Plat
du jour: What's on your plate?
Anatomy
of a dish
Take a
hamburger,
any hamburger...
What are its ingredients?
Where did the
ingredients originate?
When?
Bread: Wheat, yeast /
Beef / Mayonnaise: oil,
egg, lemon juice, and vinegar / Tomato / Lettuce / Salt
......is this
globalization?
What
is globalization, when
did it begin? Where?
Key to
globalization is the geographic distribution of organisms
Domestic plants
and animals are carried by people as they migrate -- that was
how wheat spread, from the fertile crescent, toward the east and west.
Some domesticates do not
thrive where they are introduced, and get dropped from the diet.
Some plant and animal
products are so prized that, even though not available locally, much
time, effort and wealth are spent in procuring them--trade connects
human beings in distant parts of the world.
'Non-essential'
substances such as aromatics, spices (including sugar), tea, coffee,
and tobacco drove much of the western 'discovery' and conquest of the
world--and laid the basis for the 'globalization' of today.
Why are organisms found in some
places but not others?
There are two ways to answer 'why' questions in biology: using
proximate and ultimate explanations.
The proximate (immediate) cause is what "what one can see", the cause
closest to the effect; the ultimate (indirect) cause is the
evolutionary explanation for a trait. The proximate cause for
sexual differences in bird plumage is hormonal differences between
males and females, but the ultimate cause is natural selection.
Why does black pepper grow in tropical forests, but not in temperate
grasslands? The
proximate cause is
the particular set of physiological properties that allow it to survive
in the one environment, but not the other. The ultimate cause is
natural selection, which led to the evolution of this set of
properties.
Why did the black pepper, until recently, grow in the tropical forests
of southern India, but not in other, similar forests? The
proximate causes are that, 1) given limited ability to disperse, pepper
cannot easily spread beyond the tropical forests in the south-western
part of India to those in north-eastern India and 2) because of the
dry regions in-between, it cannot migrate through the intervening
area. The ultimate cause is that its limited ability to disperse
is a trait that is part of its evolutionary history.
If human beings had not started growing wheat and carrying it with them
everywhere they went, wheat would be be found in south-west Asia and
not spread out as it
is today.
Evolutionary
Origins: Let's
start at the very beginning...
=================================================
Bread: Wheat Iraq, Syria Israel
8000 ya; bread wheat 6700 ya; yeast; bread (Egyptian sculpture,
archaeol.) 4700 ya
Beef: cattle 8000 ya
Mayonnaise: oil, egg, lemon juice,
and vinegar
Chicken S SE Asia multiple domestications 8000-4000
ya
Lemon S SE Asia
Vinegar-Alcohol
Tomato: Central America
(tho’ wild relatives Peru--no lingusitic or artefactual evidence
cultivated there).
Lettuce: Africa? Egyptian tomb
paintings, 4500 ya; Introduced to Europe by Romans? Herodotus, 2550 ya
in Persia
=================================================
