Nibbles: Micronutrients, Population, Opium, Nixtamalization, Chocolate, Seed swap, Dog domestication, Meeting, Biofuel failure, Mesquite

“Organic management practices appear to result in elevated levels of grain micronutrient concentration.” By no means the whole story.
Tom too takes The Economist to task.
Afghanistan’s opium growers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Nixtamalization for the rest of us. More than you could ever want to know. Rye tortillas!
Chocolate began with leftover beer? Seems unlikely.
Take the fight to the monster’s lair. Swap seeds in Brussels. h/t Patrick.
Dogs or dholes? Yeah I didn’t know what they were either.
There was a workshop on “Seed System and Climate Change” in Bhutan a month ago.
Big biofuel project in Tanzania bites the dust. And the land they “leased,” what happened to that?
Ancient grinding holes. Might mesquite be another edible never domesticated?

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.