- Companies should pay to protect ecosystems.
- Like these? Hope they include some agricultural ones. Maybe even urban ones.
- Why you’d want to is not least because of these plants. Which can be better for micronutrients. Not to mention mainly outcrossing.
- Yeah, not all species are equal. Right?
- I wonder if any of this philanthropic training money will go to work on rice wild relatives.
Nibbles: Hot peppers, Job, Hippy scientist, Seed law considered, Old seed, Rice and recovery
- Will the world ever tire of hot pepper stories?
- Would you like to work at the Millennium Seed Bank?
- The Guardian hymns Howard-Yana Shapiro, the “vegan hippy scientist” who wants to open orphan crop genomes.
- Patrick links to Arche Noah’s response to the new EU seed laws.
- Laws that don’t bother Gene Logsdon, planter of old seed.
- IRRI claims that rice seed aids Bangladesh’s cyclone recovery, but frankly, I can barely read it.
Brainfood: Grass evolution, Great Lakes fisheries, African cassava, Sustainable UK farms, USA biodiversity loss, PVS, Agriculture to the rescue
- Evidence for recent evolution of cold tolerance in grasses suggests current distribution is not limited by (low) temperature. Geography a better predictor of cold tolerance than phylogeny.
- May we eat biodiversity? How to solve the impasse of conservation and exploitation of biodiversity and fishery resources. We may, if we all agree.
- Genetic diversity of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) landraces and cultivars from southern, eastern and central Africa. There isn’t any.
- Evidence of sustainable intensification among British farms. Amazingly, there is some, and aiming to increase profitability can get you there.
- Key areas for conserving United States’ biodiversity likely threatened by future land use change. To the tune of 5-8% area loss, and not counting climate change. Would be interesting to know what that will do to crop wild relatives.
- Dilemma in participatory selection of varieties. If it’s a one-time deal, as it often is, it ain’t gonna work.
- Green Revolution research saved an estimated 18 to 27 million hectares from being brought into agricultural production. And saved 2 million ha of forest. But less than Borlaug thought. More on “Agricultural innovation to save the environment” from PNAS.
Nibbles: New genebank, Modelling change, Non-GMO tomato, Greenhouse gases, Fruit diversity, Chickpea genomes
- The Australians have turned the sod on a new genebank. Can’t have too many genebanks.
- Climate change model reveals the differences between coffee and mango. Can’t have too many models. Or mangoes.
- GMO tomato that is not GMO and is purple could result in healthier, cheaper tomatoes. Can’t have too much confusion.
- Fantastically interesting infographic on where greenhouse gases come from. Can’t have too many good infographics.
- Among which I include Pop Chart Lab’s new taxonomic poster of The Various Varieties of Fruits. Fruit is good for you. And tomato is not a fruit
- A late addition: chickpea genome sequenced — twice. Can’t have too many chickpea genomes, as Nigel Chaffey explains.
You are what you eat: junk food edition
An article in last weekend’s New York Times Sunday Review has been getting a lot of traction. Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food by one Jo Robinson complains that nutrition has been going downhill ever since farming began. Not, she says, merely with the advent of modern varieties.
Wow! I mean, that’s quite a claim. So I took a serious look.
I guess my main beef with the piece is that it still presents a thoroughly medical view of nutrition and diet. I guess the de rigeur hat-tip to Hippocrates should have tipped me off. “Let food be thy medicine” is not in fact a prescription for specific active ingredients to combat specific ailments. And to switch, as Robinson does, between active ingredients and some vague notion of phytonutrients, confuses me at least. There’s also the vaguely disquieting idea that if a phytonutrient is good, more is better. It ain’t necessarily so. 1
Actually, there’s a lot more in the piece that made my blood boil. Most trivially, having said that our nutritional downfall is the result of preferring more sugar and less bitter, how can this be good advice:
Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.
Because blue corn contains anthocyanins, obviously.
More worrying is Ms Robinson’s deep misunderstanding of the nature of selection, at least as she describes the domestication of teosinte. To imagine that “nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn” from the first cultivation of maize until the 19th century, when “farmers began to play a more active role” is nothing short of scandalous. Not unlike people who think Columbus discovered America.
Better yet, in hammering on about modern maize and how sweet it is, we are treated to a description of the discovery and commercialisation of supersweet corn. The first release of a commercial supersweet corn took place in 1961, of which Robinson says:
This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention.
If you think supersweet corn is genetically modified, I’d love to know what you think of the changes that turned teosinte into maize.
I was also intrigued by a little “correction” the NYT yesterday slipped in at the bottom of the piece.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the origins of supersweet corn. The corn was the result of a natural, spontaneous mutation, not one artificially induced through radiation.
I’m sure the whole thing was equally well researched. Because …
Jo Robinson is a bestselling, investigative journalist who has spent the past 15 years scouring research journals for information on how we can restore vital nutrients to our fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products.
The book will probably be a runaway success.