- Is the World Producing Enough Food? The NY Times has the answer(s).
- Aussies trying to get to grips with salinity through breeding. Very cool, but maybe they should just stop growing wheat and think of some other crop?
- Potato Park potatoes to be parked in the Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard.
- You know what those naughty Vikings used to say: “Let there be mirth, mead and fornication!”
- Adding value to peanuts in Bolivia. KIT video.
The wildness on your sofa
The question of what is the difference between the domestic pig and a wild boar, or the distinction between a broiler chicken and a wild jungle fowl is very similar to the question of what is the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.
Well, maybe. But Evan Ratliff’s piece in National Geographic is an entertaining summary of those distinctions, and of the different possible ways in which they may have come about.
It also reminded me of a great quote from another, much older National Geographic article, which is actually quite relevant again now. 1 Talking about using crop wild relatives, a breeder interviewed by the late Bob Rhoades for The World’s Food Supply at Risk in 1991 says this:
It’s a bit like crossing a house cat with a wildcat. You don’t automatically get a big docile pussycat. What you get is a lot of wildness that you probably don’ t want lying on your sofa.
Bibbles: Nutrition conference, Arabidopsis tinkering, Grape evolution
- The Leveraging Agriculture: what engaged participants? And the IFPRI contribution. What’s the intersection of those two sets, I wonder.
- Productive means susceptible. Except when it doesn’t. I’m in that kind of mood today.
- The deep origins of Vitis.
Evaluating maize for nutritional quality
You think they’re discussing this sort of thing at the “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” conference? You think they’re also discussing dietary diversity?
The Concrete Corn Field
This picture contains more layers of meaning than you can possibly imagine. Nicola Twilley unpacks some of them at GOOD. Has she left any out?