Brainfood: Racism, Writing, QMS, Andean ag, Root breeding, Apple microbiome, Manihot phylogeny, Mukodamashi millet

Nibbles: Archaeobotany, Citrus genebank, Vitellaria, Potato genebank, Pignolo, IK, Atlas of Living Australia,

  1. Q&A with an archaeobotanist looking into the domestication history of maize and gourds.
  2. Q&A with the curators of the University of California, Riverside Citrus Variety Collection.
  3. Q&A on the shea tree genome.
  4. CIP’s potato cryobank. There’s probably a Q&A somewhere too.
  5. Snippets of a review of an interesting-sounding book about the almost-forgotten Pignolo grape.
  6. Snippets of the Indigenous ecological knowledge used by traditional agriculturalists in India.
  7. A more systematic approach to documenting and protecting Indigenous ecological knowledge from Australia.

Brainfood: Transeurasian languages, Japanese rice, Grapevine pip shapes, Citrus evolution & domestication, Yak domestication, Brassica domestication, Coffee diversity, Switchgrass diversity, Onion landrace, Seed systems

Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms

  1. Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
  2. Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
  3. I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
  4. Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
  5. Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
  6. Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
  7. The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
  8. Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
  9. They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.

Brainfood: Archaeological edition