- Buy Haiti’s Francis mangoes!
- The Muge dog was, in fact, a dog.
- Looking at the grapevine in its center of origin.
- Need to fence lavender populations in Tunisia to protect them.
- More Mediterranean stuff. History of the mastic trade in an Aegean island.
- Making “drunken rice” in Korea. Sign me up.
- Nutella to come with warning label? Jeremy says: We don’t need no nanny state!
- Bluish mozzarella balls confiscated. Jeremy says: Ok, maybe we do after all.
- EU makes itself useful and protects bacon pig of choice, with built-in apple sauce to boot.
- “…finding how the physical and chemical composition of different cowpea varieties influence human health, reduce obesity and prevent diseases like cancer, hypertension and heart related ailments.”
Saving crops through mechanization on three continents
While irrigation and market improvements could help, it would be reduction of processing time from hours to minutes made possible by mechanical hullers that might achieve most, “allowing women to take advantage of both their preferences for reduced labour loads and for the taste of millets in their everyday diets.”
I’ve quoted this before. It comes from a study looking at how so-called “minor” millets could be revitalized in India. A similar story of rescue of a traditional crop through the mechanization of processing is unfolding on another continent for quinoa. I was reminded of both by reading about the recent history of maize processing in Mexico on Rachel Laudan’s blog, which we have also blogged about.
…in Mexico, right up until about twenty years ago, large numbers of Mexican women were spending five hours a day grinding. Just imagine Mexico City: every household had somebody grinding tortillas. The landscape of Mexico City up until fifty years ago, and in many ways even later, is one of bakeries that make wheat breads for the upper class or perhaps for breakfast or the evening meal, and then in every household, somewhere in a back room, somebody grinding maize to make tortillas for the main meal of the day.
This has been completely changed, of course, by the wet-grinding mill, the tortilla-making machine, and finally, quite recently, the dehydration and packaging of wet-ground maize. One wonders whether bread would have made more of an inroad into Mexican cuisine, culture or no culture, if it hadn’t been for this revolution in processing. The resulting tortillas don’t taste as nice as home-made, but that’s a price most are willing to pay.
Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.
Is a similar trade-off to be expected for those Indian millets and quinoa? And if so, can anything be done about it? In Mexico, they are already coming up with better tortilla machines “that rotate and flip the tortillas like you do on the comal, so they’re much closer to the taste of the handmade ones.” So says Rachel Laudan, adding: “…I think there will be a movement for good tortillas.” What I want to know is whether these tortilla machines will come to East Africa, so that we can eat maize meal in forms other than the very dull ugali.
Sowing new seeds in the English Midlands
The initiative, Sowing New Seeds, funded by the Big Lottery Local Food Fund, will directly enable many more gardeners in the East and West Midlands to grow non-traditional crops, while also documenting how to grow them based on the experiences of the region’s diverse communities.
Sound like a great idea from Garden Organic, and you can follow the progress of the work on a great new blog. Thanks to Nigel for the headsup.
The history of farming in a few objects
We blogged before about the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. But that was some months ago and there’s a whole bunch more programmes on agriculture-related objects in the can now. Well worth a listen.
Overstating the case against the Pacific development paradigm
I must confess to having some sympathy with Helen Hughes’ scathing critique of development in the South Pacific, but she goes too far, surely. For example, with reference to one of the Millennium Goals, she says that
“The ending of hunger” amounts to a stock diet of sago and stringy sweet potato. Population pressure, plus the erosion of hunting, has led to a decline in nutrition.
However, even in such undeniably poor and troubled places as the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal people eat several root and tuber crops, bananas and a range of indigenous vegetables. There certainly are nutritional problems in the Pacific. Rising rates of diabetes and heart disease are testament to that. But the modernization and homogenization of diets are to blame, not “sago and stringy sweet potato.” If anything, it will be work on those very same sweet potatoes so disparaged by Hughes that will end hunger in many parts of the Pacific.
And to suggest that oil palm cultivation is some sort of panacea is disingenuous at best. Finally, I’m no expert on the cultures of Papua New Guinea, but this parting shot
…why is it that after a decade of implementation of the Millennium Goals, backed by billions of taxpayers’ dollars, women in PNG villages choose to breastfeed piglets because pigs are more valuable than children?
sounds like a straw man to me.