- The International Symposium on Aromatic and Medicinal Plants, 3-6 November 2008 in Noumea, New Caledonia. Anyone interested in live blogging it for us? He asked, to thunderous silence.
- Modern Forager on the traditional diets of some funky places.
- IRRI flickrs rice photos. Another day, another neologism. Via.
- The lengths people will go to exchange agrobiodiversity. Sorry, I have a thing about maps of trade routes. Via.
- Australian woman adopts Italian cucumber.
- Corn domesticated even earlier in Ecuador.
- Sweet potato may have got to the Pacific islands by chance.
- The truth about those hipster farmers; “it must be true, I read it in the paper”.
Aztec food market
Hip young food writer explores a Mexico City food market for the BBC. Hilarity ensues. Not had enough?
Follow your tree in Google Earth
I agree with Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog: it is a really good idea. You go to mybabytree.org, pay $5.50, and WWF plants a tree (you have a choice of 3 species) for you in Sebangau National Forest in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and sends you a KML file of its location. How about doing the same for heirloom varieties of fruit trees or something?
Potato museums
So there’s an Idaho Potato Museum. I found out because four local worthies have just been nominated to its Hall of Fame. It seems a fun enough place, but definitely somewhat more parochial than the Potato Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. NPR did a piece on this latter outfit earlier this year, what with it being the International Year etc etc.
Kroo Bay story
Something else about agricultural biodiversity and health today. I’ve been following the diary that Adama Gondor has been keeping for the BBC — she runs a clinic in Kroo Bay, a notorious slum on the outskirts of Freetown, Liberia. The shanties of Kroo Bay are built on a garbage dump on the banks of a river, so Adama is very busy. If you wanted to have a picture in your mind of what extreme poverty and malnutrition and disease mean — but believe me I would understand it if you didn’t want to have such a picture in your mind — you should have a look at the website Save the Children have put together on Kroo Bay: it has some truly heartbreaking pictures and videos.
Anyway, I just wanted to say something about Adama’s post from a week or so back. It’s a sort of microcosmical illustration of various points we’ve been making about how important agrobiodiversity is — or, alas, could be — for development. A severely malnourished baby is brought in, and is eventually referred to a free therapeutic feeding centre in Freetown. She’s been eating nothing but rice porridge. So you start to think about how different things might have been if her mother had had access to leafy greens, or even Golden Rice for that matter. Both of which we’ve blogged about.
And then there’s the fact that the baby has been sick and has been given traditional herbal remedies — that’s all her mother could afford. Adama seems a bit ambivalent about this: she’s ok about externally applied remedies but thinks that internally administered preparations need to be better understood, especially if given to young babies. Again, we blogged a few times about initiatives around the world to study and “certify” traditional herbal medicines.