Welcome to the AboutBiodiversity pages on the foods we eat

What’s the biological diversity that we have all around us, that we use several times a day, that we’d be in serious trouble if we didn’t have — and that we take almost completely for granted?

It’s not the beautifully diverse songs and plumage of the birds who share the planet with us. Nor is it the wonderful arrays of mammals, reptiles, and insects that wiggle, crawl, run, slide, and buzz around us. All those elements of biodiversity enrich our lives more than we can ever know. But there’s another kind of diversity that is even more important, more basic to life.

It’s food.

Without food, the rest of Earth’s diverse life would not be possible. Everything — plants, animals (including humans), and microscopic organisms — would soon starve and become extinct.

All this is pretty obvious when you think about it. But we seem to have the amazing capacity for not thinking about the diversity of food and its importance. We go through life eating what we eat — cheeseburgers for some, bowls of rice or fish for others, vegetables and fruits that look like bananas and potatoes for still others — without thinking all that much about what made those foods possible, and, more important, what makes them keep on being possible: What makes rice keep on growing despite the fact that it’s a favorite food not only for humans but also for insects called leafhoppers? What allows potatoes to grow, year after year, despite the fact that they are a prime target for a disease so awful that it once threw an entire nation into near-starvation?

The answer is diversity — the wonderful quality that life on Earth has to produce organisms, whether they’re human beings or grains of rice, that are different from one another. This section of the AboutBiodiversity Web site is about that diversity of food and agriculture and why it’s so important.

Next: Why agriculture? — About this site — Glossary — Site map
Back to AboutBiodiversity home