Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Practical policy research opportunity

Good news, everyone. There’s money available from a programme called BiodivERsA ((No comments, please, on the beauty, or otherwise, of that particular name.)) You have to come up with a proposal for an international research project to:

  • link scientific advancement to challenges in biodiversity policy and conservation management;
  • generate new knowledge and insights with the eventual goal of use in policy and management;
  • generate added value to national research projects across Europe by linking expertise and efforts across national teams.

Furthermore, it should have to do with biodiversity, and should link scientific advance to policy and practice. And it should include partners from other ERA-net countries. The online pre-proposal form will be available from next Monday, 10 December.

So you could, for example, decide to study the impact of european legislation on levels of agricultural biodiversity and then propose policy solutions that would increase the diversity farmers and others can easily make use of. But they’ll never fund you.

I wonder what they will fund.

Hat tip: Ecology and Policy.

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Literary Corner

Two books, two quotes, re two posts on maize domestication and maize preferences.

I quite imagine that huitlacoche, the corn fungus, may have been the ambrosia of the Aztec gods. I never find it quite enough to eat quesadillas filled with them, so every summer that I am in Mexico I go to the Bola Roja in Puebla to eat a large plateful of the fungus served with strips of creamy white cheese and lots of hot tortillas.

The word is derived from the Nahuatl words huitlatl, meaning “excrement,” or “excrescence,” and cochtli or cochin, of uncertain etymology, although, according to Sahagún, it may be connected in some way to the verb coch, which means “to sleep”.

“The cuisines of Mexico” (Diana Kennedy)

Three truths keep bubbling to the surface in a search for a good piece of corn bread.

Southerners like their corn bread thin — about one inch deep in the pan. they want it made with white cornmeal. White looks pure.

The North likes a thick corn bread — sometimes three to four inches deep in the pan — and made with yellow cornmeal. Yellow looks rich.

Few Europeans care for corn in any form. They consider it a “gross food.”

“The Complete Book of Breads” (Bernard Clayton Jr)

A week ago I asked a random sample (of two), 50% northern and 50% southern, and they were in total agreement with the first two truths. The third “truth” is patently not true, but no matter.

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Cacao and maize tell similar stories

Playing catch-up, I note from Cacaolab an article in the New York Times, saying that archaeologists reckon that people first used the pulp in cacao pods as the basis for a fermented beverage, only later figuring out that the seeds might be good to eat too. Cacaolab says this makes sense. I’ll take their word for it.

I like the idea of one thing leading to another because it gives weight to my favourite theory on the domestication of maize. All the evidence suggests that the original mutation that turned teosinte into maize happened only once. So how come somebody noticed it? Because people were cultivating teosinte. But why? They weren’t using the seeds, as far as we know. Hugh Iltis advanced the idea that people were growing teosinte as a source of sugar, chewing on the stalks rather like sugarcane. And they were also harvesting corn smut, Ustilago maydis, a fungus that grows on the seeds and that is known locally as huitlacoche (which, by the way, is absolutely delicious). So they had every reason to pay attention to teosinte’s miserable ears of grain, and to notice the changes that created maize.

Speaking of which … geneticists have recreated the rare events that gave rise to wheat, giving us synthetic wheat (incredibly useful for breeding) in the process. They know all about the mutations that make maize. But as far as I know they have not yet made synthetic maize. Why not?