Best-selling author Daniel Stone will be the featured speaker at the Santa Barbara County Horticultural Society‘s general meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 1.
His talk, “Botanical Adventurers: The Men Who Roamed the Planet to Find Our Everyday Food,” will focus on David Fairchild and his team of USDA botanists, who circled the globe more than 100 years ago in search of novel plants — and in turn, how their discoveries transformed the American diet with such then-novelties as avocados, mangos, kale and hops, and ultimately resulted in the abundance and diversity found in America’s supermarkets today.
Stone will draw from his first book, “The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats,” which was a national best-seller, selected as the American Horticultural Society’s book of the year, and is in development for a television series.
His book, “Sinkable,” released in 2022, is about shipwrecks, the deep sea, and the strange underworld of shipwreck obsession.
Stone is a senior editor for National Geographic, a former White House correspondent for Newsweek, has written for Time Magazine, the Washington Post, Vice, and Literary Hub, and has presented at the National Academy of Sciences.
He is a professor of environmental science and policy at Johns Hopkins University.
He lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and two “sons,” one of whom is a dog.
The meeting starts at 7 p.m. at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, at the corner of Foothill and La Cumbre Roads.
The winner of the Horticultural Society’s Bouquet of the Year will also be announced.
This award is the highest honor that the society gives. It is presented to a person or organization who has excelled in the advancement and promotion of horticulture in the Santa Barbara area.
Please join us this month to honor this year’s winner.