- Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
- Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
- IV International Symposium on Fig.
- Permaculture: The Podcast.
- The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
- Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
- Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.
Youth being recalcitrant about veggies
The Journal of the American Dietetic Association has a paper 1 which goes all meta on projects which aimed to encourage kids to eat more fruit and vegetables by getting them to work in gardens, for example at school. It covers the period 1990-2007, but only US-based studies, alas. I’m trying to get hold of the paper, but from the abstract it seems that the best that can be said about such interventions is that they may have a nutrition impact. We have blogged about how people are using school gardens etc. to educate yoofs about the importance of agrobiodiversity: it’s kind of sad to see that it is not entirely clear if the message is getting through.
Nibbles: Mendel, Darwin, Cloves
- Mendel was no cheat.
- Correspondence between Darwin and Belfast merchant about potato late blight.
- Zanzibar clove farming stinks.
Dirt goes to Hollywood
The cinephiles among us will know that the Sundance Film Festival is on at the moment. Well, agrobiodiversity-philes everywhere will rejoice that one of the movies being screened is a documentary called Dirt! The Movie. It is, of course, about soil. Is the lady in the photo in that last link Vandana Shiva? She does feature in the cast list, along with other agrobiodiversity luminaries. Anyway, perhaps surprisingly, the flick seems to be eliciting some interest among mainstream Hollywood critics. Has anyone out there seen it? It’s based on the book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan.
LATER: Alas, “Dirt” is not mentioned by The Economist as a possible next eco-blockbuster, but Robert will be pleased at the plug for “The End of the Line.”
Surfing for seaweed
I’ve been sick at home for the past few days with what the wife is pleased to refer to as a man-cold but I think is a middling form of bubonic plague: bad enough to keep me from getting out of bed, not bad enough to prevent me surfing the tubes. Anyway, it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time to follow links to your heart’s content. I won’t go into the details of how I got there, although it was actually rather fun, but anyway, for example, this evening I landed totally serendipitously, after quite a meander from something totally unrelated, on a website of genuine agrobiodiversity interest. It’s about Porphyra. This is a genus of red algae which is very important as food in Japan, where it is know as nori. The Japanese are big eaters of different sorts of seaweed. But Porphyra is the most widely consumed seaweed in the world, and is even farmed. I just had no idea that the stuff you wrap around sushi comes from one (ok, maybe two) particular species, and one so complicated to grow to boot. I wonder if it will all now go for biofuel.