Brainfood: Insurance value, Forages/invasives, Chenopod crops, Non-descript goats, Holy grapes, Black maize, Wild rice diversity, Cassava seedlings, Knotweed domestication syndrome, Wild potato use, Farmers/researchers, Winged yam diversity, Genes to ecosystems, Wild carrots

4 Replies to “Brainfood: Insurance value, Forages/invasives, Chenopod crops, Non-descript goats, Holy grapes, Black maize, Wild rice diversity, Cassava seedlings, Knotweed domestication syndrome, Wild potato use, Farmers/researchers, Winged yam diversity, Genes to ecosystems, Wild carrots”

  1. Luigi asked:
    But do we really want to promote a landrace as a functional food?

    Why wouldn’t we? Would its landrace status be lost if it were a functional food? My suspicion is there would be breeding to select the nutritionally positive attributes into a higher yielding maize background with subsequent commercialization. The original landrace could remain – and in situ conservation might even be bolstered if the nutraceutical value caught on (ala quinoa) among foodies. So I’m not sure where the difficulty lies.

  2. I hadn’t considered it a new strategy for widespread landrace conservation – more of a one off (or perhaps a model for the chance application in some cases). A case by case sort of thing.

    What might be interesting to follow, if indeed some commercial scale production of the landrace itself were realized, would be to track the genetics of the landrace over many generations of wider scale production to see how gene flow is affected.

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