Only complaint is with the title. This is much more a story of how crops are saved (by hard work, nature and luck) and why we desperately need to conserve our remaining biodiversity, not so much a direct survey of the supermarket and what the consequences of demanding every type of food all season are.

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Jan 17, 2018 James rated it it was amazing

A fascinating book about the perpetual evolutionary arms race between our crops and their pests, and the efforts made (and desperately needed) to stay ahead. Interesting personal and political stories about the plants we have come to rely on for survival.

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Aug 07, 2017 Joshua Buhs rated it liked it

Shelves: belly, non-fiction, science, ecology

At the risk of being too cute: this is more a seed catalog than a sustained argument.

Seed catalog--that's a term I picked up from the old pseudoscientific author Ivan T. Sanderson, who would complain about books that were hardly more than lists of anomalous things, with nothing else added. Dunn's book isn't just a list, but the book doesn't really have an overarching perspective. He isn't in control of his material, and so it rides him, expanding beyond the scopes of what he wants to touch upon. At the risk of being too cute: this is more a seed catalog than a sustained argument.

Seed catalog--that's a term I picked up from the old pseudoscientific author Ivan T. Sanderson, who would complain about books that were hardly more than lists of anomalous things, with nothing else added. Dunn's book isn't just a list, but the book doesn't really have an overarching perspective. He isn't in control of his material, and so it rides him, expanding beyond the scopes of what he wants to touch upon. In the end, the title doesn't even make any sense.

What Dunn seems to be concerned with is modern humanity's reliance on a small number of crops, and those crops being grown in huge monocultures, which make them susceptible to diseases and pathogens. I am completely sympathetic to this argument but, even so, found the book both unconvincing and scattershot. It is also very repetitive, reading more like a loose collection of essays than a book on science (or the history of science, which is also how it might be understood).

The first body chapter deals with the Irish potato famine, and indicates the sloppy arguing that will follow. Dunn wants us to see that we are in a similar situation as 19th century Irish peasants, at the mercy of plant diseases. But the chapter ends up with new varieties of potatoes coming into use; Dunn briefly references the political system that made the famine--much more than the potato blight did--but quickly passes beyond it because he wants to focus on the biology of the situation, before tripping to conclusion in which our reliance on a few cheap crops is the result of our evolutionary biology, which makes use lust after cheap carbs, fats, and proteins.

And that's one of the key problems with the book. He keeps wanting to look at what are fundamentally political problems as somehow a mater of natural history. The word capitalism only gets a few nervous mentions--he even uses the phrase "mode of production"--but there is no sustained argument about the economic systems which gives modern agriculture its shape.

I would be willing I guess, to look at this as only a matter of natural history, if Dunn could sustain that insight and analysis, but he's constantly heading off in different directions, indulging in long discussions of personal biographies. The book comes at the central issue of monocultural agriculture from several different directions, but aside from multiplying the examples, he never develops his perspective further.

As the book continues on, Dunn seems to fall over himself trying to generate worthy insights, but these just don't scan. The title of the book is "Never Out of Season," and he highlights the phrase in one chapter, but it doesn't really gel with his concerns about monoculture. Going around seasonality is more about shipping than monoculture or (another topic he brings up) genetic engineering.

He does eventually come up with his own conclusion to how to make matters better, and it isn't by regulating unbridled capitalism. He thinks the solution is to fund more basic science, so that when the inevitable happens, and some crucial crop fails, we know potential biological controls and understand the natural history of the pathogen or pest. Which is fair enough, but rather an anemic analysis and conclusion.

With all of that said, and since this book is something of a seed catalog, there's likely to be some facts, here or there, that are interesting. For me it was his point that agriculturalists are always looking to buy themselves some time from predators--the predators always catch up, but sometimes they are slow--a point he borrows from the evolutionary theorist Leigh Van Valen. Genetically modifying crops is one way (though resistance eventually comes); another is moving crops--and it is the case that many of the key crops on which modern society now relies are grown far from where they evolved, wheat and chocolate and potatoes, for example.

