The unhappy fate of the Large White pig is a case in point.Picture the quintessential farmed swine -- pink, long-bodied, almost cartoonlike -- and you will probably be imagining a Large White.Originating in England in the 19th century, the Large White quickly put on weight (ie, meat) and could be kept inside or out.From England, it was exported to Europe, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Russia, America and China.Today, it fills the world’s biggest industrial pig farms.But in the past few years African swine fever has swept through such farms, from China to South-East Asia, Mongolia and India.By summer 2020 it had reached Europe -- and may have killed nearly half of China’s pigs and a quarter of the world’s.Homogeneity made the planet’s piggy population a pathogen’s playground.Such stories remind readers of the stakes, but the real delicacies in Mr Saladino’s book are its tales of people who have tried to resist the shrinkage of diets, sometimes heroically.Nikolai Vavilov, for example, founded the world’s first seed bank, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg).He and his disciples gathered more than 150,000 seed samples before he was sent to a prison camp under Stalin.
大白猪不幸的命运就是一个很好的例子。想象一下典型的农场养殖猪――粉红色，长身体，几乎像卡通动物一样――而你可能会想象出一只大白猪。大白猪起源于19世纪的英国，它的体重（也就是肉）增加很快，而且在室内或室外饲养都行。它从英国被出口到欧洲、澳大利亚、阿根廷、加拿大、俄罗斯、美国和中国。如今，大白猪填满了世界上各大工业养猪场。但在过去几年里，非洲猪瘟席卷了这些农场，从中国到东南亚、蒙古国和印度。到2020年夏天，猪瘟到达了欧洲――这时它可能已经杀死了中国近一半的猪和全世界大约四分之一的猪。同质性使地球上的猪群成为了病原体的游乐场。这样的故事提醒读者注意其中的风险，但萨拉迪诺先生书中的真正精彩之处在于它讲述了人们试图对抗饮食缩减的故事，有时甚至是充满英雄主义的。例如，尼古拉・瓦维洛夫在列宁格勒（现在的圣彼得堡）建立了世界上第一个种子银行。在他被送到斯大林统治下的集中营之前，他和他的门徒收集了超过15万份种子样本。
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