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

by Rob Dunn

The bananas we eat today aren't your parents' 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 Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food. But our crops themselves remain susceptible to the nature's fury. And nature always wins. Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Science, History, Environment, Nature, Ecology

318 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 14, 2017

About the author

Robert Dunn is a biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University.

He has written several books and his science essays have appeared at magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and others. He has become known for efforts to involve the public as citizen scientists.

Dunn's writings have considered the quest to find new superheavy elements, why men are bald, how modern chickens evolved, whether a virus can make a person fat, the beauty of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the biology of insect eggs, the secret lives of cats, the theory of ecological medicine, why the way we think about calories is wrong, and why monkeys (and once upon a time, human women) tend to give birth at night.

Ph.D., Ecology and Evolution, University of Connecticut (2003). He was a Fulbright fellow in Australia. He is currently the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at NC State University.

{more at Wikipedia}

Reviews

[Berengaria · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

short review for busy readers:
The title is slightly misleading. This is not about global supply chains and the marketing of food, but farming and food security in a time of massive climate change and international travel.

in detail:
Rob Dunn is a very passionate writer. His stories of the heroic exploits of biologists and those who study crop pathogens will have you tearing up and saying "bless them, the sweet lambs!" and wanting to send someone somewhere a check.

Despite the drama, that can get repetitive. Especially toward the middle of the book when it seems he's pulling out another and another and another example of the exact same point. (I almost DNFed there. Glad I didn't!)

Luckily, he introduces the topic of seed saving and dashes off on another round of high drama.

Dunn's main point is this: to feed billions of humans and make famine obsolete, we need a way to grow crops quickly and efficiently. And since there ain't no such thing as a free lunch -- it also needs to be profitable.

Given all the dangers to crops in the world -- pests, disease, weather, war, sabotage -- our food security is, and has always been, highly threatened. The historical answer to this in modern times has been pesticides and monocultures. But those two things have a severely negative impacts on the environment and human health. Genetically modified crops (DNA spliced or CRISPR treated to be disease resistant) is only the latest step.

Dunn points to wilderness preservation, seed saving, a return to crop variation, regional produce in addition to national, and an encyclopedic database of all known crop diseases and pests (which as of today does not exist) as the way forward to curing the ills of the past.

"Never out of Season" is passionate, informed, highly detailed, highly dramatic and extremely competently written, but in some places repetitive and can cause the reader to suffer from information overload.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 OPPOSITE of that. The author identifies the perils of monoculture agriculture and describes the short term thinking that has led food industry giants to pursue profit and productivity at the expense of diversity and quality. It is a real problem, of that there is no doubt. This book reviews the history of rusts and blights and pathogens and pests, and while it is clearly all very well researched and fluently written, it starts to get repetitive and depressing, which is of course the point, I suppose. There's a nice nod to the locavore movement at the very end but I wish there had been a bit more of that, even if just anecdotally, for balance. Perhaps that would just be the sugar to make the medicine go down, but it would have led to me recommending this book more highly!

[Caroline Brown]

trying my hand at nonfiction because hubris!! dnf around 100 pages - interesting stuff, but pretty depressing.

[Donna Kimball · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had this book on my Overdrive wishlist for a while, but I didn’t really think about reading it until I had to prepare a talk about tea and remembered that a few farms have talked to me about the dangers of monocultural crops, and suddenly, Never Out of Season seemed really relevant.

Never Out of Season is about how the loss of biodiversity in our food crops could lead to food security issues. To try and summarise the whole book into a few sentences: in our quest for food stability, we have dedicated ourselves to cultivating high yield species. However, an overdependence on one species of crop (e.g. one type of wheat, one type of tea, one type of chocolate) means that farms are susceptible to diseases. In order to save ourselves from possible starvation, we need to preserve the genetic variety of plants, but sadly, that work is undervalued and many seeds are at risk due to war and/or governments who don’t care.