Maybe you'll find something else, too. if you're interested in browsing. ...more

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Feb 25, 2018 Jason Vanhee rated it it was ok

A book about plant pathogens, which isn't what it presents itself as; I gathered from the title and subtitle that it would be about the modern practice of having all foods in all seasons, but while that is (barely) touched upon, it really has nothing to do with the book. It's fine, I guess, if you were looking for a popular science book about plant pathogens.

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Mar 20, 2017 Tom Scanlan rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Anyone who votes.

Recommended to Tom by: I won a prepublication copy from Good Reads

This thoroughly researched book covers a broad array of subjects under the general category of plant ecology. The author provides a marvelous education for the layman using a narrative style that will hold your interest even if you have little background in the life sciences. The author includes fascinating histories of the development of important agricultural products, from bananas to chocolate, corn, potatoes, rice and importantly rubber. He relates the important contribution of numerous ...more

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Mar 04, 2017 Mary Nee rated it liked it

This book is informative and educational , without being too hard to understand. It was interesting but I did get bogged down a little.

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Apr 19, 2017 Michael Strauss rated it it was ok

Misleading title...more an analytical about crops and pests. Like reading a biology book.

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Mar 02, 2018 Giedra rated it it was amazing

Excellent read about the perpetual race between humanity's crops and nature's pests, and the challenges we face in trying to stay ahead. Dunn explores many of the times when we've fallen behind in this race in the past (the Irish potato famine and the loss of the first widely known banana species are 2 fairly well known examples) and uses this history to show how inevitable it is that we will fall behind again.

Like many reviewers, I didn't think the title quite fit with the book, as it didn't Excellent read about the perpetual race between humanity's crops and nature's pests, and the challenges we face in trying to stay ahead. Dunn explores many of the times when we've fallen behind in this race in the past (the Irish potato famine and the loss of the first widely known banana species are 2 fairly well known examples) and uses this history to show how inevitable it is that we will fall behind again.

Like many reviewers, I didn't think the title quite fit with the book, as it didn't really address anything about global transportation of food that is in season in one place to other places as I would have expected. It focused more on the problems with monocultures that provide the majority of worldwide calories (wheat, corn, rice, cassava, soy), and particularly with more and more information being concentrated in agroindustrial companies that do not share what they learn about plant diversity. He also explains precisely why it's so important to save not just seeds, but to save the wild relatives of our crop plants, and not just those wild relatives, but also the wild relatives in their wild settings, where their pollinators and beneficial soil bacteria and other factors are also present. It's a great argument for conservation--if we don't want to save the rain forest "just because," then we should really save it so that we save some of the diversity that is going to be necessary to cross-breed our modern crops with resistant wild crops. Only the wild ones are going to develop resistance to the ever-evolving pathogens, so we will continue to need them basically forever.

I enjoyed a lot of the history and biographical information about many of the people who have made a mark on agricultural history, whether by figuring out exactly what caused potato blight, founding a seed bank, coming up with creative ways to breed new varieties more quickly than one crop/year, or (on the negative side) sabotaging Brazilian cacao fields, etc.

I would have liked a somewhat more coherent summary of "what do we do from here." Dunn calls for increased funding of the basic science of breeding crops especially at universities and other international publicly funded institutions, where there is more of a commitment to share data (and seeds), because many of those important "saves" in the past have been from those kinds of institutions, whose funding has decreased a lot in recent years. He also talked about the decline in the US university extension system, which was designed to connect local farmers with scientists for 2-way exchange of information. It makes sense that it has declined, because there are so many fewer local farmers in the US, and unfortunately the place where we need that kind of 2-way exchange tends to be in smaller developing countries where there are still many traditional farmers...but they have the least access to extension-type scientists. There have been some encouraging efforts to develop apps that may be accessible to anyone on earth with a smartphone to help share information about plant varieties and pathogens, but it remains to be seen whether that will be enough.

