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Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years.

The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature’s. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil’s bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet’s.

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Biological Controls for Preventing Food Deterioration: Strategies for Pre- and Postharvest Management

Various biotic factors cause diseases in crops, which result in food losses. Historically pesticide development has been instructive to us in terms of the benefits derived as well as the hazards that accompany their indiscriminate use. The application of fertilizers and pesticides to crops has become a norm in agricultural production, but this has led to resurgence in pests as they have developed resistance to such chemicals. Biological control of plant pests and pathogens is part of the solution to this problem. This is an area that continues to inspire research and development. It is also the foundation on which sustainable, non-polluting pest control for tomorrow’s farms must be built.

Biological Controls for Preventing FoodDeterioration provides readers with options of non-chemical, eco-friendly, environmentally safe natural alternatives to prevent food from spoilage at pre- and postharvest stages. It covers the principles behind these techniques and their implementation. By integrating theory and practice, this book discusses the potential and associated problems in the development of non-chemical alternatives to protect food and addresses the common hurdles that need to be overcome to enable commercialization and registration of natural products for combating diseases.

Focussing on plant foods, this timely book is unique in scope as it offers an international perspective on food deterioration caused by bacterial, fungal, viral, and mycotoxin contamination. It brings together highly respected scientists from differingyet complementary disciplines in one unified work that is important reading for food safety professionals, researchers and students.

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The People of Mesopotamia PowerPoint on CD

Explore the “People Between the Rivers” in this PowerPoint presentation about Mesopotamia. Students learn about the history of the native people who built a civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ziggurats, Gilgamesh, cuneform, and ancient irrigation techniques are presented along with concerns of preserving Mesopotamian history in present day Iraq. Professionally recorded audio clips of ancient texts introduce your students to voices of the ancient past. High school.

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Biological Resource Management: Connecting Science and Policy

Jointly published with INRA, Paris.

The application of new production methods in the food industry – genetic engineering in plants and animals – as well as recent crises over food-borne diseases have led consumers to a growing concern about science as an appropriate basis for developing sound agricultural policies. This book presents the discussion of scientists and politicians in the framework of an OECD programme conference on how to restore public trust in the application of new scientific achievements concerning food production.

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