Eating from the Tree of Life Dependent on Biodiversity

06 Oct 2016 --- Where a you live has everything to do with what you will eat and therefore the overall quality of diet, according to a new study about the impact of globalization. Grocery stores and produce aisles across the US are loaded with imported produced alongside domestic favorites, but despite the striking variety of food on offer, the diets of people living in temperate areas are considerable less diverse than those living in the tropics who tend to produce and eat from a more genetically diverse set of species.

Even though people in general have much greater access to food, they are still highly influenced by their local biodiversity, says co-author Jeannine Cavender-Bares, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.

"The diversity of the food we eat hasn't changed as much as we expected it would with globalization. We still tend to tend to eat based on the biodiversity around us even though we could eat anything," she says.

A country’s plant production and consumption patterns are still largely determined by the local evolution legacies of plant diversification. Due to a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life naturally occur in the tropics, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries. 

Even though temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the many tropical countries, the plant species cultivated are drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life, according to the research.

Published in a recent edition of the journal PLOS ONE, the study is the result on ongoing collaboration between biologisits and economists from several universities through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland. 

Lead author Erik Nelson, an applied economist at Bowdoin College, calls the results a surprise. He had expected to see increased specialization in the crops countries produce and a shift in consumption patterns toward a more diverse set of plants facilitated by global trade. However, globalization incentivised countries to concentrate production on what they can do best and import or trade for the rest, which typically increases as the nation gets richer. 

"We have not seen a lot of increased specialization in agriculture around the world like we have in other economic sectors areas such as manufacturing, finance and technology," says Nelson. And when it comes to consumption, the richness of items we consume (think multiple apple varieties) has responded to increases in trade and wealth, but not the diversity.

He adds that there may be a few reasons that practice doesn't fit theory when it comes to the spatial patterns of food production, including the cultural importance of local food, government subsidization policies that deincentivize specialization in crop production, and lack of access to capital and transportation for farmers in developing countries. 

However this lack of specialization can hamper global food supply, Nelson adds.

"We need to become more efficient in agriculture to meet demand, but food may be different than other commodities as it turns out, so we should think about the implications and whether it a good or bad thing in terms of food security."