Luigi Guarino

January 27, 2009

Heirloom tomatoes in the news…a lot

Stuck at home in bed over the past few days I’ve amused myself by looking at trends in the volume of googling for “seed bank” and “Svalbard” and of news items about armyworm outbreaks.

Anyway, here’s another one. It seems that there has been a steady increase over the past few years in news stories about heirloom tomatoes.

News peaks in summer, not surprisingly. Interestingly, the search pattern, which is not as clear-cut as that for news shown above, does not coincide with that for “seed banks.”

Well, all this is great fun, of course, but does it have any practical use? I mean along the lines of the recently-announced flu early warning system. Problem is, plant diseases don’t really generate the levels of interest of things like flu. Except maybe Ug99. So what is it good for, agrobiodiversity-wise? Apart from playing around when one is ill, that is.

January 27, 2009January 27, 2009

Nibbles: Cotton, Citrus, Fig, Permaculture, Turtles, Wine, Cacao, Fish

Wild cotton use lands prize for boffin trio.
Unesco to protect wild Citrus in India. And read the discussion.
IV International Symposium on Fig.
Permaculture: The Podcast.
The NY Times thinks Americans should eat fewer turtles. And drink more South African wine.
Meanwile, the WSJ gets into single-source chocolate.
Nice map of freshwater fish diversity. But will it last? WWF has a plan.

January 26, 2009January 26, 2009

Youth being recalcitrant about veggies

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association has a paper ((Impact of garden-based youth nutrition intervention programs: A review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Volume 109, Issue 2, Pages 273-280. R. Robinson-O’Brien, M. Story, S. Heim.)) which goes all meta on projects which aimed to encourage kids to eat more fruit and vegetables by getting them to work in gardens, for example at school. It covers the period 1990-2007, but only US-based studies, alas. I’m trying to get hold of the paper, but from the abstract it seems that the best that can be said about such interventions is that they may have a nutrition impact. We have blogged about how people are using school gardens etc. to educate yoofs about the importance of agrobiodiversity: it’s kind of sad to see that it is not entirely clear if the message is getting through.

January 26, 2009January 26, 2009

Nibbles: Mendel, Darwin, Cloves

Mendel was no cheat.
Correspondence between Darwin and Belfast merchant about potato late blight.
Zanzibar clove farming stinks.

January 25, 2009January 26, 2009

Dirt goes to Hollywood

The cinephiles among us will know that the Sundance Film Festival is on at the moment. Well, agrobiodiversity-philes everywhere will rejoice that one of the movies being screened is a documentary called Dirt! The Movie. It is, of course, about soil. Is the lady in the photo in that last link Vandana Shiva? She does feature in the cast list, along with other agrobiodiversity luminaries. Anyway, perhaps surprisingly, the flick seems to be eliciting some interest among mainstream Hollywood critics. Has anyone out there seen it? It’s based on the book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan.

LATER: Alas, “Dirt” is not mentioned by The Economist as a possible next eco-blockbuster, but Robert will be pleased at the plug for “The End of the Line.”