Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag

China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
US doubles down on cover crops…
…and pulses. No word on ginger.
How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
A paean to the mango.
Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
It kind of already is in the Andes.

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.