Nibbles: Banana history, Chicken history – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

“It seems that bananas, like Jews, are extremely perishable.” This I have to read.
How the chicken conquered the world. This too.

Yeah, yeah, it’s been quiet here for the best part of a month. Work, you know. When you notice lack of action here, though, that doesn’t mean that I’m being completely idle. Not always, anyway. Check on Twitter and Facebook, if you dare, and you’ll see new stuff on a fairly regular basis, because that’s easier to do than a fully-fledged blog post. Anyway, what I’ll do here is a mega-Nibble hoovering up snippets from the past few weeks that I posted on social media but not here.

Vegetable History 101.
If you have a heirloom of one of the above to name, try this neural network approach.
Just as long as the name doesn’t end up being racist.
It’s too late for some German veggies. Though not, it seems, for German forests. What’s the difference?
Not yet too late for Tanzanian wild veggies, but winter is coming. Maybe giving them cool names would help.
And for some North American indigenous crops too, thanks to some committed people.
And for beans in Mexico for that matter.
Why all the above is important.
And urgent.
And this is the resulting problem if you ignore that lesson.
You see, the Australians are on the case, with their bush tucker fixation.
Mind you, it’s not all sweetness and light: the quinoa bubble bursts.
Maybe we can make a game of this diversification lark. Oh, look, it seems we can.
You can even breed for it.
Wherein I pontificate about genebank data. Again.
Maybe these guys will listen?
These guys obviously did, and built a better peanut.
Yeah, but can you see them from space?
The cost of ending hunger. The cost of ensuring crop diversity conservation in genebanks seems, well, peanuts.
The archaeology of gardens. Two of my favourite topics, combined. If only there was beer too. And peanuts.
A banana is a banana is a banana. Not.
All those bananas? You can help to map them.
They’ll put them on Google Earth next, like Kew did for these beautiful natural areas, with all their crop wild relatives :)
A Japanese agricultural encyclopaedia. Illustrated to boot.
Or, for the more Euro-centric, food art at the Met…
This cheese should probably be at the Met there too.
And this weed strain may well soon be on sale in the gift shop.
The sweet potato made it to Oceania on its own.
Oh no it didn’t.
On the other hand, livestock generally need to be accompanied.
All the yeast belong China.

Published on April 18, 2018

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