Bread Wine Chocolate Chapter 2 Summary

The book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi revolves around the theme of decreasing biodiversity in all of the foods our society eats, the reasons why it is decreasing, and what we can do about it. Sethi uses a plethora of stories from her travels to describe the food production process—from deep in the jungles of Ecuador to a chocolate factory in Berkeley. She also explains that with the decreasing biodiversity, there is a decreasing variety in taste. For instance, in terms of wine, there are currently only 8 main grape varieties used to make wine in California; and they are not chosen for their taste, they are chosen for their economic value. Similarly, when it comes to chocolate, the standardization of

Every pod has a unique taste, but when big manufacturers mass produce chocolate, they just blend all the different pods together and water the taste down with fillers and sugars in order to create the uniform taste we have all grown to love. Also, coffee has been limited to 50 commercial types of plants by domestication and this is exceptionally detrimental to the future of coffee (p 193). The limited diversity in coffee plants causes the coffee crop to be vulnerable to disease, death, and even extinction. Moreover, the standardization of beer hops has made it so that a majority of people have only ever tried one type of beer in their lifetime; and it tasted like bitter penny water, which they didn’t take a liking to. Bread is the most essential part of human diet. Sethi plainly states that “wheat is the staff of life,” and this is to say that wheat is eaten in copious amounts around the world. So much so that “15 plants [alone] provide 90% of our global food energy intake” and two thirds of which come from specifically rice, corn, and wheat (p

Specifically, in lecture we discussed the effects of the Green Revolution, which was a shift made in the agricultural industry in an effort to boost food production in underdeveloped countries and increase crop output. Dr. Waines emphasized that although the green revolution did bring about some benefits (e.g. feeding people in Mexico, creating more food, etc.), it also brought on some detriments (lecture). Not only did the green revolution lessen agricultural biodiversity, but it also allowed the rich to become richer and failed to feed people in underdeveloped countries (lecture). This is not to say that it did not feed any people or a significant amount, but that the amount of people getting fed plateaued and Mexico absorbed a majority of the benefits. The green revolution also promoted a new, industrialized type of agriculture in which machine is favored and of which is extremely pesticide- and water-dependent (Lecture). This means our current system would further deplete our water tables and pollute our air. Not only that, but the large increase in food production has led to a large increase in population. Owing to these facts, it is apparent that this new form of agriculture is highly unsustainable. As previously stated, the book Bread, Wine, Chocolate revolves around depleting agricultural biodiversity in the foods we eat on a daily basis. This is a