Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

Inventorying food plants in France
ever, it proved to suffer from chlorosis, the leaves being unusually yellow; more curiously,
it was morphologically hermaphrodite, whereas the kiwifruit is known as dioecious!
A more general finding is that it is easy to find photographs of the organs that are used,
but quite impossible to find photographs of flowers of tropical fruits or spices, for example.
Nobody seems to worry about the flowers of Annona or the fruit of Syzygium aromaticum.
For Zingiberaceae it is worse. The available photographs of flowers deal
mostly with ornamental cultivars, and some popular books don’t hesitate in reproducing
a photograph of an ornamental Zingiber or Curcuma to illustrate the spices ginger and
turmeric! For Cactaceae, it is the reverse: most books are flower-oriented, and fail to
describe the fruit, because writers are mostly amateurs growing Cactaceae as ornamentals.
Eventually, the interest of my book will lie in the ca. 1,500 original drawings,
and not only in the text, which is a real challenge. As far as possible, a colour map
showing the centre of origin and the paths of diffusion of the plant is added. Fortunately,
the small size of the maps will compensate the heterogeneity of sources. Adding maps
also proved to be a naive idea. After consultation with specialists, I was confirmed in my
feeling that even for important plants, it is not possible to draw a map around the Mediterranean,
or from Europe to Central Asia. In our era of computers and international
programmes, there is a lot of work to do in order to fill those gaps. Finally, a map of
France showing the production areas will be added if relevant. This last task was an
easy one, as we could rely on the courtesy of the Statistical Department of our Ministry
of Agriculture.
Some results
This inventory was initially intended to summarize existing information about market
products. Many books exist, and most of them simply repeat what is already known. I
progressively discovered that it was not so simple to write such a book, and I constantly
need to refrain from trying to solve the contradictions I find by simply gathering information
from scattered sources. Gathering systematically this wealth of information allowed
me to compare the status of a great many species and to reach some general results I
will now present briefly.
Unnoticed changes
We know of many cases in history of one species having been totally replaced by another
one for the same use. This includes Tragopogon porrifolius replaced by Scorzonera
hispanica as salsify, and Brassica nigra replaced by Brassica juncea as a source
of French mustard.
Other changes have passed quite unnoticed, possibly because they occur with minor
species. For example, pignon nuts are said in all books to come from the Mediterranean
species Pinus pinea. It is historically true, but now with the high cost of manpower
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