- As if Japan doesn’t have enough to worry about, its sake is in trouble.
- Update on that Idaho Heritage Tree Project.
- Why local cuisine is best. Who needs fusion, eh?
- Sweet potato leaves are good, and good for you. But you can’t eat them if they’re not part of your local cuisine.
- Same goes for baobab.
- New Samara has report on crop wild relatives training in Uganda.
- A medicinal plant garden in Philadelphia.
- How can we improve agriculture to reduce the pressure in forested areas? One of the top 20 questions for forestry and landscapes, apparently.
Cup of cocoa brimmeth over
The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre at the University of Reading has been doing its business of providing disease-free cacao germplasm very quietly and unobtrusively, though no less effectively for that, since it took over from Kew in 1985. Funny, therefore, to see it splashed all over the headlines at the turn of the year. For example, the BBC trumpeted: “Facility opens to safeguard the future of chocolate.” What happened, of course, is that the ICQC just moved into a new, £1 million home at the university:
It consolidates the collection of 400 varieties into a single, improved greenhouse and should make the quarantine process faster, cheaper and greener.
Interestingly, I can find nothing on where the money came from, not even in The Economist, which you would have thought would have looked into it. In any case, great that funds were found to invest in such an important facility in support of cacao research and development. Some think that it would have made better financial sense to have it in a non-cacao producing country a bit closer to where the action is, but there are arguments on both sides.
Anyway, since we’re talking Theobroma, let me take the opportunity of pointing you to the brand new Instagram account of the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, which is the source of much of the material at Reading. They’re also on Twitter.
Simran Sethi has been there a lot lately, and also has some cool pix.
Nibbles: American goats, Ancient dogs, Colorado sheep, Beer vs Wine, Vitis breeding, Southern cooking, Pennsylvania farming, Cherokee seeds
- A distinctly US flavour to Nibbles today, for some reason.
- A map of every goat in the US. Texas is the goat hotspot.
- Not there with dogs yet, but at least we now know when they arrived.
- How about sheep, though?
- Interestingly, there are more wineries than breweries in Texas.
- Saving the winegrape, molecule by molecule. Including in Texas?
- Saving Southern cooking, seed by seed. You remember that peanut thing from yesterday?
- But Pennsylvania cooking?
- How about Cherokee cooking?
Nibbles: R&D, Cheese double, Cali candied yams, Sustainable joe, Soy & deforestation, Cereals in Sudan, Big Ag, History of breeding
- ASTI says agricultural research investment in Africa is bearing fruit and needs to double.
- There’s a cheese revolution going on in America’s heartland.
- Meanwhile, the UK is worried about fake goat cheese.
- “Apparently, Californians like well-tanned sweetpotatoes.” Well of course they do.
- Good coffee AND conservation? I’ll take it.
- Soy AND conservation in Brazil? Well, not quite, but good news nonetheless.
- Cereal cultivation in Sudan pushed back several hundred years.
- What are the conditions for success in large-scale agricultural initiatives? You tell them.
- The history of crop improvement 101.
Nibbles: Hunger Games, Nutritious markets, Plant secrets, Nutrition soundbites, Buckwheat panic, Olive oil panic, Cannabis breeding, Wild turkey genetics, Quinoa wars, Domestication infographics, Howard-Yana Shapiro
- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.