Dunn talks about several frightening cases in the book – such as the potato famine that killed millions in Ireland, the act of bioterrorism that killed cacao trees in Brazil, and a mealybug that feeds on cassava, the main food source for many people in sub-Saharan Africa. All of these are tragic stories, but I think one of the most tragic ones is the story of Vavilov and his vault of seeds. Vavilov was captured during WWII for opposing Stalin and his vault was caught up in the Siege of Leningrad. His assistants literally died of starvation while keeping these plants alive but after all that effort, the land that the station was located on was sold to a private developer in 2010. This was a pretty big problem because many varieties of seeds are planted on the site. The site was even pronounced useless by the government in 2011! Then in 2012, there was a federal order that allowed the station to remain but it does not come with funds, which means that after all the sacrifices made to save these seeds, the thing that kills the vault is a lack of money.

It is pretty frightening to learn how close we are to a sudden shock to our food supply and it’s befuddling why this is not getting much funding; there’s a very sad illustration of how the weekly budget for the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2010 (way over 2 billion) to the 2006 budget for ICARDA, which works to ensure the future of agriculture in Iraq, the Middle East, and North Africa (much less than 0.5 billion).

Overall, this was an eye-opening book that was a little scary and which made me think quite a bit. For example, Singapore is highly dependent on importing food, so any of these blights would obviously affect us. But what can we do and how can we help? I checked Dunn’s website and there is a Get Involved page – I’m unfortunately not in the position to make sourdough, because I don’t have an oven, but if you are the baking type, this may be something you’re interested in! I was also prompted by this book to see if Singapore is doing anything, and I found out we have something called Biodiversity of Singapore (BOS). If you’re interested in the book, you may also want to see if your local area is doing anything about this issue.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 worked to save seeds or plant stock, as well as those who have studied the pests and diseases that affect the various food crops. The 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. On a small, local, personal scale, we all should be searching out the products that grow best in our areas, whether growing them ourselves in backyard gardens and orchards or buying from the farmer at local markets and farm stands.

[Caleb Fendrich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Based on the title and the recommendation I received for this book, I was expecting (and hoping for) a discussion of the economics, logistics, and history behind the food we eat. Why we grow food the way we do. And how we might go about doing this in a more sustainable manner.

That’s not what this book is. It is a meandering exploration of various pathogens and pests that threaten several common food types, with repetitive calls for elementary scientific study of these plants. I didn’t learn *nothing* from this book. Which is the best I can say for it.

[Xerxia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for thoroughness but three stars for readability. This book starts strong, with powerful stories about the lack of biodiversity in the world’s food crops and the danger inherent in that (hello Irish potato famine). But by the end it devolves into an American-centric whinefest about supporting something called university extensions, having fewer children and downloading the author’s friend’s plant pathology app. So read the first 3/4 and stop after Monsanto.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Michael Strauss · Rating 2 out of 5]

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

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting Yet Only Tangentially Related To Title. This is a book primarily about plant pathogens and the history of the study of plants and specifically their pathogens, mostly centering on the roughly 200 ish years between the beginnings of the Irish Potato Famine in the mid 19th century to the bleeding edge research being done by Dunn and other scientists in the later early 21st century. Dunn bemoans the fact that the food supply of the world basically comes down to a dozen or so key varieties of key species in the beginning... while later backdoor praising that very same thing as saving the world from certain pathogens, at least - as Dunn claims- "temporarily". Overall the book, at least in the Audible form I consumed it in, was engaging and thought provoking, and despite being vaguely familiar with farming due to where and when I grew up, Dunn highlights quite a bit here that I was never aware of. Things that adventure authors like David Wood, Rick Chesler, or Matt Williams could use as inspiration for some of their stories - but also other real world events that could serve as inspiration to Soraya M. Lane and other WWII era historical fiction authors. Ultimately the book becomes quite a bit self-serving, highlighting work done by Dunn and his colleagues and friends in the years preceding writing the books. And yet, again at least in Audible form, there was nothing truly objective-ish wrong here to hang a star deduction on, and thus it maintains its 5* rating. Recommended.

