- Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Go flexitarian.
- Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world. Go flexitarian?
- Periodic Table of Food Initiative for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible biodiversity. Unclear if flexitarians have the best molecules.
- Environmentally protective diets may come with trade-offs for micronutrient adequacy. More sustainable may mean less nutritious. Flexitarians unavailable for comment.
- Market engagement, crop diversity, dietary diversity, and food security: evidence from small-scale agricultural households in Uganda. Market access and crop diversification are both good for dietary diversity and food security. The ultimate flexitarianism.
- Sustainability of one-time seed distributions: a long-term follow-up of vegetable seed kits in Tanzania. Now watch flexitarians demand an even playing field.
- Developing holistic assessments of food and agricultural systems: A meta‑framework for metrics users. One framework to rule all of the above.
Giving a fig
Jeremy’s latest newsletter is out, with a medium-deep dive on a deep dive on figs. There’s more on FIGGEN here. And FYI, Genesys shows about 1500 fig accessions in genebanks.
AramcoWorld is a glossy publication from the Saudi oil giant that covers all sorts of topics generally linked to the Muslim world. In the latest issue a deep dive into fig diversity. For the scientifically inclined, FIGGEN is a cooperative effort to collect figs wild and cultivated and decode links between DNA and desirable qualities. The heart of the story, however, is the Tunisian farmers working to keep ahead of the climate emergency by changing the varieties they grow and the ways they grow them.
Read it, and you too will be able to speak knowledgeably about caprification, and if you can find an etymology beyond something like goat figs, do let me know.
Brainfood: Wild melon dispersal, Fertile Crescent domestications, Angiosperm threats, Wild rice alliance, Wild potato leaves, Brassica oleracea pangenome, Wild Vigna nutrients
- Frugivory by carnivores: Black-backed jackals are key dispersers of seeds of the scented !nara melon in the Namib Desert. Jackals pee on wild melon relatives and disperse their seeds, not necessarily in that order.
- Out of the Shadows: Reestablishing the Eastern Fertile Crescent as a Center of Agricultural Origins: Part 1. Go East, young archaeobotanists!
- Extinction risk predictions for the world’s flowering plants to support their conservation. Fancy maths says 45% of angiosperms are potentially threatened. Same for crop wild relatives in the Eastern Fertile Crescent? Black-backed jackals unavailable for comment.
- Global Wild Rice Germplasm Resources Conservation Alliance: WORLD WILD-RICE WIRING. Scientists get together to conserve global wild rice germplasm resources, understand the ecology of wild rice environments, identify and address threats, define effective ways to use wild species in rice improvement, and provide data for decision-making. Not a minute too soon, given the above.
- Morphometric analysis of wild potato leaves. Who needs genotyping anyway.
- Large-scale gene expression alterations introduced by structural variation drive morphotype diversification in Brassica oleracea. Brassica scientists need genotyping, apparently, that’s who.
- Exploring the nutritional potentials of wild Vigna legume species for neo-domestication prospects. Not much potential if they go extinct though. Quick, photograph their leaves!
Brainfood: Archaeology edition
- Early human selection of crops’ wild progenitors explains the acquisitive physiology of modern cultivars. The high leaf nitrogen, photosynthesis, conductance and transpiration of crops was already there in their wild relatives, the first farmers just happened to domesticate greedy plants.
- The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe. When the first farmers arrived in northern Europe armed with their greedy plants, they learned a lot about food from the local hunter-fisher-gatherers, and vice-versa, but without much interbreeding. Jeremy interviews one of the authors on his podcast.
- Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe. There was extensive interbreeding between farmers and the local transitional foragers/herders before with the expansion of pastoralist groups into Europe from the Eurasian steppes around 3300 BC.
- Isotopes prove advanced, integral crop production, and stockbreeding strategies nourished Trypillia mega-populations. The earliest European mega-settlements, in Ukraine and Moldova, from around 4000 BCE, integrated greedy crops and generous domesticated livestock.
- Inference of Admixture Origins in Indigenous African Cattle. Following introduction from the Near East, domesticated cattle got admixed with a North African extinct aurochs before spreading throughout Africa.
- Flax for seed or fibre use? Flax capsules from ancient Egyptian sites (3rd millennium BC to second century AD) compared with modern flax genebank accessions. Fibre first.
- Revealing the secrets of a 2900-year-old clay brick, discovering a time capsule of ancient DNA. DNA from 34 plant groups were detected inside an old brick when it happened to break.
- Making wine in earthenware vessels: a comparative approach to Roman vinification. Comparison with modern counterparts shows that Roman clay jars for storing wine were integral to the process. No word on whether there was any ancient DNA in the clay.
- Breadfruit in the Pacific Islands, its domestication and origins of cultivars grown in East Polynesia and Micronesia. Spoiler alert: they came from Polynesian Outlier Islands.
Nibbles: Cheese microbes, OSSI, Mung bean, Sustainable ag, Agroecology, Collard greens, African orphan crops, Olive diversity, Mezcal threats, German perry, Spanish tomatoes, N fixation
- A sustainable blue cheese industry needs more microbial diversity.
- The Open Source Seed Initiative gets written up in The Guardian. Looks like we need something similar for cheese microbes.
- The Guardian then follows up with mung bean breeding and fart jokes.
- But then goes all serious with talk of trillions of dollars in benefits from sustainable food systems. Diversity not mentioned, alas, though, so one wonders about the point of the previous pieces.
- Fortunately Indigeneous Colombian farmers have the right idea about sustainability.
- Collard greens breeders do too, for that matter.
- More African native crops hype for Dr Wood to object to. Seriously though, some crops do need more research, if only so they can be grown somewhere else.
- There’s plenty of research — and art for that matter — on the olive, but the international genebanks could do with more recognition.
- The mezcal agave, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have much diversity in genebanks, and it is threatened in the wild.
- Perry culture in Germany is also threatened. Pretty sure there are genebanks though.
- This piece about tomato diversity in Spain is worth reading for many reasons (heroic seed saving yada yada), but especially for the deadpan take on the Guardia Civil at the end.
- Maybe we could breed some of those tomatoes to fix their own nitrogen. And get the Guardia Civil to pay for it.