The bananas we eat today aren’t your parents’ bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out.

That’s the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance-once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time.

Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food. But our crops themselves remain susceptible to the nature’s fury. And nature always wins.

Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.

Never Out of Season

A Banana in Every Bowl

An Island Like Ours

The Perfect Pathological Storm

Escape Is Temporary

My Enemy's Enemy Is My Friend

Chocolate Terrorism

The Meltdown of the Chocolate Ecosystem

Prospecting for Seeds

The Siege

The Grass Eaters

Henry Ford's Jungle

Why We Need Wild Nature

The Red Queen and the Long Game

Fowler's Ark

Grains, Guns, and Desertification

Preparing for the Flood

Epilogue: What Do I do?