Category: Cooking

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Nibbles: Pearl millet redux, Garden plants, Armenian pics, Seeds galore, Heavenly Book, Pastoralism threats

  1. Pearl millet is getting the hybrid treatment. And, loving it.
  2. Want to know what to grow in your garden? Yes, even pearl millet.
  3. Nice pics of Armenian landscapes, food and foodways. No pearl millet in sight.
  4. The latest monthly newsletter from The Botanist in the Kitchen does seeds. Pearl millet unavailable for comment.
  5. China is genotyping and phenotyping (almost) everything. Pearl millet feeling left out.
  6. If pearl millet fails, there is always pastoralism. No, wait…
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Brassica on the brink

How did collards get to remote oases on the edge of the Sahara? That’s what ethnobotanists Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have been looking into for like 20 years now, and it’s a fascinating story. Which you can read about in detail in their paper in Economic Botany. They also present an abbreviated form of the argument in The Conversation. Which got Nibbled some months back, though without giving anything away. But actually what I recommend you do is listen to Jeremy interview the intrepid duo in the latest episode of Eat This Podcast.

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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…