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Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist, we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no idea!).

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There was a picture going around o reddit of 50 totally different varieties of potatoes grown in Peru. How many varieties do we grow that are significantly distinct? This is probably caused by the optimization of industrial farming selecting for best yield (kg) with very little regard for looks, taste, or even nutricion. It's also harder to stock supermarkets with 50 different types of potatoes, carrots, lettuces, and dozens of other vegetables. Maybe a solution could be that not all supermarkets sell everything, instead of all of them selling exactly the same selection of products. But this would be too inconvenient and would never be tolerated.

Exactly. But with like 40%ish of food completely wasted/thrown away on the consumer side "total Kg" is not the only thing to optimize for any more. It feels like there's an opportunity there to optimize for things like "better taste" and sell them into markets with more disposable income. One of my favorite Youtube channels is "weird fruit explorer" where this guy goes to all these different countries and eats fruit you never see in the U.S.

Thank you! And this is a good idea. My third (and last) installment in the series will be about policy. I'd be interested to see if there are any that encourage that kind of experimentation.

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