Friday Coffee Break: Where Food Comes From

So maybe for those of you in the States this is a coffee break, but I'm about to scurry off to make dinner. And in so doing, I also got to thinking about where that food comes from. No, I'm not talking about my local market, or the region of Spain where those grapes flew in from. I'm think more along the lines of long-term evolution of crop diversity! In one of my lectures this first week of classes (!), we looked a lot at geologic time scales, and then more in-depth into the last 10,000 years - the post-agrarian revolution Earth. As such, I was ecstatic to wander across this nifty map and toolkit for discovering the origins and current state of our agriculture diversity! These types of reflective resources always get me; the hot spots of poverty and the seats of current political unrest (and what we perceive as terrorist inclinations) are in fact also "the cradlee of agriculture and home to the first farmers." Well, there's food for thought.