Luigi Guarino

November 13, 2007

Paris Hilton and agrobiodiversity

Paris Hilton worried about elephants getting drunk on rice beer. Pocket pig bandwagon awaits her.

November 13, 2007November 13, 2007

Garlic; cooking and diversity

How to cook garlic. Oh, and also how to identify duplicates in garlic germplasm collections by DNA fingerprinting.

November 13, 2007

Timing agricultural transition

When did Bhutan go agricultural? Dr Putterman says 5500 BP.

November 12, 2007

Simposio de Recursos GenÃ©ticos para AmÃ©rica Latina y el Caribe

Greetings from Mexico DF. I’m here for SIRGEALC, which is always a great opportunity to meet up with old friends working on agricultural biodiversity in the Americas, and see what they’ve been up to lately. I’ll try to blog about the highlights as the week goes on.

November 9, 2007October 4, 2012

Maize preferences survey

Glenn Hyman at CIAT is doing a survey of the preference for different maize colours in Latin America. There’s a questionnaire you can take. The results so far are shown on the map to the left: dark brown is a strong preference for yellow maize, dark green for white. Glenn told us about it in a comment on a post of mine a couple of days back, but I figured he’d like some more publicity.

Fresh Nibbles

Ancient farmers didn’t have to wait for the genetic diversity that made domestication possible. They selected from variation already present in wild plants, including the ancestors of rice and maize. Domestication was as much about spotting (or happening upon) useful differences as creating new ones.
English colonists in America called Indigenous dogs “wolves,” revealing as much about colonial perceptions as about the animals themselves. This history of Indigenous dogs shows how unfamiliar animals were classified through peculiarly European ideas about wildness.
Austria is bringing forgotten apple varieties back to life. Saving old varieties in genebanks is one thing: getting people to grow, sell and eat them is another, but it can be done. Or at least tried.
Jordan’s olive-oil heritage centres on traditional varieties such as Nabali and ancient Rumi trees, but most production is consumed locally, leaving exports limited and making provenance, cultivar and harvest date important indicators for buyers. Compare and contrast with Austrian apples.
Small island developing states have distinctive food cultures and ingredients, but face particular challenges in building sustainable and resilient food systems. FAO’s A Taste of SIDS explores the connections between island food, biodiversity and culinary heritage. Nice to see diversity within crops considered, though a few local variety names would have been nice.

Published on October 21, 2026