Kathryn over at Blogging Biodiversity rounds up the latest on Starbucks vs Ethiopia here.
Bananas at school
The Rainforest Alliance is tooting its own horn about the value of bananas as a teaching tool, in an item about its ideas for using the banana as a basis for several school activities. Intended for young children in non-tropical countries, the ideas struck me as pretty entertaining, and infinitely expandable. Bananas as the basis of surveys and measurement, geography, history, even a bit of botany. There are other possibilities too, only hinted at or completely ignored. But wouldn’t it be cool if other crops were used this way, not as object lessons in themselves, but as the basis for studying all sorts of things?
That, by the way, is Gros Michel, which I had the pleasure of tasting for the first time earlier this year. Just the shift from Gros Michel to Cavendish opens up all sorts of pedagocic possibilities.
Farming tigers
Not agricultural biodiversity, but here’s a somewhat radical (in its context) take on conservation through use. Of course, this strategy is fairly well established for wild plants.
Extra stimulation
The People vs Starbucks rumbles on. Fair Trade weighs in to the debate with an almost entirely decaffeinated post. A shame, really, as there are important issues to discuss in the realms of protecting farmer varieties in a fair and equitable manner. A new blog — Coffee Politics — devoted entirely to the subject, may be worth keeping an eye on.
Lupins against hunger
Bread enriched with lupin flour left people feeling fuller than ordinary wheat bread, according to a recent report. This could be good news for people who would otherwise be taking anti-obesity pills, and even better news for Australia’s lupin farmers. That’s where the research was carried out. I didn’t know that lupin is already widely used in baked goods because it can replace (more expensive?) eggs and butter. Edible lupins are a common snack in Italy. They also periodically crop up as “neglected” species that could solve world hunger given half a chance. Whether this latest news will reinvigorate that effort is anybody’s guess.