[Anna Abney Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Interesting book, though not quite what I was expecting. Rob Dunn is great at throwing hilarious asides into otherwise serious topics (I would love to read a novel by him on the oddities of a college biology faculty, as he jokingly pitched in this book.) I learned a lot about not only the threats to our food supply, but the threats that come from treating much of what we've learned about agriculture as private information owned by corporations.

[Tom Scanlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 researchers who have helped develop plant variations and maintained seed banks, often under dire circumstances and at the risk (and sometimes loss) of their lives.

He emphasizes again and again the importance of plant diversity in fighting drought, parasites and pathogens. He stresses the importance of maintaining significant portions of our planet in its wild and natural state. You cannot read this book without becoming convinced of the importance of funding research in these fields. This book should be required reading for anyone who votes. I hope that this excellent expose’ of the problems we face in maintaining our narrow edge in agriculture will inspire more young people to become researchers in applied ecology.

Tom Scanlan

[Nore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Literal two stars, as ever: It was okay.

An informative (if repetitive) book, but not on the topic I was hoping for; I now know plenty about the history of seed saving, but not quite as much as I would hope about the insider process of how the forces of capitalism have poked and prodded our agricultural system into providing grocery stores the exact same fruits and vegetables year round, which is why I picked this book up in the first place. An expose about how bananas are picked early and artificially ripened with ethylene gas when necessary, maybe?

The topic of monocultures and how they make our food supply vulnerable to pests and diseases is related, of course, but if I had known this would essentially be a series of biographies of people who had gone on crusades to gather and save seeds to preserve the genetic diversity of our crops, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. Oh well!

[Nam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is informative, but a bit text-book like. Still, the author did a good job to keep the book engaging by alternating between some history intrigues, and biological details.

[Mary Nee · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Giedra · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern science has made it possible for people to enjoy the agricultural splendors of every corner of the world, at any time, regardless of growing season. Our access to a wealth of choices has also put intense pressures on the production of crops that would otherwise be rare or so diversified in taste that there wouldn’t be a consistent commercial product. Agricultural scientists over the past decades have selected specific varieties for their high yields, hardiness, flavor, and many other important qualities. But with the winnowing down of crop species comes an intensification of the pests and pathogens that target crops with impunity. Over time, our agricultural system has become more susceptible to failure, as proven again and again throughout history when crops like bananas, potatoes, cassava, chocolate, and even rubber have come under attack. To survive, we’ll need to start taking a different approach before we’re faced with a pest or pathogen that our modern crops can’t withstand.

Never Out of Season was a very interesting book, scratching my constant literary itch to learn more about our agricultural system and how the food we eat makes its way to consumers, from seed to table. This book focused on specific crops that are currently vulnerable to mass destruction by pathogens, and the ways in which those pathogens are already starting to control our growing patterns and our ability to have plentiful crop yields. There are some interesting historical examples to start. Potatoes, having been dwindled down from 4k South American varieties to just a single, productive variety in Europe, was hit by a blight that caused over a million deaths and displacements due to the resulting famine. That’s definitely the most famous example, and so too the story of the modern banana, which is actually a single generically stagnant variety that was only popularized within the last century after the previous commercial version was entire wiped out. The other examples in the book were no less compelling, and on top of the threat of pests and pathogens there is a very real threat of bio-terrorism causing disruption in the agricultural space that could affect millions, if not billions, of lives. As a consumer, it feels like our options are limited - attempt to shop for produce from your area, encourage and sample non-standard varieties of different produce, lobby pur local governments for enhanced protections for small farms- including increasing their access to scientists who can help identify and resolve problems from new diseases that threaten to overtake our crops. Never Out of Season was a very interesting read, and although I feel like my hands are tied, it feels like the primary purpose of this book (the spread of information, rather than a call to action) was powerfully achieved.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

