Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, argues that the world is currently too reliant on just a handful of key species of edible plants for food.
Welcome aboard, Prof. Hopper!
Notes from Cartagena
I’m in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia at a conference on the state of plant genetic resources in Latin America and one of the presenters this morning said that people in the region of Iquitos in Peru consume 193 fruit species, of which 57 are found in local markets. I had never run across this statistic, and was a bit skeptical, but it’s clearly extremely solid, coming from a paper by one of the greats of tropical American botany. Only thing is, the paper is 20 years old. Would be good to count again. I bet that number will be down a bit.
Another interesting little bit of information that emerged is that Chile has, since 2006, a “…Comité Agro Gastronómico, entidad público-privada que busca unir la producción agrícola y del mar con la gastronomía chilena, de manera de poner en las mesas de Chile y el mundo preparaciones que rescaten productos que reflejen la identidad nacional.” ((“…a private-public entity which seeks to unite the harvest of land and sea with Chilean gastronomy, so as to put on the tables of Chile and the world dishes that feature products that reflect the national identity.”)) This kind of thing can be taken too far, and I don’t know whether a committee is necessarily the best way to do it, but the idea of promoting agrobiodiversity through gourmet “ethnic” cooking is not a bad one.
Poppies 2 Pomegranates
Down an “Active Pretox Drink,” plant a pomegranate in Afghanistan. Local varieties, I trust.
Nibbles: Fraxinus, Sheep, Fish, Potato, Chickens, Eden, Microlivestock, Saliva, Mashua, Vine
- Chinese ash seeds go to Ft Collins (et al.) to fight emerald ash borer.
- And also colonial sheep.
- One fish goes up, another down. That’s life, I guess.
- Potatoes fried by climate change?
- What chicken breed is right for you?
- Agrobiodiversity bears fruit at Eden!
- Fish and snail farming in West Africa.
- “The saliva microbiome does not vary substantially around the world.â€
- Mashed mashua, anyone?
- Earliest evidence of vine cultivation in China.
AIDS experts recognize importance of diet, apparently
You may remember a little discussion about agrobiodiversity and AIDS that we had here some time ago. Basically, I was wondering why there weren’t more biodiversity-based interventions to support people living with HIV/AIDS. Well, our friend Arwen Bailey now informs us that this came up at a recent seminar given by Dr Tim Johns at Bioversity International HQ in Rome, and he said that at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico last August, there was “a feeling that clinical interventions have gone as far as they can go without addressing the environment and diets of affected people.” Apparently the session on biodiversity and AIDS was standing room only. Arwen found a couple of abstracts on the topic on the programme. Thanks, Arwen.