- Boffins find lots of cryptic genetic diversity in earthworms.
- China produces half the world’s vegetables?
- Know your bison.
- Flouting Zimbabwe’s laws on urban agriculture to stay alive.
- Cork certification.
Slow Food on the move
The Slow Food movement is evolving, its founder says: “People who sniff a cheese and talk about how it has the most wonderful aroma of horse sweat. Think how incredibly boring we would be if we were still just a gastronomic society.”
New journal on Food Security
The new journal “Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food” has two aims: (1) to define the constraints that prevent around one billion of the world’s population from accessing an appropriate diet i.e. one that is sufficiently nutritious to allow full development of physical and mental potential and (2) to address the means by which these constraints may be overcome. Food Security will cover the following topics: global food needs, the mismatch between population and the ability to provide adequate nutrition, global food potential, natural constraints to satisfying global food needs, nutrition, food quality and food safety as well as socio-political factors that impinge on the ability to satisfy global food needs. The journal will contain a mixture of original refereed papers, review articles, case studies, commentaries and letters to the editor. The editor-in-chief is Dr. Richard Strange of Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
Overexploiting crop wild relatives?
One of the seven plants studied in a recent IUCN report on overexploitation of wild medicinal plants in India is in a genus (Dioscorea) with a number of cultivated species. How many wild medicinal plants worldwide could also be classed as crop wild relatives?
Interacting vitamins
How can we ever expect to be healthy when we’re shunning the foods our bodies are built for?
Modern Forager gets on a soapbox.