Nibbles: Taste edition

The Stairway to Heaven of barley breeding for whiskey involves thinking about taste a bit more.
Taste comes into maize breeding too.
Jeremy talks taste with Margot Finn. Oh and there’s his latest newsletter.
Farmerama podcasts on cereals in small-scale farming in the UK and beyond.
Nothing small-scale about ancient farming in the Nile Valley.
Make ancient Roman bread during lockdown. Then compare and contrast with the Egyptian kind?
What did the Romans ever do for the rural economy of Britain anyway?
Course on communicating the value of biodiversity. Wasn’t all the above enough?

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.