In the 1860s, a power vacuum in Sicily coincided with a global craze for lemons, making orchards more profitable than French vineyards. A new organization emerged not to grow lemons, but to run extortion and protection schemes on the lucrative trade, evolving into the mafia.
Unlike wildlife conservation, which prioritizes non-interference, preserving agrobiodiversity requires consumption. Reviving, cultivating, and herding ancestral grains and livestock creates a market and an economic incentive for their survival, following the principle: "to save it, you've got to eat it."
Storing seeds in vaults like Svalbard is a flawed backup plan because they are not adapting to new diseases and a changing climate. True resilience comes from cultivating diverse crops in the field, allowing them to co-evolve with threats and develop natural resistance.
Despite shelves stocked with heirloom tomatoes and exotic grains, our core food supply is dangerously uniform. For example, 90% of U.S. milk comes from a single cow breed descended from just two bulls, and half of all calories consumed globally come from just three grasses.
Nutritional research shows that dietary diversity is a more critical health factor than simply eliminating animal products. People who consume 30 or more different kinds of plants and animals weekly are significantly freer from disease than even those on exclusively vegan or vegetarian diets.
Primatologist Richard Rangham's theory posits that early hominins used fire for cooking. This made food more energy-efficient to digest, freeing up metabolic resources that enabled the evolution of our larger brains. We didn't just get smart and then cook; we cooked, and that's how we got smart.