- A Mexican entrepreneur and a Pawnee Keeper of the Seed try to save maize landraces in their different ways.
- Indian farmer tries to save plantain varieties.
- Indigenous conservation will save conservation.
- Alice Walters cannot save the food system. But why not let her try?
- None of the above of them would understand the concept of designing a perfect tomato.
- Saffron is the perfect spice.
Nibbles: GenResBridge, Food for All, CIAT genebank, Seed for the Future, Vavilov book, Seeing Pastoralism, S Sudan floods, Sustainable diets, Elon Musk, CePaCT, NZ genebank, Wild potato, Peyote
- Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
- Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
- Meanwhile, in Cali…
- BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
- A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
- Exhibition on pastoralism.
- Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
- Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
- Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
- The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
- Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
- The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
- …and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.
Nibbles: Edibles books, Yam farmer, JL Hudson Seeds, Italian landraces, Native American maize
- University of Chicago Press series on food & drink: Edibles.
- An Indian farmer who’s really into tuber diversity is featured in The Hindu.
- “We are a public access seed bank – not a commercial seed company. You will find that our presentation of information and how you access our seedbank is a bit different from ordering seeds from the usual on-line commercial enterprise.”
- Italian university maps agrobiodiversity.
- Maize data in USDA’s GRIN database includes Indigenous group.
Nibbles: Cheddar cheese, Chickpea festival, Senegal rice, Great Plains, Brazilian fruit, Hungry Eye
- There’s a national chickpea championship, but in Spain.
- Senegal is getting its rice back. No word on any championship.
- The Great Plains are not coming back, alas. Spoiler alert: rice and chickpeas are not to blame.
- Cheddar is trying to get its cheese back, though, and has a chance.
- Cool book on the fruits of Brazil. I bet some would go great with cheddar.
- Review of what seems a cool book on the history of food in Europe. I wonder if it explains the whole cheese-with-fruit thing.
Brainfood: Archaeological edition
- Do Pharaohs’ cattle still graze the Nile Valley? Genetic characterization of the Egyptian Baladi cattle breed. Maybe.
- Lessons on textile history and fibre durability from a 4,000-year-old Egyptian flax yarn. Pharaohs’ flax still being woven though.
- Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture. Which made it easier to adopt cultigens when farmers arrived.
- The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Horses from the lower Volga-Don spread all over Eurasia starting around 2000 BC along with equestrian material culture.
- The Japanese wolf is most closely related to modern dogs and its ancestral genome has been widely inherited by dogs throughout East Eurasia. Kinda too bad it’s extinct, but maybe it can be reconstructed?
- Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites in the montane forests of New Guinea yield early record of cassowary hunting and egg harvesting. Amazing. From looking at eggshells.
- Hallstatt miners consumed blue cheese and beer during the Iron Age and retained a non-Westernized gut microbiome until the Baroque period. Amazing. From looking at, well, there’s no easy way of saying it, paleofeces.