Our July book club discussion was Dunmire’s Gardens of New Spain. Out of print for a while, it is once again available from UT Press as a print on demand. Dunmire’s classic work describes how food plants traveled from Central America north and south and ulitmately, with Spanish contact, west to Europe.

For August AND September we will be discussing Spengler’s Fruit from the Sands: the Silk Road origins of the foods we eat. In the first half of the book, he describes the travel and trade throughout Eurasia over several millenia (all heavily referenced – that must be the academic in him) and then ventures on to assorted plants and how they traveled along the routes. Although as a paleoethnobotanist, aka archaeobotanist, Spengler’s style is more academic than, say, that of the author of the Food Explorer, the topic is quite interesting.

The plants in the first half of the book are the grains. Personally, I’m looking forward to the fruits and nuts but I think he’s operating on the principle of – you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner. Just a thought.