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The birds, the bees and the bananas

Nature Plants volume 4, pages 625–626 (2018)Cite this article

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Sex on the Kitchen Table: The Romance of Plants and Your Food

  • Norman Ellstrand
UNIV. CHICAGO PRESS: 2018. 238 PP. US$20

Norman Ellstrand writes, “It is important to keep the females from the rogues. Consequently, the parts of southern France and Adriatic Italy that were specifically chosen for sugar beet seed production areas are hundreds of kilometers from the major leaf beet, table beet, and sugar beet production areas of Europe. The logic is not unlike that of parents who sometimes send their daughters to isolated girls-only schools that are paired with the appropriate boys-only schools.” These sentences encapsulate the wild associations between crop production and human reproduction in Ellstrand’s recent book, Sex on the Kitchen Table: The Romance of Plants and Your Food.

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References

  1. Ellstand, N. C. Dangerous liaisons? When cultivated plants mate with their wild relatives (John Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, MD, 2003).

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  1. Systematic Botany and Mycology, Faculty of Biology, University of Munich (LMU), Munich, Germany

    Susanne S. Renner

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  1. Susanne S. Renner
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Correspondence to Susanne S. Renner.

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Renner, S.S. The birds, the bees and the bananas. Nature Plants 4, 625–626 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0246-2

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