117: Where the wild things grow — foraging in Japan w/ Winifred Bird
Deep Dive from The Japan Times
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Foraged Foods and the Development of Agriculture
Before agriculture, wild food was simply food. There didn't use to be this distinction between wild foods and cultivated foods. People had an incredibly diverse diet ofall these wild plants and animals. Then the climate changed, and rice agriculture came from kurea and china to japan. Those technologies arrived and began to spread throughout the japanese archipelago. As that happened, a couple of different things happened. So where it was possible to grow rice, pretty easily, like in the lands an the valleys, the wild foods took on a kind of a more of a minor role in the diet. And wild foods remained incredibly important in people's diets, especially during famines and
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