Underdeveloped Crops

Basics

• Plants / "Proto-Crops" that were never domesticated
• This was often due to the time needed for Selective Breeding of these crops being longer than how long it took for another culture to introduce an existing crop
  • This has led to Monocultures as well as growing non-native plants, leading to issues like Drought Tolerance
• Via Genetic Engineering what took decades or GENERATIONS, can be done in years
• Corn/Maize is a great example of how far something can come. It went from Teosinte to modern Sweetcorn , and this was done mostly via selective breeding!
• If this level of change was applied to Cattails , Pawpaws , or Dandelions for food use, there could be many new crops
• Most Cruciferous vegetables came from one "ancestor plant". Thus by developing even just one of the MANY potential underdeveloped crops, humanity could gain many new food ingredients, that also may grow better in some areas where other more "conventional" crops are challenging

Internal Links

• Coontie Palm ( Florida Arrowroot )
• Cattail
• Pawpaw

External Links

• The Wikipedia Page on Neglected and underutilized crops
  • (Wikipedia chose this name, it seems to have few (~300,000) results in google search, GRANTED the "underdeveloped" may be leading to use cases such as "Underdeveloped nations" and thus lots of irrelevant results inflating results? Either way this page's name is more concise and ties into the "developer" language. Any thoughts on this? (could discuss further in the discussion page, or Slack / Discord )