Origin of Agriculture
gregladen | February 9, 2008What do you eat when you are traveling the world in search of truth about the natural world? Most of the time Darwin ate pretty well...
While traveling through the interior near Rio, Darwin makes note of some of the agricultural practices of the region. He is visiting farms ... plantations .. carved out of the forest.
The chief produce of this part of the country is coffee. Each tree is supposed to yield annually, on an average, two pounds; but some give as much as eight. Mandioca or cassada is likewise cultivated in great quantity.
... that would be Manihot, or cassava, also known as…
gregladen | February 2, 2008Solanum tuberosum, is an American cultivar related to the tomato and the eggplant (Remarkably, they are all in the same genus, but rarely to all three appear in the same dish). Potatoes, the lovely underground storage organ (USO) without which we would not have French Fries, or dipping chips to eat during the Super Bowl, twice baked potatoes, or Mr. Potato Head and his family, were domesticated by Native Americans in two local centers, one in the high Andes in eastern Venezuela and northern Argentina, and in the lowlands of south-central Chile. During the last half of the 16th century, they…