Nibbles: Meat, GMOs, Fungi, Africa, Aid, Artichon, IYB, Rare onion, Hummus, Fig

Professor said meat should be properly priced to avoid disaster. Why just meat?
“The Seed Makers Who Don’t Pray for Rain.” Slick, but do they actually pray for drought?
Found the above here, but is GMO drought resistance really “very important stuff to making farming sustainable”?
Kenyan farmers grow mushrooms. Fun, guys.
Does Africa need better product branding?
Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development. I confess, I didn’t understand most of it.
Rhizowen invents the artichon. Who says there’s no new food to be discovered?
Kew celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Pollinators get a look-in.
Rome celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Agriculture prominent.
IUCN celebrates Allium pskemense: edible, medicinal, a crop wild relative, and threatened.
World record plate of hummus, 10,452 kg of tasty serotonin.
Local man sends USDA a fig they didn’t have in their genebank.

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.