Cooking

Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest

Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.

Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?

Professor said meat should be properly priced to avoid disaster. Why just meat?
“The Seed Makers Who Don’t Pray for Rain.” Slick, but do they actually pray for drought?
Found the above here, but is GMO drought resistance really “very important stuff to making farming sustainable”?
Kenyan farmers grow mushrooms. Fun, guys.
Does Africa need better product branding?
Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development. I confess, I didn’t understand most of it.
Rhizowen invents the artichon. Who says there’s no new food to be discovered?
Kew celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Pollinators get a look-in.
Rome celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Agriculture prominent.
IUCN celebrates Allium pskemense: edible, medicinal, a crop wild relative, and threatened.
World record plate of hummus, 10,452 kg of tasty serotonin.
Local man sends USDA a fig they didn’t have in their genebank.

At last, sustainable clarinets!
Hummus war gets serious. All that seratonin not helping?
“Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men.” Simon Schama on Quercus robur. Note to BBC: learn how to write species names.
Pop quiz: Some 20,000 tons of this seed were delivered by Aztec farmers in annual tribute to their emperor, Montezuma. Now big in the US, according to NYTimes piece. From 1984.

All the cool crops are doing it. Sorghum has a Facebook page. Any others?
Soil microbes showing “increasing antibiotic resistance“.
Big, expensive, new Seed Tech Institute for East Africa. I’m suspending judgement. h/t CAS-IP
New Agriculturalist does the AgroSalud thing: biofortified staples.
Speaking of which, you can biofortify chapatis with distillers grains. But what will the livestock eat?
More fermentation goodness.
Cobia is the new cod.
Nutrition in the Millennium Villages.
NW USA seafood recipes have moved up the foodchain in last 100 years, because rarer and more expensive.