Free (ADE-DRM PDF) Hybrid: History & Science of Plant Breeding [Agricultural Botany]

[ATDrake]

Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding by Noel Kingsbury (Wikipedia) is his thorough botanical agricultural overview and exploration of Exactly What It Says In The Title, spanning from the roots of agriculture straight up to modern frankenfoodifying, free courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.

This is their selected free ebook of the month for April, and it's really quite nifty, clocking in at a substantial 500+ pages and covering topics nicely in a quasi-academic but still very readable fashion, even though the author is apparently primarily a garden designer and relative layperson by training and trade, although he has earned a late-career doctorate for stuff, which just goes to show that you really do keep learning throughout your life, if you try.

Currently free throughout the month of April @ the UCP giveaway webpage (ADE-DRM PDF available worldwide in exchange for a valid email address).

And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Because science! And history! (And history of science!) And quasi-scholarly! (And history of quasi-scholarly science notions!*) It's like a hat-trick of Stuff I Like Which We Don't Really Get Enough Of, so

Enjoy!

Description
Disheartened by the shrink-wrapped, Styrofoam-packed state of contemporary supermarket fruits and vegetables, many shoppers hark back to a more innocent time, to visions of succulent red tomatoes plucked straight from the vine, gleaming orange carrots pulled from loamy brown soil, swirling heads of green lettuce basking in the sun.

With Hybrid, Noel Kingsbury reveals that even those imaginary perfect foods are themselves far from anything that could properly be called natural; rather, they represent the end of a millennia-long history of selective breeding and hybridization. Starting his story at the birth of agriculture, Kingsbury traces the history of human attempts to make plants more reliable, productive, and nutritious—a story that owes as much to accident and error as to innovation and experiment. Drawing on historical and scientific accounts, as well as a rich trove of anecdotes, Kingsbury shows how scientists, amateur breeders, and countless anonymous farmers and gardeners slowly caused the evolutionary pressures of nature to be supplanted by those of human needs—and thus led us from sparse wild grasses to succulent corn cobs, and from mealy, white wild carrots to the juicy vegetables we enjoy today. At the same time, Kingsbury reminds us that contemporary controversies over the Green Revolution and genetically modified crops are not new; plant breeding has always had a political dimension.

A powerful reminder of the complicated and ever-evolving relationship between humans and the natural world, Hybrid will give readers a thoughtful new perspective on—and a renewed appreciation of—the cereal crops, vegetables, fruits, and flowers that are central to our way of life.

* For some reason, that episode of Dinosaurs (Wikipedia) where Earl is giving his kids a lesson-lecture on how everything fits under an "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral" paradigm and when questioned ends up classifying water as a "fruit" comes to mind.

[ATDrake]

Just a reminder that this is the last day to get this, if you're interested.