Nibbles: Food Deserts, Garlics, Communication, Bee breeding, Millets, Sweet potatoes, Visualizing herbaria, Medieval beer

The Economist discovers food deserts. Money quote: “some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to”.
William Woys Weaver on garlics, and America, and garlic in America.
Agricultural Communication for Development conference. Sure. But 12 days long?
Breeding a better bee. And why not?
Kenya Agricultural research Institute to release three new high-yielding finger millets.
Too many sweet potato seedlings. What’s a poor breeder to do?
A visual history of California botanizing.
Ah, to have lived at a time when a man got most of his calories from beer! No, wait…

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.