On Friday January 13th, from 9am to 7.30pm, some of the UK’s leading scientists, writers, chefs, farmers, campaigners and entrepreneurs will be taking part in a continuous feed of discussions, storytelling and information sharing – all about the wonders and importance of food diversity. These discussions will be made available for free via Eventbrite, live-streamed on YouTube and available to view after the event. Explore the resources for each of the sessions here.
I hit “publish” too soon yesterday. If I had waited a couple of hours, I could have done a deeper dive into how Jeremy spent his holidays, by adding his just-dropped podcast on the “Let’s Liberate Diversity” Forum held in Budapest back in October to his last newsletter of 2022.
In the podcast, Jeremy muses on the new EU Organic Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/848), which finally allows the marketing of organic heterogeneous material (OHM), and interviews two beneficiaries of this welcome change in the law. Spoiler alert: Belgian beer is being re-Belgianized, and everybody seems very happy about it.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing the kind of climate matching Jeremy mentions in his third note, you could check out this website, though it only covers Europe. If you want global coverage, you might have to brush up on your R. ((Thanks, Julian.))
In the decades after 1492 “a massive multidirectional transfer of biota, diseases, technology and humans occurred between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas”. But if you look at the standard maps of these movements, collectively known as the Columbian Exchange, you miss almost all the complexity and context of what moved, where, why, and what else was going on.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper: (Re)Mapping the Columbian Exchange. Suggestions for an Updated Cartography. The paper itself is behind a paywall, although one of the authors is a friend of the podcast so I may well invite him on to discuss the story in more detail. Thankfully, the maps themselves are available to download, and even a superficial glance shows that the story is much more interesting than the standard maps imply.
You can’t see the wealth of detail in this map, but you can download the full-sized version.
Each of them overcomes the “overly constrained geographic scope, chronological compression, non-depiction of the contemporaneous movement of important cultural, technological and biological elements of each product, ethnocentrism and the obscuring of human consequences” of the standard map, and I look forward to reading the new plant biographies just as soon as I get hold of the paper.
The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.
Modelling the chronology and dynamics of the spread of Asian rice from ca. 8000 BCE to 1000 CE. Deep breath. Rice domestication originated in eastern China (7430 BCE) and northeastern South Asia (6460 BCE). Then gradually spread in 2 waves: (1) in the 4th-3rd millennia BCE to the rest of China and SE Asia, associated with millet cultivation (Transeurasian speakers?), and (2) in 1st BCE-1st CE to Liao River region, Central Asia, and Africa.
