Slow Food Vancouver and the Ark of Taste

Conserving the many species of plants and animals that we use for food is not just a good idea. It may be the key to preventing hunger.

The Irish potato famine is a devastating example of what can happen when only one variety of a plant is cultivated. Because the widely planted potato variety was susceptible to the blight caused by Phytophthora infestans, crops failed on a large scale and one in eight Irish people died of starvation over a period of three years.

One way to avoid such disasters is to preserve as many varieties of a species as we can, so we will always have a large gene pool to draw on. In conditions where one variety can