- Nice piece from NPR on the coffee genebank in Costa Rica and the importance of breeding for resistance to coffee rust. Where’s the diversity for that going to come from, you ask?
- Weird piece from NPR on why humans took up farming. Hard to swallow.
- At least in India and Uganda, men and women use trees differently, and have different access. Good to know.
- “David Byrne receives national 2013 Carroll R. Miller Award for peach research.” Settle down! Not that David Byrne.
Nibbles: Beer edition
- Genebank saves beer!
- Not so fast…
- So, lets get back to basics shall we, and the dawn of brewing, recreated (again).
Nibbles: Lemons, Quinoa, Sago, Onions
Iron Chef edition:
- Preserve Amalfi lemons. (No, not that kind of preserve.)
- Ist International Quinoa Research Symposium comes to Washington. (No, not that Washington.)
- Sago before rice in Ancient China. (A remark about sago being dessert isn’t going to fly, is it?)
- Know your onions and, er, “make love to them”?
Nibbles: SRI in Indonesia, SRI in Nepal, Diversity in GMO review, Climate change fears, Ancient grind in China
- System of Rice Intensification increases yields, not incomes, because it takes time away from other jobs. Caveats apply.
- Which does not deter Rajendra Uprety, an SRI activist, in Nepal, where rice farmers “hydridize technology”.
- In reviewing the global march of GMOs, a plea for policies to promote “much more crop diversity”. Well of course we agree.
- US food company executives fear “weather extremes” more than anything else in 2013.
- The same fears may have driven Chinese people to food processing 23,000 years ago. A grind not being able to access the PNAS paper.
Tracing the Polynesian migrations through DNA, but not only
I know you probably don’t have an hour to spare to listen to a lecture on the evidence for pre-Columbian contacts between Polynesians and South American cultures, but Dr Lisa Matisoo-Smith does a really good job of galloping though the DNA and archaeological evidence from humans, commensals and livestock in a recent podcast from the Bishop Museum. She even mentions crops.
The bottom line? The human anatomical and artifact evidence is compelling, but the DNA is not cooperating yet. At least the human DNA. But listen to it. While you’re preparing dinner or something. I just wish the Bishop had thought to put the slides online too.