A useful book

The title of this work is "Useful plants of Neotropical origin and their wild relatives" by Heinz Brücher. It's a very interesting mini-encyclopaedia of useful or potentially useful plants from the Neotropics. (Apparently, a new and updated edition is being prepared as we speak.)

The author lives in Argentina and has an ideological agenda. He is worried about the (real or perceived) combined threat of overpopulation, overproduction and undernourishment. Most of our plant-derived foodstuffs come from only seven crops, and these are often cultivated at enormous monocultures susceptible to large-scale destruction due to bad weather conditions, climate change or pests. Brücher wants to promote biodiversity and point out that many other plants than the standard crops are useful to man. At first, I assumed that the author was some kind of fanatic, since he refers to our species as Homo "sapiens" (his quote-unquote). However, Brücher discusses both pros and cons with the plants listed in his book (toxicity, low yields, pests etc).

Some of the plants mentioned in "Useful plants" are well known, such as cassava or sweet potato. Others are unknown, at least to the present reviewer: edible American yam, arrakucha, lairén, murrutungo-bean and a staggering amount of wild potato species. A fruit-sallad of sugar-apples, mammey-apples, avocado-pears and Barbado's cherry might be interesting!

For some reason, Brücher has included an extensive chapter on the regular potato, so he can discuss his own pet theory of how potatoes were introduced to Europe. Forget about Drake and Raleigh, the real hero (sort of) was the slave-trader John Hawkins who brought potatoes from Colombia to his native Britain.

I only skimmed this book at a library here in Stockholm, but it looks like a work I could consider buying myself. Five stars!