A manifesto for flavor-heads, biodiversity junkies, and edible flower bros.
Bro. Seriously. WHY AREN’T YOU BIO-MAXXING?
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Do your smoothies contain anything other than banana and sad imported strawberries? When was the last time your stir fry featured a vegetable that wasn’t a bell pepper or “baby” spinach? (What is that baby even doing in your wok?)
We live in a golden age of food mediocrity. And it shows. According to the FAO, 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. That’s not a menu — that’s a death drive. Meanwhile, the average grocery store carrot tastes like wet cardboard that’s been emotionally neglected since 1993.
It’s time to BIO-MAXX. That means maximum flavor, maximum nutrients, maximum ecological intelligence. It means stuffing your life (and your face) with as many species, cultivars, landraces, and foraged weirdos as your foodshed can handle.
Eat like a forest, not like a factory.
Here’s how you start:
1. Cook like a chaotic botanist. Start counting. Literally. How many species are in your pantry right now? If your “variety” means 3 kinds of pasta and two types of tomato sauce, you’re doing it wrong. Cook with color and chaos. Use ancestral grains, bitter greens, overlooked tubers, legumes that come in colors you didn’t know nature invented. Make ferments from wild brassicas. Throw in an amaranth leaf just to flex.
2. Source like your supply chain depends on it (because it does). Build relationships with seed savers, rogue farmers, and that one guy at the farmers’ market selling purple peas and celtuce. Choose foods that aren’t monoculture-mafia staples. Push your grocery store to stock varietals you can’t pronounce. Ask restaurants where they get their ingredients — then ask why they’re not serving huitlacoche dumplings or dandelion pesto. Press the issue. Be annoying. Your gut microbiome will thank you.
3. Winter? Pickle it, dry it, cellar it, don’t despair it. Local biodiversity doesn’t die in December. It transforms. Stockpile fermented garlic scapes, freezer-dried alpine strawberries, jars of pickled purslane. “…people’s current desire for food that is ‘never out of season’ creates a fragile agricultural system; it fosters monocultures (…) and takes away the rich abundance of flavours, textures and ways of living that used to accompany the wide variety of local foods.” Translation? Eat your sour plums and chill.
But why tho?
Because your flavor palette is a political act. Because monoculture kills the planet and your vibe. Because eating 20 plant species a week isn’t radical — it’s normal (or was, until global agribusiness erased it). “No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet – something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost.” wrote food scholar Simran Sethi in Bread, Wine, Chocolate. “This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.” You want to be part of that gray goo future? Or you wanna crunch on crimson sunchokes and weep with joy?
Biodiverse diets are tied to better health outcomes too. More species = more nutrients = more ways to NOT get scurvy in your 30s, Chad.
Oh, and let’s not forget flavor. Dan Saladino (a.k.a. the David Attenborough of obscure foods) wrote in Eating to Extinction that:
Over millennia, food, cooking and eating became the most powerful expression of the human imagination. So, when a food becomes endangered, another seed lost, another skill forgotten, it is worth remembering the epic story of how they got here.” Every time you choose a purple daikon over a bland cucumber, you’re saving a narrative from extinction. Bite by bite.
At-home bio-hacks
Color quota challenge – seven colors a day, no excuses.
Ingredient roulette – spin a wheel and land on sorrel, sea buckthorn, or salsify. Cook it. Eat it. Brag.
Micro-microgreens – sprout six species at once. Your windowsill is now a rainforest understory.
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Nasturtium deadlifts your salad aromatics; dianthus adds vanity-mirror vibes.
Supply-chain side quests
Ask your grocer for “the weird stuff.” Purple yam, pigeon pea, African spider plant—whatever isn’t already cash-cropped into oblivion.
Signal-boost polyculture producers—share their CSA boxes like you share cat memes.
So here’s your final wake-up bite:
If your plate looks like a cornfield, you’ve already lost. If it looks like a forest floor, you’re BIO-MAXXING.
Eat aggressively. Eat diversely. Eat like the future of flavor depends on it — because it absolutely does. Now go out there and ask your barista for tulsi and sea buckthorn oat milk. Be the chaos you want to taste in the world.
