- One pathetic nibble today, but it is tasty: Fruit-full schools in the UK.
Is diet on the agenda or not?
I’m puzzled. Having taken one attendee at the recent biofortification conference to task for utterly ignoring dietary diversity as a source of good nutrition, we were told, privately, that “biodiverse diets are 1st choice, but high nutrient crops can help in the mean time or in addition to a diverse diet”. And yet I have just read another stirring report from that conference that does not mention diversity of diet.
Am I still missing something?
Nibbles: Sweden, Nagoya, 100 questions,
- Swede objects to relaxed seed laws because it promotes profit, not biodiversty. Huh?
- Scidev.net optimistic about Nagoya.
- Those 100 questions answered in full for global agriculture, from climate change to consumer choice. We’ll be back on this one.
Nibbles: Advice, Advice, Advice, IR8
- Americans advised to eat diversity, by USDA and others. Wot, no fortified staples?
- Webcast on Food Systems and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa. h/t The Agrobiodiversity Grapevine.
- French vegetables disappearing? Je ne le crois pas.
- The Scientist Gardener tackles declining yields of miracle rice, but what has he done to his colour scheme?
Peanut news
Over at National Public Radio, a story of an inveterate tinkerer who built a better peanut sheller (and much else besides). Not the kind of thing I personally need. I enjoy creating masses of biodegradable debris while I snack. In Africa, however, the hero of the story:
noticed African women shelling thousands of peanuts by hand. It was slow, painful work that made their fingers bleed. Before he left the country, he made a promise that he was going to send them back a peanut sheller. But he ran into a problem. “When I came back to America to buy it, it didn’t exist,” he says.
Bottom line. He made it, it works. And rather than simply give it away, he sells the plans.
That makes farmers investors in a minifactory. They get a set of instructions and concrete molds that allow them to build their own … shellers.
And here it is in action. I like that they don’t bother separating the debris from the nuts, which is easy and satisfying to do by hand.
But that’s not all the peanut news for today. Remember the “cute plastic peanut-shaped toys which open to play a jingle“? 1 Well the toy in question finally made it to its intended owner, our very own friend, the genuine Mr Peanut. 2 And he noticed a very strange thing.
Can you spot it? 3
That’s right! The cute plastic Chinese peanut on the left is absolutely identical to the handcrafted Mexican pewter peanut box on the right, down to the last little cell on the surface. And it seems that the pewter version is actually less crisply detailed then the Chinese. So did the Mexican artisan use the Chinese peanut as the form for a mold? Is there some third megapeanut ancestral to them both? Are there other examples of a more-or-less worthless trinket being copied in a more valuable material, rather than the other way round? And is this enough questions for now?