Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms

Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.

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.