Category: Cooking

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Nibbles: Crop mapping, Climate change impacts, Rice cheese, Andean blueberry, Rare apples, Hungarian genebank, Old seed collection

  1. AI doesn’t recognize tropical agriculture very well.
  2. So presumably it can’t easily be used in assessing climate change impacts in agricultural heritage systems? FAO has some ideas on how to do it.
  3. Maybe rice heritage systems can be used to make cheese.
  4. I bet Andean blueberry (Vaccinium floribundum) goes great with rice cheese.
  5. But if not, heritage apples will probably do.
  6. The Hungarian genebank is hoping to inject heritage grains into non-heritage agricultural systems. AI and FAO unavailable for comment.
  7. Maybe AI can help with the mystery of this old seed collection at the Natural History Museum, London.
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Nibbles: Agricultural expansion maps, Brassica diversity, Not against the grain, South African seedbanks, Safer peanuts, Diné seedbank

  1. Agriculture is bad for natural ecosystems. But great for maps, you have to admit.
  2. Greens are good for you. And this is a great roundup of the latest scholarship on brassica evolution, domestication and diversity. You’ll find most of the paper quoted in past Brainfoods.
  3. Grains are great. Especially with greens.
  4. Thank goodness for household seed banking. Especially in conjunction with the formal kind.
  5. All so we can breed a better peanut. And cut down more natural ecosystem?
  6. No, there’s community genebanks for that too…
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Nibbles: Restoration, Monitoring, CARDI, Margot Forde, Warwick, Slow Beans 2025, Lonicera

  1. Africa needs good forest seeds.
  2. And genetic monitoring of the resulting plantings, probably.
  3. The Caribbean also wants quality seed, and thinks a mobile seed bank is the way to get it.
  4. The only mobile things about New Zealand’s genebank are its collectors.
  5. A very mobile donation to the UK’s vegetable genebank.
  6. Nothing very mobile about Slow Beans 2025, but that’s the point.
  7. The long journey of honeysuckle.
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Nibbles: Fiona Hay, Richard Ellis, FAO exhibition, Peasants, Wheat breeding, Svalbard, Søren Ejlersen, Ephraim Bull, Heirloom apples, Caffeine, Collards history

  1. Dr Fiona Hay, seed scientist, on why we need genebanks, including seed banks.
  2. Prof. Richard Ellis retires. A genebank legend, as Fiona would probably agree.
  3. FAO exhibition goes From Seeds to Foods. By way of genebanks, no doubt.
  4. And peasants, of course. No, it’s not a derogatory word, settle down.
  5. Can Green Revolution breeding approaches (and genebanks) help peasants deal with climate change?
  6. Even genebanks need a back-up plan though.
  7. New Mexico genebank helps out Danish chef.
  8. The history of the Concord grape and its foxiness. Chefs intrigued.
  9. The history of Aport and Amasya apples. No foxiness involved, as far as I know. Genebanks? Probably.
  10. The origin of caffeine. Now do foxiness.
  11. Where did collards come from anyway? No, not genebanks. Bloody historians, always re-writing history.