How a 19th-century slave kickstarted the world's vanilla-farming market

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/02/how-a-19th-century-slave-kickstarted-the-worlds-vanilla-farming-market.html

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Self-pollination isn’t ideal, because you want genetic diversity among your offspring. That is, you want to hedge your bets by having a variety of offspring, increasing the odds that at least one of them will survive. The best way to get genetic diversity among your offspring, is to reproduce sexually with some other individual.

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And nearly last best is the way some rotifers do it, hoovering up genetic material at random from the bottom of ponds and incorporating it. Shathak, aka Mrs. Tasth, was mildly offended and horrified at this, which is pretty impressive when you consider She is a plant geneticist and agronomist by training as well as a Great Old One.

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How enslaved people kickstarted nearly every world market?

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Exactly. Here’s an interesting one about rice in the US:

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Yep, and “enslaved ______” is better than “slave” too.

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I was drinking hot chocolate while reading this. When I got to the part about the person who owned him, I instantly felt sick. I hadn’t even registered properly what the words meant before I started to feel sick.

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Thanks a lot for that link, today I learned.

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Thank you for sharing this article!

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