Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

by Carolyn Steel

We already know that wild foods are vastly more nutritious than cultivated ones. The wild berries the Hadza eat, for instance, have between ten and a hundred times the nutritional content of blueberries bought in Aldi or Asda. Instead of breeding such wildness out of plants in order to achieve higher yields, therefore, we might start farming in such a way as to preserve their wildness. That is, of course, pretty much what organic farming already does. But we could go much further, by mimicking and encouraging wild growth to produce edible ecosystems almost as rich and diverse as those in the wild. Such an approach would clearly require us to eat very different foods (less bread and pasta and more nuts and berries, as well as more seasonal produce), yet they would also be deeply efficient in the sense that they would focus on quality rather than quantity. If we ate berries a hundred times more nutritious than supermarket ones, we’d only need to grow one hundredth the amount.