The Reawakened Foods Initiative is leveraging the power of storytelling to bring awareness to crops that are vital for supporting biodiversity around the world.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there are more than 6,000 plant species that have been cultivated for food, but less than 200 are cultivated on a significant scale. In 2014, just nine crops made up more than 66 percent of agricultural production. Restoring and safeguarding agrobiodiversity is seen as critical for food and nutrient security, climate resilience, the economic sustainability of communities, and for supporting and maintaining the cultural connection between people and food.

The Lexicon, a nonprofit based in Northern California, created the Reawakened Foods Initiative to help drive their work around creating a healthier, safer food system. The Lexicon built Reawakened with guidance from the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture along with dozens of other organizations and government agencies from across the globe.

“We have a global society that has gone from eating food for nutrition – what food is designed to do – to looking at food from an economic standpoint,” Douglas Gayeton, Co-Founder of The Lexicon, tells Food Tank. “This is to the great detriment of people’s health and the cultural ties in communities that are so often based on food.”

Reawakened works to cultivate greater visibility and appreciation for the value that traditional crops bring to communities, the environment, and the global marketplace. The initiative accomplishes this by capturing the narratives of growers who are reintroducing traditional crops, and spotlighting their success so that it can be replicated elsewhere.

Read the full article about storytellers by Amylark Lorwood at Food Tank.