Cheshire is a veritable hotbed of gooseberry growing.
High Plains Drifting
Wheat being nudged and prodded into perenniality, and local perennials the other way ((That’s the Land Institute stuff we’ve blogged about before.)); cows managed like bison, and bison managed like cows (including by media moguls turned restauranteurs); reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand, and Indian retirees going home to the reservation; farmers paid to retire some of their acres so grasslands can make a comeback, and high-tech plants turning corn into diapers. There sure is some funny stuff going on in the Great Plains, that sixth of the continental US between the foothills of the Rockies and the 98th (or possibly the 100th) parallel. Read all about it in National Geographic’s Change of Heartland. The feature is from a couple of years ago, but still well worth checking out, if only for the photos. And thanks to Kem and her friend for pointing it out to me.
Interacting nutrients
We’re always saying how agrobiodiversity includes all kinds of different things — crops, livestock, wild relatives, pollinators, microbes — which interact in often complex ways. Mess with one part, and you often unintentionally affect another.
Well, it looks like those interactions continue once the products of agrobiodiversity are harvested and eaten. A review described in ScienceDaily today says that people should worry less about individual nutrients and
shift the focus toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand nutrition in regard to a healthy human body.
For example, there is little evidence, according to the researchers, of long-term health benefits from taking isolated supplements of beta-carotene and B-vitamins, or from reducing total fats.
In contrast, myriad observations have been made of improved long-term health for foods and food patterns that incorporate these same nutrients naturally occurring in food.
So it’s the foodway as a whole, rather than intake of individual nutrients, that needs to be optimized. Which I guess should give pause to those — like me! — who hope that, for example, things like deep yellow sweet potatoes or bananas will solve the problem of vitamin A deficiency.
Accepting yellow maize in Africa
The cuisines of Italy and southern and eastern Africa don’t have much in common. One thing they do share, though, is the concoction of boiled maize meal which we call polenta, Kenyans call ugali and Zimbabweans sadza. I remember my wife’s excitement — she’s from Kenya — as I first explained to her about polenta when we saw it listed in the menu of a Milanese restaurant in Rome many years back now.
That quickly turned to something close to disappointment — if not disgust — when she saw the stuff, in all its golden goodness. She was expecting it to be white. Yellow maize she associated with hard times, she explained. It came into the country as food aid in bad years when she was a girl, to be eaten by poor people.
I guess I thought this was something that was confined to Kenya, but a paper just out in Food Policy tells a very similar — though perhaps more statistically robust — story from Zimbabwe. ((Tawanda Muzhingi, Augustine S. Langyintuo, Lucie C. Malaba and Marianne Banziger. Consumer acceptability of yellow maize products in Zimbabwe. Food Policy. In Press, available online 31 October 2007.)) The authors surveyed people’s attitudes to yelow maize in 360 households in three rural districts and the two main urban centres.
Yellow maize is rich in provitamin A, and could be a good way of combating vitamin A deficiency in vulnerable groups. But because it is mainly available in imported food aid, and also has a tendency to develop a bad taste if not handled properly, people just don’t like eating it — and don’t grow it. The authors suggest that nutritional education aimed at low-income groups might stimulate local production and consumption. But I think the social stigma associated with it will be difficult to dislodge. At least if my wife’s attitude is anything to go by.
Incidentally, when I talked to Jeremy about this post he said that there is a clear geographic divide in the USA between regions which prefer white and yellow maize, but he couldn’t remember the details. And I wasn’t able to find anything online. Maybe someone out there can help.
Walnuts in Wisconsin
Running a walnut farm is hard work.