- Botany Photo of the Day is an onion wild relative! Pretty.
- More on that livestock-can-help-reduce-desertification thing, this time from Scientific American.
- Breeding Striga-resistant sorghum. Whatever it takes to protect local beer, boffin-dudes!
- Emmer wheat reviewed to bits.
- No passport data for your barley? Fear not.
- Rachel Laudan ably defends Hawaiian food.
- Origins of almond traced to Iran. Not for the first time.
- Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: A Commons Perspective. Presentation from our friends at FAO.
- Presentation on the untapped potential of cassava in the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of many from CIAT lately. Check out their stuff on beans too.
- The Seed Cathedral of Shanghai. Thanks to those public awareness wizards at Kew.
- Big shindig on biofortification. Be there, or be malnourished.
- Times of India bangs the drum for nutritious millets.
- Yet more loveliness from serious amateur pea breeder Rebsie Fairholm.
A plan to keep cacao alive in Ivory Coast, but for how long?
A long article in the Financial Times a few days ago described the woes of the Ivorian cacao industry. Fundamentally, it’s down to old, and therefore increasingly sick and unproductive, trees. And the quantity squeeze is forcing farmers to compromise on quality.
All this is important because Ivory Coast accounts for 39% of the world’s cacao production. A “chocolate crisis” is looming. And companies like Nestlé are worried. They employ a small army of agronomists, breeders and extensionists just to guarantee their supply of raw materials.
Hence their “Cocoa Plan” to replant 12 million trees (out of a total of 2 billion in the country) over the next decade at a cost of almost $100 million. A monumental task for a crop grown by hundreds of thousands of smallholders. The article does not go into detail on the varieties that are being used in the replanting, beyond saying that they are not GMOs and that the plantlets
…have already been nicknamed “Mercedes” for their supposedly upmarket quality. “They grow very, very quickly,” says Jebouet Kouassi, a 43-year-old who runs one of Nestlé’s nurseries in Ivory Coast.
Neither, alas, does the Cocoa Plan’s website. Elsewhere I found this:
The seedlings will be produced from high-yield and resistant varieties by somatic embryogenesis, which produce replicas of high performance cocoa trees, with high yield and high resistance to disease.
I hope that the narrowing of genetic diversity that this approach seems to imply will not store up problems for the future.
Recipes then and now
And here’s another of those serendipitous juxtapositions that the tubes are so great at producing, if you’re on the alert for them. A blog on historical American recipes on one side. And, on the other, how African specialty foods are infiltrating current gastronomy. Good to see this penetration of the international market, of course, but truth to tell, not many of said specialty foods are very African, apart from having being grown there. When will we see Swahili dishes go mainstream in the US or Europe, say, or finger millet porridge, or fried plantain? The way the marula fruit has.
Sweet potato fries brains?
It is actually hard to know whether Tom Barnett’s tongue was in his cheek when he gave a recent piece this headline: The sweet potato silver-bullet?. In fact, in light of his article and its source, the headline makes no sense at all, except that it did persuade me to sit up and take notice.
The thrust of Tom’s piece is a report in the Wall Street Journal about industrial food giant ConAgra trying to create a sweet potato ideal for frying. ((Under the altogether more wonderful headline ConAgra Pushes Sweet Potato to Straighten Up and Fry Right.)) The WSJ’s botany is not all that sparkling, referring to the sweet potato as the “step-brother” of the “ordinary” potato. That suggests to me that they share one recent parent. And how about this:
Sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant.
But I digress. The WSJ’s beat is business, not botany, and it reports in wonderful detail on ConAgra’s goal, to create the raw material suitable for an industrial business process: uniform shape, size, colour and sweetness.
[T]hree years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.
“We’re wanting to deliver to [ConAgra’s] factory something that looks like a brick,” says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. “We don’t want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store.”
Read on, for an insight into how the food industry views its raw materials and its final products. There are, of course, other approaches. A chum of Luigi’s reports that in Taiwan in the 1980s “SP fries were the standard in local fast food. It was changed to potato fries when the giant international chains entered.” The same chum is working on sweet potato leaves as a vegetable green, not an entirely new idea. Well, they’re a huge component of livestock feed; how nice to reverse the normal pattern of animals eating our food. And apparently sweet potato leaves might do well in space.
One of the commenters at Tom’s blog asks why people don’t just “eat a baked sweet potato, all funky shaped”. He clearly doesn’t understand the business of food production.
And frankly, neither do I.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity, Mexican food, Benin chickens, Tylosema chemistry, Wild coffee
- Do my eyes deceive me? Exhortation not to forget farms during biodiversity festivities.
- Edible Geography does Mexico City. Oh to be in DF on the 9th.
- What do Benin farmers want out of their chickens? Clue: it wont be easy.
- Is marama bean the next big thing? Probably not, but check it out anyway.
- New Biosphere Reserve protects wild coffee.
- Uber-blogger Tom Barnett tackles sweet potato breeding. Sweet potato wins.