Anyway, highly recommended to anyone with an interest in learning more about how food is grown and what keeps agriculture experts up at night. ...more

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Mar 15, 2017 Lori L (She Treads Softly) rated it really liked it

Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future by Rob Dunn is a highly recommended discourse on the importance of diversity in our increasingly genetically standardized crops grown worldwide.

We used to know what season it was and where a person lived based on what food was available. Now agriculture has been globalized and homogenized. Food crops are breed for taste, productiveness and hardiness - and then that selected variety is the Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future by Rob Dunn is a highly recommended discourse on the importance of diversity in our increasingly genetically standardized crops grown worldwide.

We used to know what season it was and where a person lived based on what food was available. Now agriculture has been globalized and homogenized. Food crops are breed for taste, productiveness and hardiness - and then that selected variety is the one relied upon almost exclusively. We are standardizing crops. Now the taste is always the same, rather than greatly differing between different types of, for example, bananas.

Dunn points out that the Irish potato famine "was not the last ancient plague but rather the first truly modern one. And whereas the threat from the potato famine was regional, the threat we now face, in our far more connected economy, is global." In 1845 the Irish were more dependent on the potato than anyone else, and when disease we call late blight hit the potato crop, it caused the famine. With the standardization of crops we are setting ourselves up for the same kind of event. A single blight, disease, pathogen could at any moment attack a specific crop and destroy it. "We need ever more food from each acre and so are bound to those crops that produce the most. Just as it was for the Irish, each time a child is born our reliance on our most productive crops increases. Corn in North America. Wheat in Europe. Cassava in Africa. Rice in Asia."

The problem is that with reduced diversity of crops, we are setting ourselves up for failure because now when a pathogen attacks a crop it has the potential to wipe it out completely. We no longer have the many different varieties grown in different places so if one variety is wiped out, the entire crop could no longer exist. The key is to keep the wild relatives of our crops available. We need all the species alive and their seeds available as a key to combat any future plagues. We are reducing the number of varieties of crops we depend upon for food when we need to be protecting the varieties in order to protect our future food supplies.

Dunn covers a variety of crops including bananas, coffee, cacao, wheat, corn, cassava, and potatoes. He also tells about the forward thinking of Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov who began collecting a wide variety of seeds in the 1940s and those who understood the need to protect the seed bank during WWII. Dunn extensively discusses the "doomsday vault" in Norway where seeds are preserved against a future apocalypse.

Never Out of Season is well-researched and contains extensive notes for each chapter and the sources cited. There is also an index. Even though it is a scholarly work, it is very accessible for anyone who is interested in agriculture, history, and food science.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Little, Brown and Company.
on 3/16/17: http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/
...more

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May 24, 2017 Chris rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science-natural-history, goodreads-giveaway

I received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

That was really interesting. I had never known how much of modern agriculture is dependent on breeding traits from wild variants of crops or how much trouble there is in gathering the seeds of the wild variants for storing in seed vaults and then keeping the seeds alive in seed vaults.

One Russian scientist made a career of venturing to Anatolia and Central Asia to gather varieties of wheat and even learned local languages so he I received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

That was really interesting. I had never known how much of modern agriculture is dependent on breeding traits from wild variants of crops or how much trouble there is in gathering the seeds of the wild variants for storing in seed vaults and then keeping the seeds alive in seed vaults.

One Russian scientist made a career of venturing to Anatolia and Central Asia to gather varieties of wheat and even learned local languages so he could talk with the locals and learn as much as he could about the species themselves and to learn all the locals knew about planting those seeds. Or how Russians in Leningrad heroically protected that same seed collection during the siege of Leningrad (in the midst of starvation no less!).

Or the American scientists breeding crops in Mexico so he shuttled the plants between two locations in order to force two breeding seasons out of the crops per year (I'm not even sure how that works) and in so doing laid the foundation of our modern agricultural system.

Or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, the largest seed bank in the world and dug into a mountain to survive rising sea levels, increasing temperatures and nuclear fallout. Apparently there are people actually working there to keep the seeds they store alive and ready to be used if necessary.

