- Dahlias: good to look at, good to eat.
- Why agriculture bypassed herbaceous perennials, until now.
A menu of political diversity
“Traditional” usually means indigestible or overcooked. “Organic” means it costs more.
I’m not going to fall into the trap of taking satire seriously enough to correct misapprehensions. 1 But that’s a tiny snippet from a very entertaining piece on The Economist’s Europe View. It explains menu items such as Cutlet Carpathian Style 2 and other gems. What I want to know is, could we do the same for traditional, neglected and underutilised species?
Around the world in a grain of rice
A great image of agrobiodiversity from Italian Grazia magazine, with thanks to Linda for cutting it out and saving it for me. It’s not online, so this is a scan. Click on the image to enlarge it. The spoonfuls are, from the top:
1. arboreo rice for risotto
2. long-grain basmati rice
3. mixture of rice, oats and Khorasan wheat
4. Sisa rice for sushi
5. black Venere rice
6. long-grain red rice
7. basmati again
8. mixture of unmilled rices
Nibbles: Poisonous cassava, Methane, Beer
- Tragic. But was cassava really to blame?
- Breeding the wind out of cows.
- “I just got back from Italy, where there are now 250 breweries. A few years ago, there were only 20 or 30. They’re on the verge of an explosion of beer culture…” Really? I do hope so.
Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood
- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”