Luigi Guarino

You may have noticed a neat new feature on the blog. There’s a “Show on map” link after some of the latest postings which whisks you off to a pointer to the geographic location of the story. Jeremy will say a bit more about how he did it and why later on. I bring it up now because it was the reason why I stumbled on an interesting paper.

You remember that video of the long-crowing chicken from a few days back? Well, how do you geo-tag that? Where does the weird creature come from? The caption on MySapceTV says that it is a pure-bred Totenko cockerel. If you google that, one of the things you get pointed to is a DNA study that suggests that this and a couple of other long-crowers were bred on Okinawa from fighting cocks from southern China or Indochina. Want to see exactly where Okinawa is? Click below…

Fresh Nibbles

Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.

Published on August 16, 2026

Author: Luigi Guarino

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