Curated playlist
Staple foods
- MaizeMaize relies on humans to survive. Its kernels stay locked to the cob, unlike its wild ancestor teosinte, whose seeds scatter to the ground on their own. Left alone in a field, a corncob would simply rot where it fell. This is a plant that…
- WheatWheat grows on more land than any other food crop on Earth. In 2024, farmers planted it across 219.5 million hectares, and the world harvested 799 million tonnes of grain. World trade in wheat is greater than that of all other crops…
- PotatoThe potato is a starchy tuber that pre-Columbian farmers domesticated around Lake Titicaca between roughly 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. They worked from a wild species in the S. brevicaule complex, in what is now southern Peru and…
- RyeRye, known to botanists as Secale cereale, is a grass that has fed northern civilizations through climates that defeat nearly every other grain. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder dismissed it as a "very poor food" that "only serves to…
- BeanFour or five raw red kidney beans can leave a person doubled over with stomachache, vomiting, and diarrhea. The culprit is a flavourless toxin called phytohaemagglutinin, a lectin that only cooking can destroy. Stranger still, under-cooked…
- OatOats, known scientifically as Avena sativa, may be the most underestimated grain on Earth. Samuel Johnson, writing his famous 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, defined oats as a grain which in England is generally given to horses…
- Sweet potatoThe sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, carries a name that is older than written history and a journey that crossed entire oceans before Europeans had any idea it existed. It is one of the few food crops that can honestly claim to have…
- Cooking bananaCooking bananas rank as the tenth most important staple food in the world, yet most people in North America or Europe have never peeled one. They are not the sweet yellow fruit stacked near supermarket checkouts. Cooking bananas are…
- BananaBananas are the world's most exported fruit by volume and by value, yet almost every banana eaten in the Western world belongs to a single variety: the Cavendish, a triploid clone with no seeds and almost no genetic variation. That…
- PumpkinPumpkin fragments unearthed in Mexico have been dated to somewhere between 7,000 and 5,500 BC, making the pumpkin one of the oldest cultivated plants on earth. Long before the jack-o'-lantern, long before the Thanksgiving pie, and long…
- FlourFlour is one of the oldest human-made substances on Earth, and archaeologists have found evidence of people grinding cereal into flour over 32,000 years ago. That is not a typo. Tens of thousands of years before written language, before…
- BreadBread is one of the oldest human-made foods, and the oldest evidence of it does not come from a kitchen. It comes from a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in the northeastern desert of Jordan. Older still, in Europe and Australia, rocks dating…