Among the gems Jeremy has included in his latest Eat This Newsletter are an essay on the potato in Belarus and a visual guide to the peppers of the world. Very tasty.
Brainfood: Seeds through time
- Natufian sickle blades (ca. 15,000–11,700 cal. BP) reveal cereal cultivation ca. 4.5 millennia before domestication. Archaeological evidence from ancient sickle blades suggests that people were harvesting cereal seeds thousands of years before domesticated forms emerged, blurring the line between foraging and farming, and offering fresh insight into the long co-evolution of humans and crops.
- Teosinte alleles enhance nitrogen assimilation and seed protein in maize. Wild relatives continue to provide valuable genetic resources for the improvement of crop seeds.
- Modeling seed germination data to meet biodiversity conservation needs in the Mediterranean. Robust germination models can improve both restoration planning and ex situ conservation by predicting when and how seeds are most likely to establish.
- To grow or not to grow: questioning seed dormancy and thermal germination responses along elevational gradients in four plant taxa. Seed dormancy does not always follow predictable patterns across environmental gradients.
- Delayed Seed Germination as a Strategy to Cope With Environmental Stress and Disturbance. Seed dormancy follows a (fairly) predictable pattern when you look at stress and disturbance.
- Reconsidering how to dry orthodox seeds for improved ex situ conservation outcomes. Conventional wisdom about drying orthodox seeds before storage may deserve re-evaluation, and refining drying protocols could enhance long-term viability and strengthen the effectiveness of seed banks.
- Short periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species. A broad analysis of mast seeding reveals that many tree species synchronize seed production over relatively short recurring intervals rather than highly irregular cycles.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition to help opportunity crops
The latest episode of Eat This Podcast explores why the tomato, first recorded in England in the 1590s, took more than a century to become an important food. The explanation offered was that it took a combination of factors: a somewhat warmer climate, the movement of people and culinary traditions caused by the Spanish Inquisition, and its connection with another New World crop, the chile pepper. Do listen to the episode, it’s a fascinating story.
What struck me most about it was how little of the tomato’s eventual success depended on technology. Sure, glasshouses and fermenting horse dung helped, but so did luck and recipes.
Today, discussions about agricultural diversification often emphasize research, breeding, seed systems and value chains. The recent paper on the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS), for example, lays out an ambitious roadmap to transform Africa’s Cinderella “opportunity crops” through investment in breeding, seed delivery, agronomy, markets and policy support.
There is much to admire in that vision. Many neglected crops undoubtedly suffer from decades of underinvestment. Better varieties, better seed systems and better market access could surely make a substantial difference.
Yet the tomato’s history offers an interesting counterpoint.
The tomato did not become a success in England back in the early 1700s because somebody developed an improved variety. It did not require a major breeding programme. It was not the product of a coordinated development initiative. Rather, its rise seems to have depended largely on changes in climate, cuisine and culture. People learned how to use it. They incorporated it into recipes. It found a place within evolving food traditions.
In other words, the tomato became important because food systems adapted to it, not because the crop itself was somehow transformed.
This is not an argument against VACS. Rather, it is a reminder that technological interventions are only part of the reason why crops become successful. History suggests something else is needed too.
The tomato spread because it became embedded in dishes that people wanted to eat. The chile pepper may have played a role in that process, helping to create new flavour combinations and culinary traditions in which tomatoes made sense.
For some of Africa’s opportunity crops, the principal constraint may well be genetic improvement. For others, however, the limiting factor may lie elsewhere. Middle-class consumers may not know how to prepare them. Urban markets may not value them. Food processors may not see commercial opportunities in them. In such cases, the most effective intervention may not be a breeding programme but a chef, an entrepreneur, a recipe book or a social media campaign.
The VACS paper rightly argues that there should be “no romance” about opportunity crops. But perhaps there should also be no assumption that technological tweaking is always the decisive factor.
The history of the tomato suggests that crops can sometimes become important without being substantially “improved” at all. What matters is whether societies discover compelling reasons to grow, sell, cook and eat them.
That is a useful reminder that agricultural diversification is ultimately as much a cultural process as a technological one. Though we could probably do without the Spanish Inquisition.
Brainfood: Unusual data edition
- The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations. Hundreds of plant species, many now forgotten, show up in archaeological assemblages stretching back tens of thousands of years. Exploiting an astonishing diversity of plants was a fundamental human adaptation long before agriculture. And the data was kinda always there.
- Evaluating cultivars for pollinator gardens. Some ornamental cultivars attract more pollinators than the wild plants they were bred from. The relationship between genetic modification through breeding and ecological function is not always straightforward. And I now want to see the descriptor “pollinator attractiveness” in evaluation datasets.
- Chemotypic Diversity and Integrated Metabolic Profiling of Myrtle (Myrtus communis L.) from Mediterranean Turkey. Dozens of different chemical compounds vary dramatically among individual myrtle plants that look much the same to the naked eye.
- Essential oil composition and ethnobotanical survey of male and female Juniperus seravschanica Kom. (Cupressaceae) in Iran. Traditional knowledge and chemical profiling show that juniper male shoots, female shoots and cones each produce distinct blends of essential oils, exposing a surprising layer of sex-linked diversity within a single species.
- Earth Metabolome and Digital Botanical Gardens Initiatives: Chemodiversity Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Millions of plant-produced molecules remain undocumented, forming an invisible dimension of biodiversity. We need global digital infrastructures to catalogue this vast reservoir of chemodiversity before it disappears. Of course we do.
- Herbaria Provide a Valuable Resource for Obtaining Informative mRNA. Decades-old herbarium specimens still contain usable messenger RNA, opening the door to studying historical patterns of gene expression from preserved plant collections.
- The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices. Data infrastructures may be open, but control over them often is not. And that probably goes even more for the unusual sorts of data represented by the above papers than for the crop diversity data we normally deal with here.
Himalayan maize: The saga continues
I decided to dig a little deeper into the climatic adaptation of Himalayan maize. You may remember from my last post on this that Genesys has 96 maize accessions from over 2000 masl in the Himalayas, collected at some 50-odd unique localities. When I ran these accessions through the Subsetting Tool in Genesys, I got the following histogram.
What struck me — and surprised me — was the spike of sites way at the left hand of the precipitation plot. So I took a closer look at the results of the subsetting analysis. And the clustering algorithm it uses to look for similar sites did in fact identify two climatically quite different groups of locations: 45 of the unique high altitude maize collecting sites (the blue ones) are indeed drier than the other 7 (in orange).
Much drier. (And also colder actually, but that’s another story.)
They’re the ones mainly collected in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Now, I don’t know whether these areas really get 135 mm of annual precipitation, which seems really low, and in any case the agriculture there is clearly irrigated.
But those maize samples, mainly now conserved at CGN in the Netherlands incidentally, the results of something called the 1976 Netherlands-Pakistan Expedition by the Stichting voor Plantenveredeling, do seem to have some very unique adaptations.