Maria del Mar Jimenez-Gasco

The New Oxford Book of Food Plants has been one of my most faithful companions since I was a graduate student. This is a wonderful book packed with beautiful, hand-painted illustrations, with emphasis on botanical features of the world's food plants. But this book also focuses on the history behind the early domestication of most food crops. This book inspired me as a graduate student to think about the emergence of agriculture, the coevolution of cultivated plants and their microbial pathogens, and their impact on plant pathogen population biology, which would later become of my main research interests. Still today I enjoy this book and learn about the origin of many of our food crops.