annieb123's Review of The Seed Detective

by Adam Alexander

‘Informative, enlightening and entertaining but also important.’ Mark Diacono

‘One of the most inspirational books I have encountered.’ Darina Allen

‘If you’re a vegetable growing addict or just curious about their origins, there’s something for everyone in Adam’s new book. ’ Rob Smith, TV presenter

Meet the Indiana Jones of vegetables on his quest to save our heritage produce.

Have you ever wondered how everyday staples such as peas, kale, asparagus, beans, squash and sweetcorn ended up on our plates? Well, so did Adam Alexander. Adam’s passion for heritage vegetables was ignited when he tasted an unusual, sweet and fiery pepper while on a filmmaking project in Ukraine. Smitten by its flavour, he began to seek out local growers of old and near-forgotten varieties in a mission to bring home seeds to grow and share – saving them from being lost forever.

In The Seed Detective, Adam tells of his far flung (and closer to home) seed-hunting adventures and reveals the stories behind many of our everyday vegetable heroes. How the common garden pea was domesticated from three wild species over 8,500 years ago, that the first carrots originated in Afghanistan (and were actually purple or red in colour), how Egyptian priests considered it a crime to look at a fava bean and that the Romans were fanatical about asparagus.

Join The Seed Detective as he takes us on a journey that began when we left the life of hunter-gatherers to become farmers. Sharing storiesof globalisation, political intrigue, colonisation and serendipity, Adam shows us the vital part vegetables have played in our food story – and how they are the key to our future.

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

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.

The Seed Detective

by Adam Alexander

Reviewed by annieb123 on Nov 5, 2022

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