askchapo

Typing while making dinner. I did not watch them.

They're not wrong. What might take thousands of years to select for better qualities can be done in a generation with modern analysis and precision gene edits. What one might even NEED to tweak isn't clear without significant upfront research. That same effort could be applied anywhere (usually corn, wheat, and rice as they're modern staples) to try to squeeze more out (personally, that's a diminishing returns situation but that's not my life anymore, who knows)

That doesn't include resource leeches like Monsanto's efforts and greater corruption away from the goal of ever better crops.

Last I heard (it's admittedly been about a decade) there was work on a vitamin A fortified rice, Golden Rice, being worked on.

We COULD choose to bring alternative species into the modern era of agriculture. We do not (not mentioning the failures of capitalistic logic behind the current choices) choose to as we've become pretty focused on our current crops. Land dedicated to production already exists. The infrastructure to process the harvest already exists.

Also worth noting. Teosinte was a grass seed prior to domestication and it's classification as Maize. It is a threatened species. Rapid alterations to any existing species to create a more viable food product may devastate existing species in the wild, especially as a common growing range encroaches on wild species. Modified cattails might be a good source of calories to feed the growing world, but the wetlands they inhabit are already facing pressures from human expansion. To be fair: most human populations end up altering wetlands. This is not a new problem.

The very biodiversity and density wetlands are know for tend to make for easy pickings. But, they also support diseases and pests that plague society. As we develop better food sources we depend less on that richness, we only see the landscape as something else to solve.