- Grains of Wisdom: Insights into the Minds of Top Chefs—A Synthesis of Expert Interviews and Literature. A good chef can make even quinoa palatable.
- Citizen science informs demand-driven breeding of opportunity crops. I wonder if tricot can make quinoa palatable. Never mind, it’s good for a lot of other things.
- Recurrent evolution of cryptic triploids in cultivated enset increases yield. Unclear if triploid enset is any more palatable than the diploid. Interesting that traditional knowledge picks up ploidy.
- Is there unrecognized potential in neglected livestock species in Sub-Saharan Africa? A systematic review of four selected species. The benefits include sustainability, nutrition and income, but not higher palatability apparently.
- Enhancing Nutrition and Cost Efficiency in Kenyan School Meals Using Neglected and Underutilized Species and Linear Programming: A Case Study from an Informal Settlement. Better palatability was not included in the linear programming, alongside such staples (geddit?) as cost and nutritional value. But it could be, right?
- Cocoyam (Xanthosoma sagittifolium (L.) Schott) genetic resources and breeding: a review of 50 years of research efforts. Unclear if enhanced palatability is a breeding aim. But it should be.
- Strengthening the millet economy: lessons from a South Indian case study. Palatability is not an issue. Drudgery is.
- The traditional knowledge about the biodiversity of edible Brazilian fruits and their pollinators: an integrative review. Presumably includes data on palatability? And ploidy :)
- Wild edible fruit utilization patterns in Garhwal himalaya (Uttarakhand, India): a multi-decadal perspective. Reasons for decline in consumption include limited traditional knowledge transfer, time constraints, migration, generation gap, and hygiene concerns. But not, apparently, palatability.
Finding one’s way through the forest of forest resources databases
As well as the 3rd State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the 2nd State of the World’s Forest Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was also launched at FAO Commission meeting the week before last. Some headline numbers? There are about 58,000 tree species worldwide, about 30% of whch are threatened and 1,400 and 1,100 species are included in in situ and ex situ conservation programs, respectively.
At least some of the data behind the forest report is to be found in FAO’s new global information system, SilvaGRIS, launched at the same time. SilvaGRIS joins a fairly crowded field — or perhaps I should forest — which includes various products from the World Agroforestry Centre, the restoration-focused Tree Diversity database, and Europe’s own portal EUFGIS. No doubt each does something different, but a guide through the thicket of resources might be useful.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity, HealthyDiets4Africa, Warwick genebank, NPGS trifecta, Florida potatoes, On farm, Guatemalan community seed banks, Welsh black oats, WorldVeg genebank, Turkish olive genebank, Citrus genebank, Orchard of Flavours, Piper diversity, Ancient Egyptian food, Chocolate & world history, Ancient DNA & breeding
- What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
- Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
- Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
- What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
- Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
- Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
- Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
- Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
- Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
- And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
- And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
- Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
- You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
- I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
- Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
- No, not using ancient DNA, but actually…
Third global assessment of PGRFA sees the light of day at last
I spent all last week at the 20th Session of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources in Rome: “[t]he Commission is the only permanent intergovernmental body that specifically addresses all components of biological diversity for food and agriculture.” As ever, there’s a great summary of the session at Earth Negotiations Bulletin. Maybe the most significant milestone was the launch of the Third Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, 15 years after the second report. FAO has a nice summary of the key findings. You know how we have been saying that there are 1750 genebanks in the world? Well, we can’t say that any more: due to a tighter definition, there are now 867 genebanks.
If you want some more fun numbers, elsewhere I have blogged about how the work of my own organization, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is featured in the report.
Brainfood: Ancient maize trifecta, Chinese Neolithic, Ancient silk, Sheep domestication, Ancient focaccia, Indus diversity
- The genomic origin of early maize in eastern North America. There were at least 2 eastern dispersals of ancient maize from the US Southwest.
- Archaeological findings show the extent of primitive characteristics of maize in South America. At about the same time, semi-domesticated maize also reached deep into South America.
- Maize monoculture supported pre-Columbian urbanism in southwestern Amazonia. Including the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia, where it supported cities.
- Millets, dogs, pigs and permanent settlement: productivity transitions in Neolithic northern China. In China, it was millet that supported cities. Well, and pigs.
- Species identification of silks by protein mass spectrometry reveals evidence of wild silk use in antiquity. People in those cities had to wear fancy silken clothes, right?
- Ancient genomics and the origin, dispersal, and development of domestic sheep. Sheep domestication started in Anatolia, but that wasn’t the end of it, because there was an influx of diversity from the steppes in the Bronze Age. Nice parallel with human diversity. Different to the Chinese millet-pig story though.
- Unveiling the culinary tradition of ‘focaccia’ in Late Neolithic Mesopotamia by way of the integration of use-wear, phytolith & organic-residue analyses. You can trace focaccia way back. Goes quite nicely with roast sheep, I suspect.
- Different strategies in Indus agriculture: the goals and outcomes of farming choices. Even ancient cultures sometimes felt the need to diversify.