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)"

[Mike Cross · Rating 2 out of 5]

An absolute hodgepodge of a book that has very little to do with the title and subtitle and skips from topic to topic without much continuity. In fact, the only recurring theme throughout most of the book, but not all, is crops used by humans (not just food crops, but plants such as the rubber tree) are continuously threatened by nature. If this theme comes as a surprise to anyone, maybe you should read the book. The solutions to these threats from nature, be they pathogens, climate change, insects, etc., are never really spelled out other than more studying by and funding for the public sector (by which he mainly means scientists and universities) is necessary. (Again, this solution should come as no surprise to readers as the author is a professor at a land grant university.)

Corporations, as is oft the case in these books regardless of their track records in producing insane amounts of food that have actually been able to combat most of the threats the author presents, are the bad guys. To be fair, he does give credit to corporations for creating such innovations as BT crops which significantly reduce the amount of pesticides used, but then warns that this is merely a temporary solution, which everything it when it comes to fighting nature.

At times the author laments the fact that crops and plants have been taken from the native areas to be grown all over the world and that eventually nature will catch up to this, and at other times he indirectly praises this as it allows the crops to thrive when their native areas are under attack or can no longer support their original plants. (Truthfully, if crops, such as wheat, weren’t grown outside of their native area, we would never be able to feed the planet. No area in the world can be crop self-sustaining.)

While some of the stories are very interesting, well presented, and well written, the overall book lands as a dud because it never addresses the title and was not composed as a single theme. Not recommended unless you are really interested in plant pathogens.

[Tom Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 broad audience, including those with or without a science background. Dr. Dunn provides an engaging overview of the long history of agriculture and science with fascinating examples, facts and anecdotes about the causes of biodiversity loss including illuminating if unsettling facts about the effects of corporate agriculture.

“Never Out of Season” illustrates how the risks of the occurrence of another agricultural catastrophe like the nineteenth century Irish potato famine haven’t diminished today. Our dependence on a handful of crops for most of our calories is increasingly precarious.

Solutions for replacing any failed agricultural staple crops depend on preserving their wild crop relatives to utilize unexplored beneficial genetic traits. Yet many wild crop relatives have become extinct in the wild. The need to preserve their seeds and surviving living collections of these plants as an insurance policy against future pathogens and pests make local farmers, seed banks and botanical gardens all increasingly important for our survival.

Dr. Dunn provides a comprehensive and daunting picture of the magnitude of the challenges facing future food supplies but also points to solutions and successes to date.

[Matt Hooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 the surface, but such a narrow focus has negative effects. Obviously, it limits our menus and palates – bananas are a great example of this, as there are hundreds of different varietals but only one variety available in your American supermarket.

Lack of crop diversity also leaves us susceptible to widespread crop destruction and famine. If only one varietal is planted and a bug comes along with a taste for that varietal – well, you see where this is going.

Rob Dunn gives us some historical context on these issues – including a very well-written and rather fascinating history of the Irish potato famine. He also provides some thought-leadership on how to diversify crops worldwide, improve seasonality, and increase sustainability. He provides a rather shocking appraisal of the haphazard effort to preserve varietal seeds from the past and present – an effort that may someday be our last chance to avoid mass starvation.

If none of the above moves you to action – Dunn reminds us that both coffee and chocolate are crops which have been affected by wide-scale parasites and diseases. Both are on rather shaky ground from the standpoint of sustainability.

Therefore, it's truly in our best interest to get moving on this.

[Thomas Shevis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent enough exploration into the agricultural sector and how it has evolved over time and dealt with major crop diseases and pests.

