- The International Symposium on Aromatic and Medicinal Plants, 3-6 November 2008 in Noumea, New Caledonia. Anyone interested in live blogging it for us? He asked, to thunderous silence.
- Modern Forager on the traditional diets of some funky places.
- IRRI flickrs rice photos. Another day, another neologism. Via.
- The lengths people will go to exchange agrobiodiversity. Sorry, I have a thing about maps of trade routes. Via.
- Australian woman adopts Italian cucumber.
- Corn domesticated even earlier in Ecuador.
- Sweet potato may have got to the Pacific islands by chance.
- The truth about those hipster farmers; “it must be true, I read it in the paper”.
Thanks for good reading tips, again. Its with your blog as in that Economist advertisement: I used to think. Now, I only read the Economist. Thus: I used to look around. Now, I only read the agricultural biodiversity weblog.
That sweet potato piece in the Times made me think: Is all dispersal of crops in prehistoric times a result chance, or is such language just an expression of historical arrogance? Or, to put it even less clearly, is not expressions like “unconscious domestication†and “non-purposeful voyaging†tautologies in a reality description that operates with a history and a pre-history. After all, was there any other way than by drift that first sweet potato could have made it over?