Truffle crops and soil drugs : new fungal practices and epistemologies for the 21st century

Perigord truffles (Tuber melanosporum) have, over the past 200 years, become a cultivated crop grown across the globe. Since the 1890s, soil microbes have been commodified to "fertilize" agricultural crops (and are now referred to as biofertilizers, biostimulants, or simply "soil drugs"). This dissertation examines both truffle crops and soil drugs to investigate how a beneficial relationship between plant roots and fungi has become meaningful in twenty-first century industrial societies. This fungus-root connection, which exists with over eighty percent of plant species, is called the mycorrhizal symbiosis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Oviatt, Peter Gibbs.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Heather Paxson.

• Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124066

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124066