- Solanum porno.
- Veggie tourism.
- Something else to blame climate change for. Not.
- Wanna learn breeding?
- Gary does Turkey.
- Podcast on school gardens.
- Department of improbable claims: Sunflower genome holds the promise of sustainable agriculture.
- Ok then Mr Cynical, how about woodland strawberry, then?
- Not so fast, Mr Sunshine: No strawberry genome ::sniff::
Nibbles: Goldman Environmental Prize, UK networking, European landraces publication, Seed Warriors, India agrobiodiversity sites, Beer books, Teosinte, Drought foods, Sugarcane genebank, Regional genebank in South Asia, Rhubarb, Annals, Food articles, Cryo
- Goldman Prizewinner Jesús León Santos: “It is time we recognize that traditional agricultural methods can make strong contributions to biodiversity conservation. We should encourage it and value it as a way to produce healthy foods that conserve and care for the environment.” Time indeed.
- British twofer: The Food Climate Research Network aims “to better understand how the food system contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and to research and promote ways of reducing them.” Then there’s the Foresight Project on Global Food and Farming Futures. Will they talk to each other, I wonder.
- From Bioversity, “European landraces: on-farm conservation, management and use.” I wonder if the Foresight Project will download a copy.
- The “Seed Warriors” trailer. Oscar buzz, I hear.
- Agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. Ethnobotanist brings together information on food plants used during drought. Mashup, anyone?
- A book about beer. My two favourite things. Oooh, here’s another couple! And it’s not over: Spiegel weighs in on the old chestnut about beer being the reason for agriculture. My tankard runneth over.
- CIMMYT team monitors teosinte. Teosinte planning to fight back.
- Regional sugarcane genebank is actually being used! Heartwarming. Oh, and, coincidentally, here’s a history of Indian sugarcane breeding.
- “A SAARC Plant Genetic Resource Bank for rice, wheat and maize may be created to facilitate free exchange of germplasm between the member countries. To begin with, the Indian Gene Bank facilities may be utilized, with suitable modalities.” Not so heartwarming.
- The Russian roots of Alaskan rhubarb. Take that, Palin! Note the bit about St Isaac’s Cathedral, which of course sits opposite VIR. How apposite is that?
- Nigel Chaffey rounds up the usual suspects in presenting a potpourri of “plant-based items from the world’s media” for Annals of Botany. May well be one to watch. And not just because genebanks make an appearance.
- Amazing food roundup.
- Cryopreserving Chip, the Tennessee fainting goat.
Eating grass seeds is much older than we thought
An astonishing paper has just been published in Science. Under the title Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age, ((Mercader, J. (2009). Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age Science, 326 (5960), 1680-1683 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173966)) Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, informs us that:
A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.
From a broad selection of stone tools, Mercader retrieved 2369 starch granules, 2112 (89%) of which were from a Sorghum species. There were granules from other edible species too, including beans, mallows, and even the African false banana Ensete ventricosum and the African wild potato Hypoxis hemerocallidea. He also found some evidence that granules had been altered in ways suggestive of “culinary-induced modifications” but conclusive proof that the people were cooking the foods they gathered will require a different kind of research.
The standard litany for the diet of early people is that
“[s]eed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time”.
Mercader concludes from his data
“that early Homo sapiens from southern Africa consumed not just underground plant staples but above-ground resources too”.
I’ll wait to see what people better versed in archaeological methods have to say about the paper. For now, I’m too gobsmacked to think of anything except to wonder whether they were cultivating those grasses as well as harvesting them.
Nibbles: Old goat, Ethiopian sorghum
- Reptile-like Balearic goat.
- Sorghum diversity hotspots identified in Ethiopia.
Silk Road on show in New York
The American Museum of Natural History has an exhibition on the Silk Road. It looks pretty good, and there even seems to be a bit on agrobiodiversity. I mean apart from the obvious, the silkworm and the camel. In particular, you get a look at the night markets of Turfan.
Surprisingly, visitors to markets along the ancient Silk Road—long before overnight shipping and refrigeration—could also choose from an array of foreign delicacies. As travelers moved along trade routes, they introduced their own ingredients and recipes to foreign lands. Over time, such exotic edibles became familiar features on local menus.
Check the video at the 2:18 mark. Not bad, I guess. But was it too much to ask for — having come so far — to include something about the role of this trade route in the spread of at least crops like the apple and wheat?