Archaeology

Nibbles: Quinoa, Chilean landraces, Planetary sculptors, Offal, Eels, Grand Challenges in Global Health, ILRI strategy, Artemisia, Monticello, Greek food, Barley, Rain

The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?

And Kenya’s best agriculture blog is…Tracking The Scent! Congrats Kio Wachira!
Drinking beer as an agricultural act.
CRP4 needs a new name.
Meanwhile, here’s another example of CGIAR centres working together. Not clear if it’s in a CRP, though, and if so what it is called.
Horse domesticated once, but with occasional restocking.

Mushrooms in Art: why, and what good has it been.
Keep moving that livestock; it’s more profitable.
And … noted promiscuous communication expert confuses cow and elephant in search of livestock’s climate hoofprint.
Best blog account of those Swedish farmers from Cyprus.
Back to the strawberry’s future: meet the pineberry.
Too late for Robigalia, yellow rust threatens triticale.
Lecture of Dr Maurits van den Berg – “The future of land”. You’ll get nothing from the link, but the presentation made me wish I’d been there.