Nibbles: BananaGuard, Wheat has a blast, Grow your own antibiotic, Bhutanese cypress, Natural history collections, Genebanks big & small, Better grasslands, Local foodways

Who needs resistant banana varieties when you have synthetic biology? And more.
More trouble for wheat, and climate change is to blame. Maybe Vavilov can help there too?
DIY penicillin.
Saving the sacred cypress. Try saying that quickly.
What have herbaria ever done for us? Apart from giving us endless joy, you mean?
The Indian and other ‪genebanks‬ securing the future of food. But see also our earlier post on Dr Tyagi’s paper.
Aboriginal community gets a genebank.
We need better grass. No, not that kind of grass. Well, not only that kind of grass.
A pean for African food cultures. And Pacific ones too.

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.