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Ingrained: A Human Bio-geography of Wheat

This is a book about the multitudinous ways that wheat is entwined in our lives (the title is a play on words). It represents an earnest attempt to treat domesticated plants as our equal partners—“playuhs,” to use the hip-hop term—rather than patronizing them, and to point the way toward a more inclusive theorizing, within human geography, about human–environment relationships. The lead author is an Australian whose early research was on aboriginal fire ecology, employing approaches that were at least partly scientific. Subsequently, Head became a cultural geographer. Thus, her career straddles a disciplinary divide that can be difficult to negotiate. This volume does not ignore the evolutionary and biological aspects of wheat, but the primary focus, and the bulk of the literature review, is in terms of social theory. This reviewer is a biogeographer, and thus a scientist, professionally, but philosophically a Taoist since age thirteen. I have only an incidental familiarity with critical social theory. This review is from an evolutionary and a Taoist perspective; it seems to me that these perspectives have something to offer to scholars such as Head, Atchison, and Gates.