- Stilton cheese from Stilton village? Illegal. h/t CAS-IP
- Is Indian agriculture heading for disaster?
- “If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless“. Riiiiiight.
- Banana genome to be discussed.
- Uganda’s National Genebank online.
- GM crops to free third-world women from the drudgery of weeding! h/t reviews The Fruit Hunters (a book).
Seed Savers Exchange under new management
George DeVault has resigned as Executive Director and President of Seed Savers Exchange, the Iowa-based non-profit dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.
Speaking for the Board of Directors, Chair Amy P. Goldman said, “We were saddened to learn of George’s resignation, but we understand his reasons for leaving. George was a boon to Seed Savers Exchange, and we are deeply appreciative. In just a short period of time, George managed to endow Seed Savers Exchange with new energy and vitality; he has set new standards of excellence; and he was respected and admired not only by the members, staff and Board of SSE, but by the wider community as well.”
DeVault and his wife are moving back to their own farm in Pennsylvania, and he will continue to work with Seed Savers Exchange on future projects. He is handing over to Aaron Whaley, son of Kent Whealy and Dianne Ott Whealy, the co-founders of Seed Savers Exchange.
The Board of Directors has appointed Whaley Acting Executive Director and President. Board Chair Goldman said “Aaron is uniquely qualified for this job and the Board has full confidence that he can advance his family’s legacy at Seed Savers Exchange in this new and challenging role.”
Whaley has worked at the organization in a full-time professional capacity since 1996, primarily as head of the commercial seed sales operation. He has degrees in Biology and Public Communications.
Seed Savers Exchange’s full press release can be downloaded as PDF file.
Nibbles: Japan, OECD, Novel, Palaeo diet
- Rocket — and much else — hits Japan.
- OECD says agriculture and biodiversity interdependent! Seven years ago!
- Weird stuff that turns up when you have an alert for “genebank”.
- Nice take on that 100,000 year-old sorghum story. Will it change what the Palaeo diet people recommend?
Eating grass seeds is much older than we thought
An astonishing paper has just been published in Science. Under the title Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age, 1 Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, informs us that:
A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.
From a broad selection of stone tools, Mercader retrieved 2369 starch granules, 2112 (89%) of which were from a Sorghum species. There were granules from other edible species too, including beans, mallows, and even the African false banana Ensete ventricosum and the African wild potato Hypoxis hemerocallidea. He also found some evidence that granules had been altered in ways suggestive of “culinary-induced modifications” but conclusive proof that the people were cooking the foods they gathered will require a different kind of research.
The standard litany for the diet of early people is that
“[s]eed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time”.
Mercader concludes from his data
“that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples but above-ground resources too”.
I’ll wait to see what people better versed in archaeological methods have to say about the paper. For now, I’m too gobsmacked to think of anything except to wonder whether they were cultivating those grasses as well as harvesting them.
Nibbles: Climate Change, Blogs, 1492, Grass, Beers
- Head of Convention on Biological Diversity says nothing to Reuters about climate change and agriculture.
- Link farm lists Top 50 Botany Blogs. We reciprocate.
- “[M]ost of us are the beneficiaries of millennia of acclimatization“. Rachel disses the Columbian Exchange.
- “Men didn’t grind, let alone gentlemen.” Rachel disses Iberian explorers.
- Back40 has a beef with supermarket nonsense. There is grass-fed beef in America.
- The Naked Pint: beers gone wild