Where food really comes from

Recently I've been listening to a lecture series by Prof. Brian Fagan about human prehistory. An entire section of the series is devoted to the domestication of wild plants and animals by our early human ancestors. Access to these reliable food sources, in turn, changed the nature of humans' interactions with each other--the whole hunter-gatherer versus farmer-herder dynamic--and allowed humans to create colonies in otherwise inhospitable parts of the planet.

One fascinating side-light of Dr. Fagan's conversations about domestication is the information he gives about where foods were originally domesticated--at least to the extent that archeology can tell us. It turns out that some of the foods we've been eating have--forgive the dreadful pun--deeper roots in the area than others. Wheat, for example, was domesticated in south-west Asia. Chickens, according to Wikipedia, are descended from south-east Asian wildfowl. Corn, potatoes and tomatoes are American crops and have probably been grown in this area for millenia. Beans are found the world over but, again referencing Wikipedia, it's likely the varieties we're eating fresh are American in orgin.

None of this directly relates to our local eating challenge--we're concerned with food that's been grown locally in the past year or so, not the past ten-thousand years--but I find it interesting to think about none-the-less.