Crop Diversity Day 2026 Puts Flavour and Healthier Diets on the Menu

Botanic gardens often introduce people to plant biodiversity. They give visitors a chance to ‘meet’ food plants long before they reach a market stall or supermarket shelf. Their living collections also help conserve fruits, nuts and other plants that cannot easily be kept in conventional seed storage.

The New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Academy takes a hands-on approach – children and adults learn to grow and prepare vegetables, fruits and herbs. The day’s programme included a visit to explore this work.

Connecting botanic gardens with genebanks is at the heart of the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants, which celebrated its first anniversary at the Crop Diversity Day 2026. Hosted at the New York Botanical Garden and supported by the Crop Trust and partners, the Consortium unites botanical gardens, genebanks and the wider conservation community.

The benefits reach well beyond the institutions involved. Mauricio Diazgranados, Chief Science Officer and Dean of Science at the New York Botanical Garden, said the Consortium’s work matters “for producers and others who make their living within food systems, for communities and their food security, and for anyone who eats, which is all of us.”

A highlight of the event was the launch of the latest  World Food Map, which gave guests a new lens through which they can explore the world’s edible plant diversity. More than 25,000 plant species have been used as food worldwide – including foods that are familiar in one place and barely known in another. 

The map combines information on what people eat with where food plants grow and how well they are conserved. Based at Wageningen University & Research, the platform helps identify local foods that could fill gaps in diets. Its Stories of Food bring this knowledge to life.

One story shared at Crop Diversity Day 2026 took guests to three Aymara communities in Peru, where farmers grow many potato varieties together to spread the risk of an unpredictable harvest. Working with them, a team from the International Potato Center CIP identified 83 native varieties, each with its own story and flavors ranging from earthy and nutty to something resembling egg yolk.

“Diversity is farmers’ food insurance,” said Martin van Zonneveld,  Head of Genebank and Biodiversity Science Leader at CIP. That insurance also extends beyond the fields – two of the communities had turned to the genebank to recover native varieties they could no longer find locally.

There is more to discover inside these foods, too. Jenny Gallo-Franco, of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, showed how green vegetables that might seem interchangeable contain different combinations of compounds. Looking alike on the plate does not mean being alike in composition.

Through the Crop Trust’s Power of Diversity Funding Facility, researchers are also using the initiative’s methods to examine opportunity crops in different countries. Measuring them in the same way makes the findings comparable and could help farmers make a stronger case for these foods in local markets.

Guests could taste that diversity over lunch, with dishes including smoked carrot “lox,” crispy za’atar sunchokes and delicata squash with pumpkin seed dukkah. The menu gave the day’s discussions an edible form.

As Arielle Johnson, author of Flavorama, explained, flavor carries information about a plant’s growing conditions, the way it is cooked and the memories we bring to eating it. “Flavor is really the tasteable connection between the diversity of plants and the diversity of human experience,” she said.

Making room for more diversity on our plates starts with protecting the diversity of plants – and supporting the people who conserve, grow and cook them. From genebanks to farmers’ fields, gardens and kitchens, that work keeps a world of flavors within reach.

Crop Diversity Day 2026 took place on 25 September 2026 and was organized by the Crop Trust, New York Botanical Garden, Wageningen University & Research, the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, Food + Planet and the International Plant Treaty. More images from the event can be found on our Flickr.