The ultimate global food
iAfrica.com – 7 February 2008
STELLENBOSCH, SOUTH AFRICA: A Big Mac and fries may be the quintessential fast food meal, but it can also be viewed as the perfect example of humanity’s increasingly globalised diet as it contains over 20 plant species from around the world, according to Stellenbosch University researchers who have conducted a unique study of all the plants that people eat worldwide. In the first-ever study of the ‘phylogenetic distribution’ to show the ancestral relationship of the human diet, a team from the DST-NRF Centre for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University, ecologists Dr Serban Proches, Dr John Wilson and Prof Dave Richardson, collaborated with plant evolutionary ecologist Dr Jana Vamosi from the University of Calgary in Canada. Their findings were published in the February issue of the journal ‘BioScience‘. The study also argues that steps to protect the diversity of human food plants may have to be taken as loss of indigenous knowledge gradually leads to more uniform diets for the world’s population overall. Read the article…
