Endangered Maize
About This Book
Many people worry that the foods we eat are losing their genetic diversity. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly taken over farm fields. Out of concern for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have tried to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they regard as endangered. They have built high-tech genebanks and organized heritage seed swaps, searched fields for ancient landraces, and looked for farmers who grow Indigenous varieties.
Helen Anne Curry, a historian, argues that behind this concern lies a second extinction narrative, about the survival of farmers themselves, which urgent calls to collect and preserve often hide. Endangered Maize draws on the history of corn in Mexico and the United States to bring that narrative to light and to show how it shaped the conservation strategies of scientists, states, and citizens.
Curry examines more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practice to find out which tasks farmers and researchers have treated as essential to maintaining crop diversity. Using efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, she shows that people who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage varieties built their methods on the expectation that social, political, and economic change would wipe out diverse communities and cultures.
The book is a study of how cultural narratives shape science. It calls for new ways of understanding endangerment and for alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
ISBN: 9780520307698
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