By Ashish Saxena
It’s easy to forget. Most of us think that the food we eat is a “natural” product of the earth that has always looked and tasted this way.
The truth is far more dramatic: If it weren’t for plant breeders, our plates would be empty.
Everything we eat was designed. It is the result of a 10,000-year-old conversation between humans and nature, a process called plant breeding. As breeders, we are the invisible architects of the world’s diet. We work in the heat of the fields and the precision of the labs to ensure that the next global food catastrophe is the one you never have to hear about.
From grass to gold: the maize transformation
To understand the power of breeding, let’s look at maize. Around 10,000 years ago in what is now Mexico, its ancestor, teosinte, looked nothing like the corn we know today: small, hard grains, enclosed in resistant shells, dispersed along a thin stem – almost impossible to eat. Over thousands of years, farmers observed, saved, and replanted the best seeds. That tedious work, generation after generation, slowly transformed teosinte into maize.
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