With his upcoming book Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future (Little, Brown), biologist Rob Dunn is prepared to fight to squash global hunger.
The book, which the publisher has called "a rigorously researched and highly provocative account about the future of our food" intended to urge people into "eating the way we always used to—locally, in season, and with an eye toward preserving food quality," is slated to be released on March 14, but with a twist. With every pre-order of the book, Little, Brown will include a packet of heritage squash seeds. The intent, Dunn said, is to get children in classrooms across the country involved in learning about science—all while helping scientists like Dunn study the traits of a popular crop with surprisingly mysterious traits.
"We know a bunch of stuff that we think is useful about farming squash, but a lot of the history and basic biology? Nobody has bothered to figure it out," Dunn said. "What this really aims to do is to get kids and families and everybody else out to help us study some of these really basic mysteries about this important crop."
Dunn, a professor at North Carolina State University, has authored a number of previous books on biology, and is widely published in science magazines including National Geographic, Scientific American, and Smithsonian. This effort, bridging the gap between author and researcher, is part of a larger project Dunn is engaged in, which aims to discover some of the pollinators and pathogens that fertilize and infect species of squash, with the intention of preserving these strains for future biodiversity.
“On a personal level, part of what motivated this was my son, who is now seven, planted a bunch of seeds in the backyard without us knowing," Dunn said. While they spent the summer in Copenhagen—where Dunn teaches at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen—the squash, a bottle gourd, grew and grew, until it became so large it "threatened the house."
Dunn knew that in Kenya, bottle gourds are pollinated by a species of moth endemic to the area. But when his son saw a moth by the gourd in their backyard, Dunn realized that while the bottle gourd may be pollinated that way in the U.S. as well, even experts such as himself didn't know. By sending seeds to book buyers, he could turn them into part-time researchers. That would be, Dunn said, a huge boon for the agriculture business, which is in "bad shape."
“There are exciting ways for people to help more than just buying local food,” Dunn said. “If that’s one of the big results of the book, that will be wonderful. And if people are buying the book and if I did an OK job, the reader should be ideally situated to want to take action. This is the perfect group of people to help us. We're [literally] spreading the seeds of change."
