{"id":1024,"date":"2022-07-29T18:31:52","date_gmt":"2022-07-30T00:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/?p=1024"},"modified":"2022-07-29T19:37:18","modified_gmt":"2022-07-30T01:37:18","slug":"traveling-with-plants-around-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/?p=1024","title":{"rendered":"Traveling with plants around the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our July book club discussion was Dunmire’s Gardens of New Spain<\/a><\/em>. Out of print for a while, it is once again available from UT Press as a print on demand<\/a>. Dunmire’s classic work describes how food plants traveled from Central America north and south and ulitmately, with Spanish contact, west to Europe.<\/p>\n

For August AND September we will be discussing Spengler’s Fruit from the Sands: the Silk Road origins of the foods we eat<\/i>. In the first half of the book, he describes the travel and trade throughout Eurasia over several millenia (all heavily referenced – that must be the academic in him) and then ventures on to assorted plants and how they traveled along the routes. Although as a paleoethnobotanist, aka archaeobotanist, Spengler’s style is more academic than, say, that of the author of the Food Explorer<\/i>, the topic is quite interesting.<\/p>\n

The plants in the first half of the book are the grains. Personally, I’m looking forward to the fruits and nuts but I think he’s operating on the principle of – you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner. Just a thought.<\/p>\n

Spengler has an amazing website<\/a> with lots of information out of the book (some of the images that are black and white in the book are color on the website…). If you don’t have a chance to read the book, the website will provide a solid background for appreciating the book.<\/div>\n
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And then in September, we’ll be wrapping up our tour with another book about how the spices of the world traveled around Eurasia and Africa and onward to the New World. Gary Paul Nabhan is a well-known ethnobotanist and this book, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans<\/em>, contains a wealth of information, as have all of his books that we have read (Mesquite, an Arboreal Love Affair<\/a>, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Climate<\/a>, Gathering the Desert.) This one adds some recipes so you can truly appreciate the tastes of the spices that have travelled around the world.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our July book club discussion was Dunmire’s Gardens of New Spain. Out of print for a while, it is once again available from UT Press as a print on demand. Dunmire’s classic work describes how food plants traveled from Central … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1024"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1028,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions\/1028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.margaretmenache.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}