- 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.
Nibbles: China, Andean roots and tubers, pigs, greenhouse gases, locavores, drought, mapping horticulture, 2010 Growing Green Awards, canker, World Bank, threats, cashmere
- China’s role in food price spikes. Books sounds worth reading.
- Dutch chefs easily fascinated. Just show ’em an Andean root or tuber.
- Much more on that pig domestication story.
- Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases agrees its agenda. In New Zealand. Jeremy avoids snarky remark.
- New York Times debates locavorism. Someone has to.
- Monsanto, DuPont Race to Win $2.7 Billion Drought-Corn Market. Africa says Yay!
- If you have an horticultural development project, Horticultural CRSP and GlobalHort want to hear from you.
- More environmental awards handed out. Recipients asked to blog.
- Chestnuts out of fire?
- Data!
- Really, who’d be a farmer?
- Chinese clone woollier cashmere goats. Why not just clone the wool directly, cut out the middleman?
- Tales of maize and tomato hybrids.
Protecting edible orchids around the world
Well, national parks may not be all that great at conserving crop wild relatives, but a fascinating article in the latest newsletter of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Network, which is unfortunately not online, alerts me to the fact that a Tanzanian national park was set up a few years back to protect edible orchids.
Last year, WCS released a report documenting how the region’s orchids were being exploited by local people, who exported the plants into neighboring Zambia, where they are eaten as a delicacy. The report says that up to 85 orchid species are being harvested for use in chikanda or kinaka, a delicacy in which the root or tuber of terrestrial orchids is the key ingredient in a type of meatless sausage.
Chikanda is an unsustainable industry in Zambia itself. Edible orchids are also big in Malawi. And they’re sought after in other parts of the world as well, notably Turkey, where their use in making a delicious traditional desert is endangering them. I couldn’t find any reference to protected areas in Turkey being set up specially for them, but the commercial export of the orchids has been banned since 2003.
Food technology: Life imitates Art
Run, don’t walk, to Nicola’s latest post over at Edible Geography, Multifunctional Desserts. I guarantee that you will emerge wiser and in a better mood than when you arrive, plus you’ll be able to fill empty moments in conversations with more fun food factoids, and other nuggets of information, that you had ever thought possible.
What’s it about?
Do me a favour, just go.
Nibbles: Quasi conservation, Prioritization, Nabhan, Wild sunflower in Argentina, Pests and diseases, Ethiopian honey, African beer, Ash, Camel milk, Livestock conference, Bull breeding, Goldman Environmental Prize, Anastasia
- Another nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism in conservation? Yeah, right. Oooooh, here’s another. What next? Conservation-vs-use to bite the dust?
- Now here’s a thing. Priority setting in conservation for plants in Turkey and sheep in Ethiopia. Compare and contrast.
- “Bad-ass eco warrior” quoted on … apples.
- Invasive species can be good … when they are sunflower wild relatives.
- Pests and diseases: “New solutions could include novel resistant cultivars with multiple resistance genes, suitable epigenetic imprints and improved defence responses that are induced by attack.” I’ll get right on that. And more from Food Security.
- Rare Ethiopian honey becoming rarer.
- Also rare are micro-breweries in Africa. Alas.
- Volcano bad for British diet. And Kenyan jobs.
- So let them drink camel milk!
- Conference on Sustainable Animal Production in the Tropics. Doesn’t sound like much fun? It’s in Guadeloupe!
- And, there will probably be photographs of bulls of “stunning scrotal circumference.” Convinced yet?
- “Rios won for his work promoting a return to more traditional farming techniques focusing on seed diversity, crop rotation and the use of organic pest control and fertilizers to both increase crops and improve the communist-led island’s environment.”
- Our friend Anastasia does Seed Magazine: “Until broader efforts to reduce poverty can take hold, crops with improved nutrients could be very important in reducing death and disease caused by nutrient deficiencies.”