- Latest on the banana going extinct.
- Latest on the UC Davis strawberry breeding saga.
- Latest on how to explain what’s happened to maize yields in the Midwest.
Preserving vegetables
Regular readers will know that while we’re big fans here of African traditional vegetables, we are also skeptical about the usefulness of formal “protection” for foods. So I for one am a tiny bit conflicted about some recent news from Kenya:
The Intergovernmental Committee for Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, upon the proposal, has selected Kenya’s success story of promoting traditional foods and safeguarding traditional foodways in Kenya as a programme, project, or activity best reflecting the principles and objectives of the Convention.
But only a tiny bit. Congratulations to everyone involved.
A juicy tomato story
Jeremy’s latest newsletter has a useful snippet on a paper on the history of the tomato in Europe. I’ll reproduce it below as a taster, but consider subscribing, as there’s lots of other interesting stuff too, on everything from pizza to chocolate.
Maybe you saw those beautiful illustrations of 16th century tomatoes that were doing the rounds a few days ago. They were prompted by a lovely paper from the Netherlands looking at the earliest tomatoes in Europe. The paper may be a bit heavy going, but the researchers published their own summary for the rest of us.
The paper sheds light on those first tomatoes to arrive, and in particular on the notion that these first fruits “were elongated, segmented, and gold in color. After all, that is how they were depicted, and they were called ‘pomo d’oro’: golden apple.” Herbarium specimens and old drawings, many of them newly digitised, revealed many different colours, shapes, and sizes, but not whether tomatoes originated in Peru or Mexico, the two leading candidates. The Dutch researchers sequenced the highly degraded DNA of their specimen and say that it was definitely not a wild plant, and shows strong similarities with three Mexican varieties and two from Peru.
The indigenous Andes population in Peru started domesticating a small wild cherry tomato. They brought this to Mexico, and there they developed the tomato with large fruit that we know today.
No herbarium specimen is ever likely to germinate, so to find out how these first tomatoes in Europe might have tasted the best bet, they suggest, is to go to Mexico and Peru. DNA analysis could probably indicate the closest known relatives for a taste test.
Now, will someone please examine critically the whole “tomatoes didn’t catch on because they were considered poisonous” thing, or is there already enough proof of that?
Brainfood: Genebanks, Covid, Sustainable intensification, Anthropocene, Biodiversity value, Cropland expansion, Better diet, Biodiversity indicators, Climate change impact, Soil fertility, Agroecology & GMOs
- Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Resilience, but at a cost.
- Avenues for improving farming sustainability assessment with upgraded tools, sustainability framing and indicators. A review. How to measure an important aspect of the above-mentioned resilience.
- Envisaging an Effective Global Long-Term Agrobiodiversity Conservation System That Promotes and Facilitates Use. To effectively guarantee the resilience of farmers and the food system, genebank accessions for likely future use need to be distinguished dynamically from those for immediate use on the basis of the best available data, and then managed differently.
- Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene. Naturalization of phylogenetically diverse exotic plants from Australia, the Pacific and Europe is leading to a more homogeneous world flora. Much the same could be said of diets, come to think of it, except maybe for the geographic source of the plants, which is interesting in itself.
- Identifying science-policy consensus regions of high biodiversity value and institutional recognition. And less than a third of the bits of the Earth that everyone thinks are important in terms of biodiversity are protected, including from the above exotics.
- Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. There was a 9% increase in cropland area in 2003-2019, mainly in Africa and South America, half of it replacing natural vegetation.
- Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Needed because of the above exotic invasives and cropland expansion, among other things.
- Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Those new cropland areas will soon be in trouble. Unless genebanks and plant breeding, I guess.
- Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty. Could that cropland grow gene-edited crops in an agroecological setting? Yes, but that will require recognizing that agroecology is not a setting.
- Plant biodiversity and the regeneration of soil fertility. Restoring biodiversity restores soil fertility too.
- Small targeted dietary changes can yield substantial gains for human health and the environment. Replace just 10% of meat calories with fruit and veggies for the win-win. Is this the answer to all of the above? Well, maybe, maybe not.
Nibbles: Aurochs, Horse domestication, Tanzanian seeds, Legume portal, MGIS, ISF, Mexico & Philippines
- A wild relative making a comeback in Europe.
- Can wild horses be far behind?
- An effort to bring back traditional foods in Tanzania.
- A new data portal on legumes.
- An old data portal gets an update.
- ISF resources on plant genetic resources.
- Mexican coconut and beverage resources are really Filipino resources.