Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I’m puzzled. Having taken one attendee at the recent biofortification conference to task for utterly ignoring dietary diversity as a source of good nutrition, we were told, privately, that “biodiverse diets are 1st choice, but high nutrient crops can help in the mean time or in addition to a diverse diet”. And yet I have just read another stirring report from that conference that does not mention diversity of diet.
Am I still missing something?
Over at National Public Radio, a story of an inveterate tinkerer who built a better peanut sheller (and much else besides). Not the kind of thing I personally need. I enjoy creating masses of biodegradable debris while I snack. In Africa, however, the hero of the story:
noticed African women shelling thousands of peanuts by hand. It was slow, painful work that made their fingers bleed. Before he left the country, he made a promise that he was going to send them back a peanut sheller. But he ran into a problem. “When I came back to America to buy it, it didn’t exist,” he says.
Bottom line. He made it, it works. And rather than simply give it away, he sells the plans.
That makes farmers investors in a minifactory. They get a set of instructions and concrete molds that allow them to build their own … shellers.
And here it is in action. I like that they don’t bother separating the debris from the nuts, which is easy and satisfying to do by hand.
But that’s not all the peanut news for today. Remember the “cute plastic peanut-shaped toys which open to play a jingle“? 1 Well the toy in question finally made it to its intended owner, our very own friend, the genuine Mr Peanut. 2 And he noticed a very strange thing.
Can you spot it? 3
That’s right! The cute plastic Chinese peanut on the left is absolutely identical to the handcrafted Mexican pewter peanut box on the right, down to the last little cell on the surface. And it seems that the pewter version is actually less crisply detailed then the Chinese. So did the Mexican artisan use the Chinese peanut as the form for a mold? Is there some third megapeanut ancestral to them both? Are there other examples of a more-or-less worthless trinket being copied in a more valuable material, rather than the other way round? And is this enough questions for now?
Nicholas Kristof was at the Biofortification Conference, telling the audience How to Get Micronutrient Malnutrition on the Public Health Agenda. 4 The organizers took the opportunity to capture the great man’s thoughts on video. And guess what? He thinks biofortification is more sustainable than supplements, even though, as he said:
Biofortification is in a sense unproven. We can’t be sure that these experiments in improving underlying foods are going to be scalable, that customers are going to accept them … there are things that can go wrong. But on the other hand, if you rely forever on drops or pills then that’s always going to cost money. It’s not sustainable in the same way. If you can get people to substitute the kind of rice they eat, the kind of bananas the eat, the kind of wheat they eat, then you’ve solved these nutrition problems that have been with us for all of human history. Is it going to work? We can’t be sure, but it’s a pretty good bet and it sure is exciting.
Absolutely spot on Nicholas. And given the two options your interviewer offered, I’d probably have answered in similar vein. But, er, did no one at the conference mention dietary diversity? Not even in the corridors where the video was filmed.
The value of dietary diversity is not unproven. People do eat diverse diets. And the approach is genuinely sustainable, quite apart from other benefits that come with increased agricultural biodiversity. It’s not a bet, it’s a racing certainty. And it is obviously being ignored by an influential sector of the community.
So, I’ve another topic for Mr Kristof and anyone else who cares to weigh in: How to get Dietary Diversity on the Solutions to Micronutrient Malnutrition Agenda.