Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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David Attenborough on Foreign Fare

Anyone got a copy of David Attenborough’s Life Stories, Series 2, Foreign Fare radio programme about the potatoes, Irish and sweet? For personal use only, you understand.

Later: I discovered that it was on the BBC World Service this morning, and is still available, for almost another week. And after just 30 seconds of listening, I feel it my duty to point out that there are not two but three kinds of artichoke, at least in English. Attenborough forgot about Stachys affinis, the Chinese artichoke. Common names, again. But an entertaining enough romp through the Solanaceae.

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Promote better nutrition and self-sufficiency with a few clicks

The Cooperative Society in the UK recently launched a scheme called Join the Revolution. People submit projects and other people vote for them. Winners get money — GBP 5000 — towards their project.

A project I already knew about alerted me and asked me to vote, which I have done even though, to be perfectly honest, the proposal didn’t exactly set the heart aflutter. There’s another project in similar vein that is currently doing better, so I won’t link to that, but it isn’t hard to scan all the submissions and pick the revolution you would most like to foment. In fact, you’re allowed to vote for as many as you want, which seems a little odd. On the other hand, having clicked the few times needed to register on the site, it seems wasteful not to vote often.

There are some videos about projects which, I think, were funded in an earlier round. Here’s one I could relate to.

Are there any other Coop-funded revolutions we should promote? Other competitions?

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Featured: Impact

Robert is unimpressed by at least one of the CGIAR’s 40 talents, “biological control of two devastating insect pests”.

This was about fixing what other researchers had broken when they shipped infected South American cassava to Africa. I understand it was fixed by finding a natural enemy in South America and bringing that to Africa as well.

It was great that the CGIAR did this, and employed an entomologist to do it, but there would have alternative suppliers aplenty. Any decent entomologist could have done that.

So wouldn’t this have happened anyway, perhaps a little bit later? If so the counter-factual is “basically the same result” (no impact). Entirely different thing from investing in a breeding program. Or a genebank.

And he has a nice little coda on using such efforts as a tool for extortion.