Brainfood: Micronutrients, Healthy Diet Basket, Meat alternatives, Chickpea polyphenols, African yam bean breeding, CC and nutrition, Biofortification, Mali diet diversity, Myanmar & Malawi agroforestry, African indigenous vegetables, Indian fruits

Nibbles: Genebanks in South Africa, Ethiopia, Cherokee Nation, China, India, The Netherlands…

  1. South Africa ratifies the Plant Treaty. Hope its genebank goes from strength to strength.
  2. Ethiopia ratified a long time ago, and its genebank is going strong.
  3. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Cherokee Nation could ratify the Plant Treaty?
  4. Want to build a community genebank like the Cherokee Nation’s? Here’s a resource.
  5. China hasn’t ratified, but that hasn’t stopped it building genebanks.
  6. And using their contents, presumably.
  7. India has ratified, and is also building genebanks.
  8. The Netherlands ratified long ago, but I’m not sure if it has a water lentil (duckweed) collection, or if it does whether it’s in the Plant Treaty’s Multilateral System. But maybe it will, and it will be, soon. I hope so.
  9. The Dutch also have an animal genebank, BTW.
  10. Watermelons are not in the Plant Treaty’s Multilateral System, but maybe they should be.
  11. Neither is Trigonella, though many other temperate legume forages are, so who knows.

Brainfood: Maroon rice, Dutch aroids, Sicilian saffron, Inca agriculture, Native American agriculture, Mexican peppers, Afro-Mexican agriculture, Sahelian landraces, Small-scale fisheries, Coconut remote sensing

Nibbles: USDA NPGS, Korean seed museum, Endangered plants, National security, Sicilian grapevines, Mike Jackson again

  1. A way to get free seeds from the US government? Yeah probably not. And if so, maybe not for long?
  2. Ok, let’s try the Korean government then.
  3. A way to find endangered plants in the US. And get the government to protect them, of course.
  4. A way to ensure national security? Why, conserving crop diversity of course. Government unavailable for comment.
  5. A way to ensure the future of Sicilian wine? See above.
  6. A genebanker looks back on the 1990s. And, given all of the above, sees that not much has changed?

Rounding up the breadfruit

Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter has a piece on Dumbarton Oaks’ Plant of the Month feature on breadfruit. And much else besides. Do have a look. In contrast to Jeremy, I myself have knowingly eaten breadfruit, in various forms. It makes pretty good chips. I’ve also blogged about it here — a lot.

Breadfruit’s Bounty

Dumbarton Oaks is a beautiful building, museum, library and garden in Washington DC and I have often linked to its Plant of the Month features. This month’s is breadfruit, and well worth exploring. I’ve never knowingly eaten breadfruit, though I have tasted its close relative jackfruit, and yet one thing I know about it is that it was at the heart of the Mutiny on the Bounty. The British government tasked Captain William Bligh with transporting breadfruit seedlings from their home in the Pacific to the Caribbean, where it was hoped the trees would provide cheap food for enslaved people on the sugar plantations. Then it gets complicated.

There’s a lot to savour in the story of breadfruit’s enforced migration from its origins in the Pacific to the plantations of the Caribbean and the lasting impacts there. The article brings all these facets out with (occasionally clunky) links to images, maps and cooking videos.