- “No a la droga, si al caucho y al cacao.”
- Spotting banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) with biochemical tests.
- The tree that owns itself. Take that, lawyers!
- “The old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree.”
- Mexican coffee growers protect surrounding forest. Nepal forest community moving in similar direction?
- Mapping the competition between soy and forest in Brazil.
- Weird agrobiodiversity corner: pseudomonad bacteria help maize take up nutrients.
- Using herbicides to help prairie establishment (including sunflower wild relative).
- Stop press: “Agricultural genetics is one of the easier parts of the solution.”
- “…wildcats preferred resting sites in shelter structures near forest edges.”
- Video on Greek yogurt. Jeremy comments: “I’m going back to Crete.”
Unripe for plucking
Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”
“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:
One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.
But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?
Nibbles: Byssus, Crops for the Future, African horticulture, Swine, Seeds, Soils, Phosphorus
- Jeremy gets all etymological about fibres. I guess he got fed up of experimenting with fermentation. And with questioning the Wisdom of the Sachs.
- Did we mention Crops for the Future has a cool new website? Subscribe!
- “Inside Africa’s First Global Horticulture Congress“
- We missed the 5th World Congress of Dry-cured Hams. Who knew? Time did.
- In Hawaii? Got seeds to swap? Go to the Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Captain Cook.
- In Australia? Want better soil? Listen to Maarten Stapper. Via.
- Phosphorus redux. You pays your money …
Go Local recognized by CDC
We’ve often referred here to the sterling efforts of Lois Englberger and the Go Local team in Pohnpei in promoting agrobiodiversity-based solutions to the many, grave health and nutrition problems afflicting Pacific Islanders. The karat banana story is only one example.
Now we hear that the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) and Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have listed the Go Local campaign as one of their success stories in reducing the burden of chronic disease across the U.S. The full list is online. Look under Federated States on Micronesia (p.29). Congratulations to the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the NGO behind Go Local. Some of the other success stories also look interesting.
Location, location, location
Tracing Paper had a fun mosaic of food-themed maps yesterday. We’ve blogged about a couple of them before, and lots more actually, as it’s a bit of an obsession around these parts, but it’s fun to see them all together like that. And while we’re on the subject of geography, I got 8 out of 9 on the beer geography quiz that was also concidentally on Mental Floss this week. Can you beat that?