Nibbles: ICRISAT award, CGIAR funding, Chinese medicine, Gut bacteria, Bee research, Sri Lankan law, Wolf Prize, Field Guides, Tapa exhibition, GFFA2014

Today in dodgy journalism, part 1: ICRISAT gets a new mandate crop? What was the picture editor thinking. And smoking.
Today in dodgy journalism, part 2: Two typos in the obsolete name of the CGIAR.
Dissecting Chinese traditional medicine. Or would that be puncturing?
Hunter gatherers have special gut bacteria.
Bees: “That’s the beauty of the research. Because we’re still short on info, everything’s worth knowing about.”
Maple syrup tasting. Nice gig if you can get it.
Activist objects to proposed new seed law in Sri Lanka.
UC Davis wheat geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky wins 2014 Wolf Prize in Agriculture. Congrats.
Sandy Knapp on what she does all day.
The future of field guides. Yes, they have one.
Tapa cloth, in Cologne of all places. Don’t think there were any from Palau, though.
Abschlusskommuniqué of the Global Forum on Food and Agriculture 2014 supports conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity. Phew.

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.