Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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How would you promote agricultural biodiversity?

Here’s the scenario: the civic authorities have decided to install a home garden somewhere in the centre of the city. This is in a country with a very conservative attitude to its food culture, where tradition runs deep (although not as deep as to recognize that several staples of the cuisine arrived as interlopers from other lands, roughly 500 years ago.) And because your organization is based in that same city, and has a reputation for knowing about agricultural biodiversity and home gardens, the authorities have asked you to contribute in some way.

You don’t exactly know why the civic authorities are constructing the garden, although you suspect it has something to do with being seen to be green, to care about food and about diversity. And you don’t know what they want, either, or what kind of experience they are planning to offer the visiting public. A gawp at vegetables in the ground rather than in plastic? Surely not. The country hasn’t lost its agrarian roots that completely. Edumacashun? Yeah, but what is the message? You also don’t know what they want. Advice? Expertise? Something to give to visitors?

So you decide to offer them plants that might be found in a home garden far away, specifically, the nutritious African leafy vegetables that you’ve been promoting for better health, incomes and environmental sustainability. But you fear that the civic authorities might not be too keen. You fear they are likely to say something like: “Why should we plant your strange African vegetables in a garden here? What’s the point?”

What one, killer argument would you offer to persuade them?

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Loafing on Lammas Day

Surprise! Today is Lammas Day, traditionally marked (at least in some traditions) with a celebration of the first harvest and the baking of Lammas loaves from the newly-milled flour of the year. I was doing a bit of reading around the subject for another blog post somewhere else, and came across the video above, shot in Tenerife. It’s clearly a fine celebration of agricultural biodiversity, and you don’t need much Spanish to understand that, as one blogger put it, “it looked more like an excuse to have a frolic in the hay to us than the most efficient way for threshing wheat”. 1

These celebrations are, I think, as much about sustaining today’s communities as celebrating yesterday’s, and it is interesting how fascinating people find them. When was the last time you thought about travelling to have a big knees-up and watch a giant combine rumbling across the prairies?

Do they have the same “first loaf” tradition in Tenerife and elsewhere? Nobody seems to care enough to pint it out. And why does a simple search for Lammas turn up such woo-woo goofiness wherever one looks? People just don’t seem able to accept a harvest festival for what it is. A focus for a campaign!

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Nibbles: Huitlacoche, Failure, Food sovereignty, Cold storage, Hunger, Prices