 Lexicon of food   Frank Lindner   Sander van der Meij   

About
Lexicon of Food was founded in 2009 by Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton to engage the public on solutions to the world’s most pressing sustainability and environmental challenges. By illuminating the meanings behind powerful ideas, they help people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and where their responsibility begins for creating a healthier, more diverse food system.

Total storytelling

To share this story, Lexicon of Food founded the Rediscovered Food Initiative, which celebrates the rediscovery of neglected and underutilized crops from around the world, and shares their power to enhance biodiversity and bring better nutrition to our plates. It’s an inspirational storytelling campaign that shows what biodiversity looks like in global agriculture: from fonio in Ghana to teff in Ethiopia, from millets in India to bambara in Zimbabwe, and from breadfruit in Samoa to chaya in Guatemala, the initiative chronicles how farmers everywhere are reclaiming forgotten crops for enhanced biodiversity, greater nutrition outcomes, increased resilience to climate change, and greater food security.

Supporters include Google, Crop Trust, the Future Food Institute, Crops for the Future, Food Forever, Bioversity International, Culinary Institute of America, GFAR and Slow Food. Together they have selected over 25 super foods to help farmers, food entrepreneurs and the public spread the knowledge through total storytelling, a communications principle that utliizes book, traveling exhibits, the web, television programs, and workshops.

Change is coming
Of 30,000 edible plants, over half the world’s plant-based nutrition comes from just three: corn, rice and wheat. Our ecosystem biodiversity is threatened and people are malnourished. Can this trend toward the intensive production of select crops be reversed? A shift is happening all across the globe. Crops that have been forgotten for the past half-century, are now being rediscovered. Farmers are learning that a lot of these undervalued crops have the potential to combat hunger, address climate change, promote biodiversity, support healthier and safer food systems and enable women to support themselves financially.

Farmers have been giving up traditional crop in favour of more genetically uniform, highly productive varieties for over a thousand years. As a result, over half of all plant-based food on earth is derived from just three types of crop: corn, rice and wheat. The Lexicon of Food has rediscovered over 20 super foods and projects that have the potential to reverse this trend.