And, of course, the various stories of how aggressive mono-cultures in the name of efficiency have exposed us to pandemic like the famous Irish potato famine or the less well known (to me at least) cassava pandemic in Africa or Panama disease in Central American banana populations. Especially with the potato famine, I had never knew that a large part of the problem wasn't just the over reliance on potatoes but that only a single breed of potato was used. A little genetic diversity would've gone a long way there.

Overall it was really fascinating and I'll definitely be attending my local farmer's market more this year.

My favorite quote:

"More than any fuzzy but inconsequential panda or rhinoceros, the often scraggily wild cousins of our crops, in rain forests and grasslands, offer reason enough to save all the wild places we can. (p165)" ...more

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Aug 08, 2019 Sweetheart_Seer rated it really liked it

*I was sent an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.*

I found most of this fascinating! It amazes me how funds are chosen to be spent. Science/Agriculture lags behind when our very lives DEPEND on food...yet stupid entertainment/commercials/advertising is a multi-million dollar business. Unbelievable really.

I rather enjoyed learning about the previous ways that our food was brought to other places, the dangers inherit with moving crops about in that manner and learning a lot of agricultural ...more

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Jun 08, 2017 Tom Parker rated it it was amazing

This is an enjoyable, and important book, that persuasively describes serious and growing threats to the world’s food supplies caused by a worrying decline in biodiversity and also addresses the need for increased public awareness of the necessity for wild plant conservation in general.

Plant conservation is a topic that doesn’t receive anywhere near the level of media attention and public recognition it deserves. This book is written in an informative, narrative style that will appeal to a ...more

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Mar 23, 2019 Matt Hooper rated it liked it

According to both Ecclesiastes and The Byrds – everything has a season. Everything, that is, except your favorite produce.

On any and every given day, you'll find the same fruits and veggies at your local grocery store. There are always bananas, oranges, berries, avocados, tomatoes, and salad greens. This lack of seasonality has had a profound, likely deleterious, effect on worldwide crop diversity.

Fact: We only grow the crops that are the most popular and most robust. That sounds reasonable on ...more

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Aug 27, 2018 Claire rated it really liked it

Shelves: ecology, plants, food, agriculture, politics

"Once humans started to farm, they were wed to the field. There was no way to return to gathering. Populations grew fast, thanks to agriculture, and as they did they became ever more dependent on their crops. The crops, in turn, became ever more dependent on people. When the people suffered, the crops suffered. When the crops suffered, the people suffered. Farming was not an insight; it was instead a marriage, a bond between humans and seeds." - pg 215

Having studied anthropology and environment ...more

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Jul 08, 2017 Bookworm rated it did not like it

This book is not quite what the title says it is. When I first heard about the book it seemed like it would be an interesting read. How we can have food that is basically the same all the time, with less concern regarding seasonal changes, lack of water/fertilizer, geographic concerns, etc. At least, that's what I thought the book was about.

Instead it's a really dry book about how delicate the food chain is in regards to pests, pathogens, etc. To be fair, that is a very important topic but ...more

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Jan 10, 2020 Emily rated it it was amazing

Great read on how the lack of diversity of our globalize crops leaves them (and therefore our food security) vulnerable to various pathogens. I really appreciated Dunn’s humorous quips and thorough notes section. He focusses on a few main crops such as cassava, corn, potatoes, latex (rubber), wheat, bananas, and coffee and outlines their evolution into monoculture. I also enjoyed how he spotlighted seed researchers/conservationists like Cary Fowler and Nikolai Vavilov as well as the lengths that ...more

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Nov 05, 2017 Meg rated it liked it

Shelves: history, health

I felt a little conflicted about this book. On the one hand, yes. Your point is well taken. On the other hand, pretty much all of the people profiled as "making a difference" or doing something that helps the situation are white men. Also the ultimate takeaway seems to be that "Science will solve it, we just need to collect all the seeds of all the plants everywhere," even though the author has alluded earlier to how (1) scientific methods actually caused a lot of the problems, and (2) the ...more

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May 04, 2017 Christina Dudley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, urbanfarmjunkie

Fascinating and not entirely depressing read about the vulnerability of our food supply. Dunn examines everything from how we came to eat the few varieties of plants we eat (blame the Conquistadors and a few handfuls of survivor seeds), to past food threats, to efforts to save our food future. I'd read about the Irish Potato Famine and Cavendish banana before, and how the tomatoes we eat represent just the narrowest genetic slice of what's out there, but Dunn makes clear the pattern set by ...more

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Nov 14, 2017 Kerri rated it liked it

Shelves: goodreads-giveaways

I received a free copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.