However, it did not live up to the expectations of the title. Other reviewers have noted this as well. Instead of discussing the problems associated with always being able to get most any item of produce any time of year wherever you are (in the global north), such as labor exploitation, increasing uses of fertilizers, pesticides, etc., nutrient depletion of farmlands, increasing consolidation of farmlands within fewer hands, increased power of seed companies like Monsanto... the author focuses on the pests and pathogens that attack key crops like cacao, coffee, cassava, and potatoes, and how crop diversity has diminished over the years, leading to less possibility for pathogen resistant varieties. These are important issues and it's very important for us to figure out how to prevent the mass destruction of crops that large populations rely on.

As important as those issues are, the author mostly glosses over the political issues that lead to death in events like the Irish potato famine instead of the provision of other produce by the ruling class who took all the rest of the food the Irish grew, or how much of Africa has come to rely on cassava for the majority of their calories due to many of the same reasons: exploitation and colonization.

Basically, this is a different book than expected and certain major issues are glossed over that really should not be.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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 in undergrad this section stood out to me. We thinks farmers control the crops they grow, but it is a relationship that needs constant renegotiation because plants themselves have needs and requirements that any gardener/farmer must attend to. Factor in pests and pathogens and we see a constantly evolving network of needs that must be met if we (as a species) intend to survive.

Dunn's book highlights this network of humans, plants, pests, and pathogens with historic and modern anecdotes of successes and failures of the agricultural system. He highlights the preservation (or in some cases the re-introduction) of biodiversity within the farm, and seed-saving as a way to ensure the continuation of species across the world. I love the call to action at the back of the book, and have enjoyed looking through plantvillage.org. As a gardener myself I will help fill out these virtual volumes with my own observations and insights.

Will continue to reference forever.

[Athena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“In Spanish, [the seed vault] is sometimes called Noah’s Ark, except that the species being saved are escaping not a literal flood but rather a sea of industrial agriculture.” (196)

“In response to our simplest urges, they have given us food that is the same all year, a manifestation of our cravings. The preferences of our tongues and eyes have created the brave new world we live in.” (201)

“Those that study farming study ways to ensure that we get as much as possible from plants.” (215)

The stories in this book are deeply important, and I think this is a great book to read, especially if you're a biology student. My main grievance with this book is the organization. The book conveys useful information, but it was difficult to process since the main focus of the book drifted heavily from chapter to chapter. The use of different ways of breaking up text also made the organization miserable, since within chapters, the author also used three middle-centered dots assumingly meant to signify a change of subject. The result was choppy and difficult to understand.

Overall, the message is beautiful and important; the writing is satisfactory.

[Bookworm · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 that's not what I thought this book was going to be about. It's not hard to understand why there'a lot of fear (and misinformation) about what goes into creating, maintaining and working our food supply and how our food supply came to be. 
 
It's not a surprise that the author urges people to buy local, try to buy foods that in-season, grow your own food if possible, etc. But the point could have been much better communicated if the author had actually stuck to the title and quite frankly didn't jump around so much at times. 
 
Skip this one.
 
 

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 they and their teams went through to protect their seed libraries. I thought this work was well-researched and completely agree that traditional seed conservation requires way more funding and recognition of its importance. I do think that there could have been stronger recommendations at the end about how individuals can take action, and it could’ve been useful to have a more thorough explanation of investing and reinvigorating your local own food systems and crops. Overall a good read.

[Kelly Conrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book scared the crap out of me. The fact that drought and the resulting famine is what ultimately took out an entire civilization which had existed for over 4,000 years does not make me optimistic about my kids’ future.

Even the Irish potato famine is still not totally understood, making us vulnerable to repeat it. The research we need on pathogens & pests and seed diversity is not well-funded. And the research that is funded is geared toward commercial farms, is not public and is paid for by big Ag, focused on maximum production per acre, not biodiversity.

We need passionate Virologists and Agronomists, kiddos!! It doesn’t sound like a glamorous job, but it just may be these quiet experts who will be the heroes of our future…provided big money gets thrown into it. I read where the billionaires listed in Forbes Richest People in the World usually give 2-5%, if at all, to philanthropy…come on people, let’s think of the greater good here. We can all do our part!