Foreword Before you browse through the pages of this work, we would like to propose that you reflect a moment about your daily diet and try to estimate the number of different plant species used in your meals. If you are like the majority of people living on this planet you probably rely on less than 30 different species, a mere pittance of the total number of edible plants, which even conservatively is estimated to number more than 20,000! What we are accustomed to eating in our daily meals is a small percentage indeed. We, the authors, believe that humanity is seriously undermining its chances for a better, healthier and more nutritious diet by not making better use of the planet’s extraordinarily rich food plant diversity. The growing concern over worldwide food shortages, the claims of a changing climate and the controversy around GMOs only make the topic of new food crop development even more pertinent. Such prac tical reasons are not the only impetus – simply including more variety in our diet is sure to be exciting – we cringe at the thought of eating the same 20 things every day for a lifetime as so many people on this planet do. In this short agricultural tome, we present 10 plants that seem par ticularly promising as “new crops” for cultivation in Northern Europe. Among them some of the world’s most promising and yet neglected crops. We have evaluated them with the goal in mind of creating new livelihoods for creative farmers in an area that extends from the Netherlands eastward to Poland. To call these “New Crops” is quite ambiguous. The term may refer to the fact that these crops are unfamiliar to the general population even if used regularly by certain “minority” groups. Pagina 4
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