Make vegetables great again!

Sure, there are 70 million fellow citizens who are in mourning.  I don't care.  

We have taken our country back from the sociopath and his followers.  I am ready to move on to pontificating about stuff like I usually do, even when I have no idea what I am talking about.

When I was a kid, cauliflower was rare.  I hadn't even heard of something called broccoli.  Chances are that if I had been asked what broccoli is, even into my teens I would have said it was perhaps a type of bacterium--like E. Coli.

After coming to America, it has been an introduction to a world of vegetables and fruits that I didn't know even existed.  Patty pan squash?  Come on!

Or strawberries and raspberries.  I had read about them, but didn't taste one until I came to California.  The first blackberries that I had were after I moved to Oregon.

Years ago, a neighbor gave me a small packet of quinoa and said that I might like to cook and eat it.  I had never heard of quinoa until then, and I certainly didn't know how to pronounce it either.

My point here is this: In five decades, the varieties of fruits and vegetables that I consume has increased phenomenally.  There is more that I don't know about. 

Extrapolate from all these, and I could hypothesize that there are way more known-unknowns that we need to make a lot more people aware of.  Especially because of climate change:

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt.

Diversity is the key to our healthy future:

Solving the food-and-climate crisis will require going back to basics, finding ways to make our mix of crops broader rather than even narrower. ... We can do that again, adding overlooked crops to the mainstream food supply and working to broaden the agricultural gene pool after centuries of going the other way. That adjustment will help ensure that farmers will have crops suitable for the extreme growing conditions they are likely to encounter in the coming decades.

“We haven’t done a very good job of maximizing diversity,” Lippman says. “And diversity is what you need to win the battle of climate change.”

Like with orphan crops:

ones that are cultivated on a small scale in some parts of the world, but that have not benefited from breeding and research to the same extent that major crops have. Some of them are already suited to relatively hot or dry conditions. Because they have not gone through the same extensive breeding as corn, soy, and wheat, the orphans have more untapped potential.

Quinoa is an example of an orphan crop.  Though it was consumed for centuries in the Andes, the rest of us had no idea about it.  I knew about it barely a decade ago.  Once when visiting with a way-out-there in the extended family cousin, I was pleasantly surprised that the cousin's mother was making a quinoa uppuma.  Adapting a new grain or vegetable is not a big deal--coming to know about is the hurdle. 

Lippman’s research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has been investigating orphans in the Solanaceae family, a diverse group that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. At least 25 orphan crops exist in this family, and there are many other uncultivated wild relatives that have crop potential. Lippman is particularly interested in the domesticated African eggplant, grown for its fruit, and a wild relative, Solanum anguivi, whose leaves are eaten. Only local communities eat these species, because there hasn’t been much interest in developing them into mainstream food crops. “There are dozens of Solanaceae plants that have more widespread agricultural potential than we currently realize,” Lippman says.

The next time somebody tells you that we cannot feed more humans, ask them to explain their logic.  And then talk to them about the orphan plants.  Help them understand that not everybody on this planet eats the same stuff, and that all of us could benefit from a lot more diversified portfolio.  "We missed the chance to stop climate change, but Lippman believes we can still win the race to remake agriculture and safeguard the food supply for humankind."