- How to tell your prosciutto cotto from your crudo.
- How cotton got to be cotton. Or cottons, actually.
- How to grow skirret.
- How to save bananas and potatoes.
- How to bring back the aurochs.
Nibbles: Switchgrass mixtures, Groundnut genomes, Bean genome, New wild tomato, CC Down Under, Aussie foods, Natural history collections, Wheat genebanks, Pompeii vineyards, Colombian exhibition, Portuguese collard, Istanbul bostan, Kenyan adaptation, Norwegian adaptation, Hybrid wheat, GMO bananas, Indian organic, Coconut generator
- If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
- The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
- As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
- New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
- Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
- And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
- Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
- CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
- Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
- Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
- Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
- The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
- Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
- Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
- Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
- The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
- Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
- Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
- Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.
Ask Prof. Huw Jones anything about plant breeding
There’s an Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on Reddit later today Thursday, 4 February, at 4pm GMT (11am EDT, 8am PST) with Professor Huw Jones. He’s research leader of the Cereal Transformation Group at Rothamsted Research, UK, so you can ask questions about plant breeding, genetic transformation, crop diversity, all that kind of stuff.
LATER: Here are the results.
Nibbles: History edition
- No, I don’t think the history of potatoes is at an end, but I know what they mean.
- The history of rubber in pics.
- The history of the wheat dwarfing gene.
- Svalbard makes history.
- Sicily goes back into its history for its daily bread.
- Another foothold in history for Gary Nabhan.
- History, shmistory, we need to look forward. Biohacking is the future of food. Say twelve year olds.
Nibbles: Value edition
- Peru to give value to its biodiversity.
- Germany already has, 500 years ago.
- Cavendish bananas have a lot of value, but that won’t save them.
- The UK’s vegetables genebank is very valuable.
- But you can always add more value to genebank collections if you evaluate them, like IRRI’s going to do in an expensive new building.
- I’m not sure what the value of Gold Rush-era heritage trees might be, but I think it’s really cool that someone’s looking for them.
- The value of genetic engineering for drought tolerance is just around the corner.