- Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
- The cost of poor diets is considerable.
- Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
- Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
- The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
- Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
- Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
- Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
- How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
- How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.
Nibbles: NHM, CGN, NordGen, ICRISAT, Chai, Cacao, Coffee, Amazon, Indian aromatics, Spying, Talking cattle
- Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
- Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
- NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
- Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
- All the tea in India. And Ireland?
- The rise of craft chocolate.
- And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
- Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
- NBPGR does medicinals.
- You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
- Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.
Coffee lost and found
Remember the paper on re-finding a couple of “lost” coffee species in Sierra Leone that we included in Brainfood a few weeks back? Thought you might. Anyway, Jeremy has an interview with the main author, NRI’s Jeremy Haggar, in Eat This Podcast this week. Have a listen, it’s a cool story.
But how will it feed into the global coffee conservation strategy?
Nibbles: Carver, Banana phenotyping, Wild wheat project, Chinese chillies, Tea book
- George Washington Carver‘s legacy lives on.
- Finding drought-resistant bananas: the movie.
- Mining wild wheat. Again.
- The definitive book on hot peppers in China. And I’ll save you a few clicks, here’s the video alluded to in the review.
- The definitive book on tea. Not just China either.
Nibbles: Mexico CC, Europe CC, Andean CC, CSA, Seeds, GIAHS, China genebank, Maize domestication, Coffee history, Conservation book
- Interactive website on bioclimatic corridors in Mexico. Bits don’t work, though.
- Interactive website on climate analogues for Europe.
- How Andean farmers are coping with the kind of changes mapped above.
- Oh dear, climate smart agriculture is a myth anyway.
- But saving seeds isn’t, thankfully.
- Still not enough linkage with the GIAHS, though, but maybe this course will fix that.
- Maybe start with peafowl? China shows us how.
- How maize became a staple: quite early, and quite quickly, basically.
- Not much coffee in early English coffeehouses. Amsterdam’s coffeeshops unavailable for comment.
- Open-access magnum opus: Conservation Research, Policy and Practice.