Climate Change Could End Hummus

14 Feb 2018
News

Hummus is in danger.

For reasons of genetics, chickpeas are unable to cope with the change of a warming world. The chickpea – the world’s second-largest legume crop – has been bred to the point that it too is experiencing “an extreme domestication-related genetic bottleneck,” wrote Eric Bishop von Wettberg, a plant biologist at the University of Vermont, and others in Nature.

One challenge in preserving hummus is that the wild breeds of chickpea that could save the condiment can only survive in parts of Turkey and possibly in Syria.

Read more in Haaretz.