I don’t watch a lot of food shows, but one thing that occurs to me when watching them is how wide a list of species some of the meals cover. It tends to be a longer list the more upscale the cooking is.
What’s your guess as to which show covers the most species?
Chopped
Bear Grylls?
I’m old enough to have watched the Japanese Iron Chef replays on Food Network in college in the early 2000s, when it was kind of a thing. Not sure about diversity, but I do like the focus on one ingredient, especially a lot of ingredients I wasn’t familiar with, in that show.
A couple of years ago I read this book by Daniel Stone: “The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats”.
As everyone probably knows, a lot of what we eat today isn’t what it looked like when it was first discovered by people. Plants have been manipulated to get better food for us in a variety of ways. It just depends on what you do to them over time in farms or gardens or greenhouses… or in a lab, I guess.
You can do a general search for “vegetables that came from the same plant”.
Example: Several vegetables, including broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, all originate from the same plant species: Brassica oleracea.
The interactive map on this page is really cool:
https://blog.ciat.cgiar.org/origin-of-crops/
Plants bred for flowers are incredibly different from their ancestors as you can well imagine. A lot of plants we use as ornamental flowers originated in one mountain area of China. Watch the PBS NOVA show “First Flowers” from a few years ago. They actually go to that area of mountains and you can see the flowers that may be in your garden growing wild.
What I find really cool is visiting a tropical rainforest and seeing wild versions of houseplants.
Sorry I can’t address the original question; I don’t watch food shows.
I have seen clips of a show that focuses on people who travels are all wrapped around sampling indigenous/wild foods that are enjoyed ONLY in their natural habitats. The most common one is probably tropical fruits. Many delicious delicacies (to us, anyways) that never make it out of the local zone because they are so limited in affordable transport means.
I have to confess that this one tempts me!
But even here in Ontario, Canada, I have come across wild foods that are native and that only a small minority of people here have ever tasted. Pawpaw is a good example (even though there are revival efforts going on) and another I have only tasted once, and that’s the common Mayapple (aka umbrella plant). Their colonies are everywhere here (unlike the Pawpaw tree) and they only produce a single flower/fruit. Only ONCE have I found a perfectly ripe fruit that I sampled. The biggest problem is that they are very popular with ground dwelling animals and it was just pure luck that they missed this one.
Chopped is the only one I know.