Spices and Spuds: How Plants Made Our World

Gr 3-7–“This relationship between people and plants, and how we changed each other, is the story I’m telling in this book,” Warner states. He begins by making a personal connection to the topic by describing his early experiences with gardening. The book is organized so that readers may hurtle straight through from cover to cover, skip to a preferred chapter, or follow the footnotes to see how a particular thread of the narrative connects to other sections. There is also a warning that serious subjects are included, such as how enslavement and wars influenced the use and supply of various commodities. Wheat, the beginnings of agriculture, genetically modified crops, cotton, and sugar are just a few of the stories included. Humor appears throughout, like Phoenicians offering Egyptians a bulk discount on timber, or a woman admiring a wheel and saying, “Nice. The 3125 BCE model.” Illustrations support the text with maps, characters in period costumes, and the technology of various eras. Students may be very interested in the description of the origin of blue jeans, or how corn is turned into the syrup that appears in soft drinks. More serious class discussions could address the perils of monocultures and how they led to the Irish Potato Famine, or farmers dependent on commercially purchased corn seed because the plants will not reproduce naturally.