- Genetic and root phenotype diversity in Sri Lankan rice landraces may be related to drought resistance. Fancy genotyping and phenotyping picks out landrace whose name in Sinhalese means “drought rice.”
- The relationship between agricultural biodiversity, dietary diversity, household food security, and stunting of children in rural Kenya. Increasing dietary diversity could increase household food security.
- Biodiversity and origin of the microbial populations isolated from Masske, a traditional Iranian dairy product made from fermented Ewe’s milk. Streptococcus thermophilus doesn’t sound like a safe thing to be drinking, but I still want to try it.
- Well, what can I tell ya, that’s all that caught my eye last week. Send me your favourite paper that I missed, and I’ll summarize it in a sentence by next Monday.
“Increasing dietary diversity could increase household food security” but the impact of agricultural biodiversity “was insignificant”. Not good news.
Of course, it depends on how you measure it. Just counting species, what was done by this study, is not very sophisticated. Counting food groups grown by households is better, I think.
With a large group of researchers we are collating a big dataset to show the relation between food groups grown and food groups consumed across the globe. I will not tell you the result yet…