Nibbles: Vancouver Island, Organic breeding, Evolution, Roots, Coffee, ABS, Donkey domestication, Domestication, Yam

Nancy Turner, great food anthropologist, deconstructs dinner on air.
Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? Eucarpia conference in Paris in December. Love the ?
Ford Denison on evolution in reverse: crops that become weeds.
Nature on evolution in forward: crop breeders look at roots.
“Shade-coffee farms support native bees that maintain genetic diversity in tropical forests.” Good to know.
Want to know about Access & Benefit Sharing negotiations? We thought so.
Ancient people moved their asses.
Selection during domestication differs from selection during diversification. For the ass too?
Expect to see Dioscorea hispida appear in spam emails very soon.
And today’s answer to malnutrition is a blue-grin alga from Lake Chad. Kidding apart, it’s an interesting story.

Big IUCN report says that biodiversity and agriculture are in conflict, they don’t really need to be, but it’s really complicated for them not to be. So that’s us all told.
If only annual crops were perennial, for example, eh?
If only we incorporated more sustainable agriculture in education, for example, eh? Apart from anything else we could still have beer. No word on the role of perennial barley though.
If only improved seeds were open source, for example, eh?
If only we could cryopreserve coral, for example, eh? Wait, what?