- Monsanto’s seeds in Haiti. “Let the farmers decide,” says Anastasia
- Indian stamps celebrate biodiversity. No pictures, so we can’t comment.
- Is maize becoming more tolerant to heat and drought? Maybe not.
- Olivier de Schutter says investment in agriculture is destroying the world’s peasantry. Responsibly.
Sweet potato fries brains?
It is actually hard to know whether Tom Barnett’s tongue was in his cheek when he gave a recent piece this headline: The sweet potato silver-bullet?. In fact, in light of his article and its source, the headline makes no sense at all, except that it did persuade me to sit up and take notice.
The thrust of Tom’s piece is a report in the Wall Street Journal about industrial food giant ConAgra trying to create a sweet potato ideal for frying. ((Under the altogether more wonderful headline ConAgra Pushes Sweet Potato to Straighten Up and Fry Right.)) The WSJ’s botany is not all that sparkling, referring to the sweet potato as the “step-brother” of the “ordinary” potato. That suggests to me that they share one recent parent. And how about this:
Sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant.
But I digress. The WSJ’s beat is business, not botany, and it reports in wonderful detail on ConAgra’s goal, to create the raw material suitable for an industrial business process: uniform shape, size, colour and sweetness.
[T]hree years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.
“We’re wanting to deliver to [ConAgra’s] factory something that looks like a brick,” says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. “We don’t want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store.”
Read on, for an insight into how the food industry views its raw materials and its final products. There are, of course, other approaches. A chum of Luigi’s reports that in Taiwan in the 1980s “SP fries were the standard in local fast food. It was changed to potato fries when the giant international chains entered.” The same chum is working on sweet potato leaves as a vegetable green, not an entirely new idea. Well, they’re a huge component of livestock feed; how nice to reverse the normal pattern of animals eating our food. And apparently sweet potato leaves might do well in space.
One of the commenters at Tom’s blog asks why people don’t just “eat a baked sweet potato, all funky shaped”. He clearly doesn’t understand the business of food production.
And frankly, neither do I.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity, Mexican food, Benin chickens, Tylosema chemistry, Wild coffee
- Do my eyes deceive me? Exhortation not to forget farms during biodiversity festivities.
- Edible Geography does Mexico City. Oh to be in DF on the 9th.
- What do Benin farmers want out of their chickens? Clue: it wont be easy.
- Is marama bean the next big thing? Probably not, but check it out anyway.
- New Biosphere Reserve protects wild coffee.
- Uber-blogger Tom Barnett tackles sweet potato breeding. Sweet potato wins.
Nibbles: Rice panicles, Cassava brown streak, NTFP
- Gene controlling rice architecture may hold promise for increased yield. Unless, of course, it doesn’t.
- Attempts to control a deadly cassava virus in central Africa. I hope someone is conserving those susceptible varieties. They may be useless now, but who knows what the future will bring? And more questions.
- And following the Kibale post, more on non-timber forest products and their trade.
8th International Wheat Conference and BGRI 2010 Technical Workshop
Wheat boffins are meeting in St Petersburg. CIMMYT is blogging about it. ICARDA is blogging about it. A whole bunch of people are twittering. So there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going on.