Joanna Linsley-Poe is a “chef, artisan bread baker, ancient food historian, food archaeologist and anthropologist as well as a writer. Although that sounds like quite a mouthful, I guess it’s all about a love of history and food.” We can relate to that! Joanna started blogging at Ancientfoods in September last year. I’ve added her to our blogroll and subscribed to her RSS feed.
Nibbles: Biofuels, No-till corn, BBTV, Coffee pest, Air potato, Neolithic, Turkish roses, Cowpea conference
- Science: Biodiversity is good even for biofuels.
- Science: Lack of annual diversity is bad for no-till maize (corn).
- Science: “Dead” bananas can still transmit banana bunchy top virus BBTV.
- Science: Potential biological control identified for coffee berry borer. (Eeeyew warning.)
- Art: Biological control (Lilioceris near impressa) of air potato (Dioscorea bulbifera). (Gorgeousness warning.)
- Science: Farmers brought farming to Britain.
- Science and art: A rose is a rose is a rose.
- Science: Black-eyed peas in Dakar gig.
Bread or beer? Why choose?
The Cartesian Dualists of the press, if not those of the hallowed groves of academe, are at it again. Der Spiegel, ((And don’t miss the photo slide show there for some sparkling web 2.0 goodness.)) late last month, and The Independent, late last week, report on Professor Patrick McGovern’s latest book, Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages, almost entirely in terms of which came first, beer or bread.
All the familiar old arguments are trotted out. That bread is actually quite hard to make, while a forgotten soaked seed or rotten fruit is easy enough to swallow and packs enough punch for the brain to say, in Der Spiegel’s memorable phrase, “whatever that was, I want more of it!”. But this convenient opposition ignores things like porridge or gruel, both of which probably represent easier ways of consuming cereals than bread. ((Rachel Laudan writes well on this, and much else.)) Most cereals don’t even make very good bread, at least not as it is understood by European journalists.
Professor McGovern, who runs the delightfully named Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylavania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is actually claiming far more than that beer came first. He seems to be laying nothing less than the development of settled agriculture, and with it civilisation as we know it, at the door of drunks. According to Der Spiegel:
[A]griculture — and with it the entire Neolithic Revolution, which began about 11,000 years ago — are ultimately results of the irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication.
“Available evidence suggests that our ancestors in Asia, Mexico, and Africa cultivated wheat, rice, corn, barley, and millet primarily for the purpose of producing alcoholic beverages,” McGovern explains. While they were at it, he believes, drink-loving early civilizations managed to ensure their basic survival.
He knits together all sorts of fascinating evidential threads, and at least as far as the articles go, makes a convincing enough case. But then, I remain deeply skeptical of single explanations for anything as complex as the evolution of settled agriculture. And I suspect McGovern does too. As he told The Independent:
As for his theory on how alcohol motivated man to adopt agriculture, McGovern said: “I just wanted to put it out there as a worldwide hypothesis. Then over time maybe the different pieces can be put together from across the world.”
I’m trying really trying to avoid this, but I can’t: I’ll drink to that.
Bringing back the aurochs
From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.
Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park (and who hasn’t) will understand how this film has stirred the imagination by suggesting the possibility of bringing back species that have long gone extinct. Add to that the recent breakthroughs in our ability to retrieve and decipher genomes obtained from tissues of animals that have perished thousands of years ago and you can understand the excitement. Italian scientists now claim to have a rough draft of the genome of the aurochs, a wild bovid that roamed Europe until perhaps as late as the 17th century and which is depicted so beautifully in the cave paintings in Lascaux. With the genome map as a compass the Italians are convinced that they can now breed back the aurochs using contemporary cattle breeds as a starting point.
Such attempts are, of course, not new and there are bovids around that are thought to resemble the aurochs. But in the past such efforts were always fraught with a fair degree of uncertainty because they relied entirely on phenotypic information gleaned from drawings or written descriptions. Having actual genetic information of the aurochs takes that uncertainty out of the equation. Whether the Italians’ efforts will be more successful is hard to predict because they are based on the assumption that all of the genetic information of the aurochs can still be found somewhere in modern cattle. And it is far from clear whether that is the case. But even if it isn’t, having the aurochs genome at hand, it may one day be possible to make the necessary genetic changes to transform a modern cattle embryo into an aurochs embryo and have that embryo then carried to term in a modern cow. And if you can bring back the aurochs, it may quite well be possible to bring back animal breeds that have similarly vanished. Still sounds a bit like science fiction? Perhaps, but nobody ever thought you could clone a sheep.
Nibbles: Old lentil, Cassava pests, Gates the reconciler, Gardeners
- 4000 year old lentil sprouts.
- It looks bad for cassava in SE Asia.
- Bill Gates speaks out on sustainability and productivity.
- “Gardeners must unite to save Britain’s wildlife.” We say: what about Britain’s landraces?