Nibbles: Coffee, Barley, Sheep, Diary, Ancient chocolate, South African wine, Pleistocene Gibraltar, Roads

Coffee: The World in Your Cup exhibit. I found it at Grist.
Making beer with less water. At last a worthy use for germplasm collections.
Rare Breeds Survival Trust take over sheep semen archive. Ah, those fun-loving Brits!.
Illinois, 1937: farm diary in twitter form.
Have chocolate, will travel.
February 2, 1659: “…today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.”
Neanderthals hung out with — and hung on thanks to — biodiversity.
Yield is not enough.

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.