Alternative Agriculture: A History

Alternative Agriculture: A History
Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Total Pages : 382
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191586811
ISBN-13 : 0191586811
Rating : 4/5 (811 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Alternative Agriculture: A History by : Joan Thirsk

Download or read book Alternative Agriculture: A History written by Joan Thirsk and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take todays startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in seventeenth-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the fifteenth century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich mens tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s we find Catherine of Aragon introducing the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history. She warns us that todays decisions should not be made in a historical vacuum: we can find solutions to our current problems in the experience of people in the past.


Alternative Agriculture: A History Related Books

Alternative Agriculture: A History
Language: en
Pages: 382
Authors: Joan Thirsk
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1997-10-09 - Publisher: OUP Oxford

GET EBOOK

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the land
Alternative Agriculture in Europe (sixteenth-Twentieth Centuries)
Language: en
Pages: 349
Authors: Gerard Beaur
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-06-15 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

The treatment of long-term agricultural transformation remains a lively topic for historians. Much debate arose when agricultural development patterns were disc
A History of World Agriculture
Language: en
Pages: 529
Authors: Marcel Mazoyer
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-06-01 - Publisher: NYU Press

GET EBOOK

Only once we understand the long history of human efforts to draw sustenance from the land can we grasp the nature of the crisis that faces humankind today, as
Agroecology in Action
Language: en
Pages: 292
Authors: Keith Warner
Categories: Agricultural ecology
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007 - Publisher: MIT Press

GET EBOOK

Detailed case studies of agrecological initiatives show how growers, scientists, agricultural organizations, and public agencies can form partnerships to develo
Farming for Us All
Language: en
Pages: 314
Authors: Michael Mayerfeld Bell
Categories: Technology & Engineering
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-11-01 - Publisher: Penn State Press

GET EBOOK

Farming for Us All gives us the opportunity to explore the possibilities for social, environmental, and economic change that practical, dialogic agriculture pre