- Oh no! Super-writer Bittman condemns yet more Bolivian farmers to destitution with yummy quinoa recipes.
- Can Geoff Tansey help the poor millet farmers of the Deccan Plateau to avoid that fate?
- Maybe he should enter that millet “initative” for The Equator Prize.
- We’re deafened by the buzz in advance of the World Congress on Agroforestry.
- For example, better nutrition associated with trees in urban environments and rural tree cover.
- Today’s genome of passing interest: Herdwick sheep. They’re primitive, y’know.
- Realfood.org – a name to strike apparently undeserved fear into the hearts of the cynical – offers an encomium to conventional modern plant breeding.
- Which is apparently a lost art, at least as regards potatoes.
- But not taro, if latest news from Pacific is to be believed. Ignore the title, BTW.
- How they made hot chocolate in the olden days, the really olden days.
- Another stunner from the Botanist in the Kitchen: Spices and phylogeny.
Demon pepper unmasked
“A friend” reached out to me with a strange request. “What could Tasmanian mezereon possibly be?” Seems he’d been served it at a fancy place in Germany.
The name tinkled a faint bell, which turned out on closer listening to be Daphne mezereum, a pretty shrub whose twigs are highly toxic, an extract being used to blister the skin (why? — wart removal?) and to treat arthritis (again, why?). That didn’t seem right, and anyway, the plant isn’t from Tasmania.
There have also been racehorses of that name, but when I offered that as a possibility, my friend said only “might have been, judging only by the taste”.
At this point I naturally had the bit between my teeth, so to speak, and set off in hot pursuit. Further searching revealed the item in question on the English language version of the fancy place’s website, to which I refuse to link as it assailed me with cheesy music. Looking at the website, though, all of the English seemed to be just a bit off. And the menu item in question:
Tenderlion [sic] of beef iced with hibiscus
Tasmanian mezereon au jus
A bunch of pumpkin, serrano-thai-asparagus
and risotto
As an aside, why bother even having an English language site if you can’t be arsed to pay for it. Anyway, off to the (presumably original) German version:
Rinderfilet mit Hibiskus glasiert
Tasmanische Bergpfefferjus
Kürbis, Thaispargel-Serrano-Bündchen
und Risotto
Now we’re getting somewhere. A quick search for Tasmanian mountain pepper, and Bingo!. Tasmannia lanceolata.
As my friend noted, “that is super interesting”.
I wonder what the Germans would have made of Cornish pepperleaf?
Nibbles: Information, Domestication, Cats, Conference, Gunpowder gardening, Policy advice, Potatoes, Ancient vineyards, New UG99, Bovine emissions, Cacao ants, Palaeo-diet, Bloody quinoa, Tokyo’s honey, Urban biodiversity, Ilex, Conifers
- Wow! Just wow. Big Picture Agriculture has launched an incredibly useful website.
- Chromosomes, crops and superdomestication, a slideshare presentation by Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Cats, domesticated? Not as far as I’m concerned. Still, Ancient Chinese cats ate rats, leading to their domestication.
- Independent plant breeders, a conference just for you.
- Great ammunition for the lazy gardener.
- IBPES told to “tap the wisdom of indigenous peoples”.
- Kenyan policymakers told to consider the potato.
- Basque vineyards of a millennium ago.
- A new strain of UG99 wheat rust? But this time, the world is ready.
- Variable diets linked to variable emissions shock.
- scidev.net reports that ants protect cacao trees from fungal diseases. (Yes, I’m taking short cuts here.)
- Palaeolithic people preferred nutrition-rich places.
- And quinoa remains as confusing as ever.
- Tokyo’s local honey.
- Although agriculture barely features in a paean to urban biodiversity. It should.
- The holly and the coffee: The Botanist in the Kitchen does Yerba Maté
- Ready for the inevitable ennui of next Christmas, a taxonomy of conifers.
Online apple breeding
Luigi noticed an interesting proposal to set up an online apple-breeding programme. Sean Myles, Canada Research Chair in Agricultural Genetic Diversity at Dalhousie University, Halifax, says that government and industry are getting out of apple breeding because traditional methods are “too expensive and risky”. So he wants to pull together an alternative. The idea isn’t fully fleshed out yet, and that’s the point, because this is just one idea that will be pitched during a “48 hour idea lab” to refresh the food scene in the Annapolis valley in Nova Scotia, Canada.
It takes place in 10 days time — 17-19 January — and sounds very cool indeed. Given the preponderance of new media types who will be attending, I’m sure there will be no shortage of online reporting. But if anyone there wants to do us a write up, that would be welcome.
As welcome as a decent downloadable apple.
Nibbles: Cranberry, Apple, Quail
Obviously it is going to take a while to get back up to cruisin’ speed, so we’ll start slow before we accelerate back to the future and attempt to catch up.
- Ready to amuse at the next Thanksgiving, a history of the cranberry.
- Ready for the next apple you eat (or, in my case, run from), a history of Granny Smith.
- Ready for bankruptcy? A recent history of quail farming in Kenya.