Nibbles: Seed video, Kew video, Indonesian cassava, Crop maps, Neglected crops, KEPHIS lab, Turkish genebank, Nepal rice, Polynesian sugarcane, Ancient beer, Garlic basics

  1. Nice video celebrating seeds.
  2. Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
  3. Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
  4. Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
  5. Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
  6. New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
  7. Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
  8. Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
  9. Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
  10. Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
  11. Garlic 101.

Brainfood: Food shift, Food footprint, Periodic Table of Food, Nutritious food, Diverse food, Food seed kits, Food meta-metrics

Giving a fig

Jeremy’s latest newsletter is out, with a medium-deep dive on a deep dive on figs. There’s more on FIGGEN here. And FYI, Genesys shows about 1500 fig accessions in genebanks.

AramcoWorld is a glossy publication from the Saudi oil giant that covers all sorts of topics generally linked to the Muslim world. In the latest issue a deep dive into fig diversity. For the scientifically inclined, FIGGEN is a cooperative effort to collect figs wild and cultivated and decode links between DNA and desirable qualities. The heart of the story, however, is the Tunisian farmers working to keep ahead of the climate emergency by changing the varieties they grow and the ways they grow them.

Read it, and you too will be able to speak knowledgeably about caprification, and if you can find an etymology beyond something like goat figs, do let me know.