Where Did Our Food Originate?

I stumbled onto this fantastic infographic showing where many of our foods first originated, and tracked it back to a scholarly article, Origins of food crops connect countries worldwide, published by The Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences).

(Click on the image to view full size)

The graphic and the article itself are published under a Creative Commons license, meaning it can be shared freely as long as the authors and original source are credited.

This could be used for so many ways in the homeschool — for geography, social studies, biology, math…

• See what part of the world each component of lunch or dinner first came from.
• See which common foods your family eats are not on the map and see if you can find out where they originally came from.
• See which of the foods can now be grown in your area and which ones need a different climate.
• See what part of the world has your favorite foods.
• See what similarities you can find in foods from each region.
• Categorize the foods into groups (fruits, grains, root vegetables, greens, etc.) and see if you can find patterns for the regions.
• Which region has the most foods listed?
• What percentage of the foods on the map are eaten at least once a month at your house?

The authors of the paper are:

Colin K. Khoury, Harold A. Achicanoy, Anne D. Bjorkman, Carlos Navarro-Racines, Luigi Guarino, Ximena Flores-Palacios, Johannes M. M. Engels, John H. Wiersema, Hannes Dempewolf, Steven Sotelo, Julian Ramírez-Villegas, Nora P. Castañeda-Álvarez, Cary Fowler, Andy Jarvis, Loren H. Rieseberg, Paul C. Struik

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Clearly they did a lot of work to assemble this.  Check out the paper itself for more graphics and a lot more information.

 

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