Jeremy Cherfas

June 25, 2009

A menu of political diversity

“Traditional” usually means indigestible or overcooked. “Organic” means it costs more.

I’m not going to fall into the trap of taking satire seriously enough to correct misapprehensions. ¹ But that’s a tiny snippet from a very entertaining piece on The Economist’s Europe View. It explains menu items such as Cutlet Carpathian Style ² and other gems. What I want to know is, could we do the same for traditional, neglected and underutilised species?

June 25, 2009June 25, 2009

Nibbles: Agroforestry, Forecasts, Coffee, Pigs, GIS, Potatoes

North American Agroforestry; new edition of an old book.
“Supply will go up, demand will go up, and real prices of grain and oilseeds also will go up” over next 10 years. That’s nice.
Nescafe coffee goes green in Philippines.
Rare-breed jamon at $490 a leg. Not so marginal any more.
Visualizing Tweeter biodiversity observations. Over to you, Luigi.
Ireland hosts International Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium meeting. Well, obviously.

June 25, 2009

Beer diversity on tap

Dock Street Brewery … announces the release at the West Philadelphia brewery and restaurant of Sudan Grass Sorghum Ale, a draft-only beer “inspired by the traditional fermented sorghum beverages found in Africa”. And that ain’t all.

Tony Knipling of Vecenie Distributing notes that the Millvale distributor has several interesting new brews, including “Pittsburgh’s first Slovenian import,” Lasko Club; Brasserie Pietra brews from Corsica, one brewed with chestnuts and another with with myrtle, strawberry, rockrose and spices; Scottish craft brews (including one made with guarana, kola nuts and poppy seeds) from Brew Dog; and Sah’tea, described as a “modern update of Finnish beer” brewed with black tea, juniper berries and other spices and hot river rocks, from Delaware’s always-edgy Dogfish Head.

Hot river rocks? Luigi will be sampling in due course.

June 24, 2009

Nibbles: Granaries, Scotland, Heirlooms, Argan

World’s oldest granaries. Storage predates cultivation.
Scots go nuts for forested agriculture.
“I pity the poor servers whose duty it will be to describe not only the vegetables’ provenance, but their pedigree as well.”
All about argan.

June 24, 2009June 24, 2009

Diversification of livelihoods

A 10-year study of Tanzanaia’s Kagera region concludes that:

households that have diversified their farming activities, growing food crops for their own consumption, cash crops for sale, and keeping livestock, have found it easiest to escape from poverty
households involved in business and trade have also been successful, though this option has only been open to households in better-connected villages with initial endowments of land and other wealth
good health and extensive trust networks have helped households move out of poverty
illness and agricultural shocks have important negative effects on everyone, except the most well-off

Good news, you might have thought, unless you were loaded for vampire.