The Seed Detective is a very well written and accessible history of 14 vegetables and fruits and how they came to be in their current forms in our culinary lives. Released 29th Sept 2022 by Chelsea Green Publishing, it's 320 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.
The author is a gifted storyteller and this could easily have been a dry-as-dust recitation with lots of facts and figures. It is emphatically anything but that. The story of food is the story of civilisation and tracing our interactions with the development of different kinds of crops from the first 8 "founder" crops developed and cultivated by our ancestors to our modern specialty brassicas and coloured sprouts.
There are chapter notes with annotations for further reading as well as an abbreviated glossary and index. There are no illustrations in the eARC sent for review, but in my opinion, they would've been superfluous to the text anyhow.
The historical tie-ins are varied, relevant, and educational (including the fact that favism could be the reason Pythagoras (yes, that one) actually died - which was a new one for me).
Four and a half stars. This would be a superlative selection for public or school library acquisition, gift giving, and for gardeners who enjoy natural history. It will make a nice break for long autumn evenings from the knee-high stack of glossy seed magazines dreaming of springtime.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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