I thought this was informative and well-researched, and I found it very interesting. However, it wasn't what I was expecting based on the title. Every now and then at the end of a chapter the author would have a few brilliant pages that kept me avidly turning pages into the next section, only to be mildly disappointed that he didn't really discuss what I wanted him to.

But overall, once I left the expectations of the title behind (I was ...more

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May 15, 2017 Kim Bakos rated it liked it

Shelves: giveaways

This book took me quite a while to read, since it takes concentration to keep track of the historical and scientific information that it contains. But I did find it very interesting and well written, and I think what the author is talking about is very important.
It left me a little scared, though, that our food security is in peril, and there is not much as the average consumer that we can do to change that. I already do what he suggests we can do - grow some amount of our own food, buy/grow ...more

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Aug 29, 2017 Greg rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, science, journalism, nature, food, food-history

It was pretty good; not quite what I was expecting (I thought it was going to be more about seasonality than it did), but interesting nonetheless. Dunn loves to repeat the central point he's trying to make: conserving the wild species of our staple crops and those plants we have yet to discover so as to ensure that future food sources do not succumb to disease and predation, all at once and with no remedy. The facts Dunn throws around are impressive, as far as just how dependent we've become on ...more

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Oct 02, 2017 Roxanne rated it really liked it

If you like to eat, you should find this book interesting and educational.

The author focuses the reader on the simple fact that our world's food supply is too dependent on big agriculture and their chemical manufactures, and more people need to become aware of the dangers we face as the world's population continues to grow and grow.

The author encourages readers to grow our own food, or buy from our local farmers which is a trend that I think many people have started to do in the past 5-10 ...more

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May 19, 2017 Christina rated it really liked it

Rob Dunn's book will make you think about the foods you eat, the details of what brought them to your local grocery, your place in the web, and how fragile the entire system is. The author does a nice job of explaining the science of our increasing reliance on a limited number of species of crops. Loss of diversity is causing vulnerability to plants, putting them at great risk. With use of true stories he shows not only the challenges to our food supply but we can do as consumers to help. ...more

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Jun 20, 2017 Daniel rated it really liked it

This book is another reminder of how planting vast tracts of genetically identical crops spurs development of pests and diseases. A new, resistant, variety used to be good for 12 years, now we are lucky to get 2-3 years. Yes we have many new genetic tools to use in designing new crops but, we are losing the genetic diversity of traditional seeds from which we may harvest resistant genes. Our salvation can only be found in diversity of crops and within crops.

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Dec 16, 2018 Fabien rated it it was amazing

Shelves: environment

Everybody SHOULD READ this book.

This is not a thriller, neither science fiction but the reality is very scary.

Thank you , Mr Dunn for analyzing all the problems and giving us advice to react before is too late.

It is up to us to protect the environment, care and cherish it for the next generations

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Feb 11, 2018 yamiyoghurt rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

A fascinating read chock full with information about monocultures and how they failed. I enjoyed the factual part, but was kinda disappointed by some of the simplistic opinions of the author at the start of the book. All in all, the theme was strong, the message clear, and I've gained new insights on the topic.

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Feb 18, 2018 Meghan rated it really liked it

Shelves: first-reads

I received this book free via Goodreads giveaways.

I really like this book. It taught me so many things about food production and how our crops are at risks to a variety of pests that leave the world vulnerable to famine. A definite read for everyone because we are all at risk to food loss if we're not careful.

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