Author: Luigi Guarino

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In praise of Granny Smith

Our regular readers 1 will know that there’s been a regular deluge — windfall? — of apple stories in the past few months, in particular about the imminent demise of the British orchard. The latest surfaced today. In such stories, aspersions are often cast on the qualities of such commercial favourites as the Granny Smith. 2 I guess the unspoken implication is that this and similarly successful varieties are the evil spawn of some sinister multinational, and probably contain, to boot, genes cruelly extracted from some Arctic fish without its prior or informed consent and unnaturally inserted into the pristine apple genome by soulless pointy-headed boffins with Nazi sympathies.

Nothing could be further from the truth, it turns out, at least in the case of the Granny Smith, which was, in fact, spotted as a seedling and first grown by Maria Ann Smith on her farm in Ryde, New South Wales around 1868. 3 It started life as the kind of backyard variety that would later become known as a heirloom. So, I ask myself, what obscure pome, currently languishing in some forgotten British orchard, soon to be rescued by the imminent influx of National Trust money, will eventually knock old Granny from her pedestal? And when will we be complaining about that one?

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A little little barley goes a long way

Like I say, not a day goes by. Yesterday, ramie. Today, little barley. As in:

They likely ate sunflower, marsh elder, two types of chenopod—a family that includes spinach and beets—and possibly squash and little barley, according to the findings. The people also grew bottle gourd to make into containers.

That would be the Riverton people living three thousand years ago along the Wabash River in present-day Illinois.

The Riverton crops may have “added to what was [already] a successful life” for the ancient Americans, said Brian Redmond, curator and head of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

Yes, because…

…[b]efore they began farming, the Riverton people lived among bountiful river valleys and lakes, apparently eating a healthy and diverse diet of nuts, white-tailed deer, fish, and shellfish, the study says.

So the Riverton people were not reacting to some environmental stress as a matter of survival when they became agriculturalists, but rather “engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation.” Good for them.

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Featured: Uses of nettels

Christopher Taylor reminds us of the uses of other Urticaceae:

One thing I discovered a while ago when looking up ramie was that nettles themselves (Urtica) contain fibre that can be used in weaving. Nettle fibre isn’t used so much currently because, to be honest, it’s kind of rubbish, but it did have a usage spike in Britain during World War II when better-quality materials such as linen were in short supply.

The multifarious uses of nettles, as coincidence would have it, Jeremy nibbled about only a few days ago.

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Ramie ruminations

Not a day passes that I don’t utter an imprecation — as Julian Simon Barnes did in print a few days back — at agrobiodiversity. Take yesterday. There’s a big meeting going on this week at FAO, and they’ve set up a series of stands in the atrium. Most of them are pretty boring, just piles of publications and the odd poster, but the one put up by the people behind the International Year of Natural Fibres is very nice indeed.

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It has examples of handicrafts and other products made from a whole lot of different fibres, from abaca to muskox. Including ramie. And that’s when I cursed the neverending-ness of biodiversity. For what, pray, is ramie? I know abaca and muskox, but I’d never heard of ramie.

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Well, it turns out to be Boehmeria nivea, a shrub in the nettle family widely cultivated in East Asia since antiquity for its bark, which is used to make fabrics. The IYNF website has a page about it. The Korean national costume (the hanbok) is made of ramie cloth, so we’re not talking about a minor, obscure, criminally underused plant here. Bloody agrobiodiversity indeed. I hate you.