- You can explore food flows among US counties. If you have lots of time.
- Studying a huge olive collection. To fight climate change.
- Improving sweet potatoes in Cambodia. Somehow.
- There’s a meeting of the Global Bean Project. Tomorrow.
- Speaking of sweet potatoes and crowd-sourced breeding (well, sort of). The Open Source Plant Breeding Forum.
- Apparently there’s nobody talking about the food extinction crisis. Nobody.
Brainfood: Japan support, American food choice, Wild potato x4, Phenotype change, Minor Vigna, Tilapia diversity, Ethiopian chicken diversity, Goat diversity, Tree seeds, Blockchain
- Three Decades of Safeguarding and Promoting Use of Agricultural Biodiversity: Changing Global Perspectives, Paradigm Shifts and Implications. The priorities of Bioversity and the Japanese government have changed over time, but miraculously stayed reasonably well aligned.
- A focused ethnographic study on the role of health and sustainability in food choice decisions. Americans pick food items mainly on the basis of price, health, taste, and convenience. Environmental impact, not so much, alas.
- Wild relatives of potato may bolster its adaptation to new niches under future climate scenarios. Some wild potato species have unique climate adaptations that we’re going to need.
- Cold Hardiness Variation in Solanum jamesii and Solanum kurtzianum Tubers. Case in point.
- Assessment of Wild Solanum Species for Resistance to Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary in the Toluca Valley, Mexico. And not just climate adaptation.
- Screening South American potato landraces and potato wild relatives for novel sources of late blight resistance. Case in point.
- The pace of modern life, revisited. A big database on how the phenotypes of wild species like the above are changing, and why.
- Insights into the genetic diversity of an underutilized Indian legume, Vigna stipulacea (Lam.) Kuntz., using morphological traits and microsatellite markers. 94 accessions, 12 with promise for different traits, in 7 genetic groups. Let the really efficient breeding commence.
- Whole genome resequencing data enables a targeted SNP panel for conservation and aquaculture of Oreochromis cichlid fishes. The breeding has already commenced between different tilapias, but don’t worry, we can now tell species apart.
- A framework for defining livestock ecotypes based on ecological modelling and exploring genomic environmental adaptation: the example of Ethiopian village chicken. 25 populations, but only 12 ecotypes, based on 6 climate variables. Basically the same methodology as the wild potato paper above but applied to genetic groupings. Who will apply it to tilapias now, or indeed that “minor” Vigna?
- VarGoats project: a dataset of 1159 whole-genome sequences to dissect Capra hircus global diversity. Distinct African, Asian and European genetic groups. Well I never.
- Are Tree Seed Systems for Forest Landscape Restoration Fit for Purpose? An Analysis of Four Asian Countries. Take a wild guess. The key is apparently focusing less on planting lots of trees and more on making sure the resulting forests are resilient.
- Smart, Commodified and Encoded: Blockchain Technology for Environmental Sustainability and Nature Conservation. Not quite ready to help grow those resilient forests.
Nibbles: Banana futures, Strawberry breeding, Maize & climate change
- 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?