Food the world grows and eats

Startling details aside, there is a larger theme running through the show, about how cultures transform nature, and how those transformations may have gone awry. At the beginning, we learn that almost no naturally grown food has been free from human domestication. Wild berries are typically much smaller than those we regularly eat because, generally, larger ones have been selected for cultivation.

This practice of selective genetic modification is ancient. Over the centuries a single species of wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, has been selectively bred to create brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and kohlrabi. Potatoes were poisonous before peoples in the Andes transformed them into edible crops 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In contemporary times, similar procedures have led to chickens that produce more eggs, tomatoes with hard skins for easier trucking, and the ever-shrinking Atlantic cod, the largest representatives of which were fished out of the gene pool, leaving smaller cod to reproduce. In the late 19th century, cod were typically over 1.8 meters long; in the 1980s, 45 centimeters.

Great opportunities are promised from farming technologies: half of all fish and shellfish now eaten are products of "aquaculture." But we also learn of the dangers of restricting diversity, leaving crops more vulnerable. (A single fungus attacked a single breed of potato, creating the devastating 19th-century famine in Ireland.)

An enormous transparent container, filled with what appears to be refuse, suggests the amount of food thrown out by a typical American family of four every year: 750 kilograms. An adjacent display compares the waste of higher-income and lower-income countries, pointing out intriguing differences. But in general, we learn, the wealthy waste out of spoiled carelessness (like discarding imperfect crops or being rigid about expiration dates), the poor out of needy inadequacy (a lack of refrigeration or decent roads). This example seems selected primarily to reinforce a simple admonition while other aspects are left unexplored.

Some weighty conclusions are offered without sufficient evidence. In a brief video, "Future of Food," scientists suggest that contemporary agriculture contributes to global warming. The curator, Eleanor J. Sterling, the director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the museum, says (as does the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) that 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas comes from the raising of livestock for consumption. Two advisers to the World Bank have gone further, arguing for a figure of 51 percent, which would mean that the Kyoto Protocol might have been more profitably concerned with vegetarianism than with fossil fuels.

But this exhibition, on view through August 11, 2013, is too diverse and rich to settle for a simple message.

The New York Times