- The looming P crisis. As is there’s not enough to worry about.
- Water pest makes itself useful in the Philippines.
- “To promote real Oscypek, Zakopane’s tourism bureau has created a special tour allowing visitors to find the mountain meadow huts of 25 baca cheesemakers.” Sign me up.
Nibbles: Aphids, Chef wanted, Spanish ham, Obama, Neem
- “The most closely related aphids were those feeding on the same host species, rather than those from the same geographic area.”
- “I’m looking for a restaurant chef who would like to spend some time with me, learn something about my garden and the plants I’m growing, and experiment with cooking some dishes and possibly serving them to a small number of customers. ”
- “It isn’t sustainable, it isn’t very natural, but it tastes great.”
- Filipinos set up seaweed genebank and nursery.
- Eat the View: the Story of the White House Garden Campaign.
- “Foreign varieties of cotton and date palms have become a threat to local species here in Upper Sindh. …these varieties are affecting agriculture, forest and environment of Sindh, this threat can be overcome with the plantation of the Neem Tree.”
Fermented diversity
Luigi’s post on The glut of bugs in your gut opened a window here on a neglected aspect of biodiversity: the bacteria associated with certain foods and those associated with digesting that food. In all the background murmuring about probiotics and prebiotics, I’ve been hearing a lot of good sense from Seth Roberts. He’s the self-experimenter who devised the Shangri-La Diet (which isn’t a diet but a way of regulating appetite) and of late he’s been blogging more and more about fermented foods.
The things Roberts has noted are plentiful and diverse — I won’t summarize them here — but I can say that I’ve yet to meet a fermented food, in the widest sense, that I didn’t like. I also like playing with a few ferments myself. Of course there are fermentation fanatics, not just for the process as a whole but for particular “miracle mushrooms” and the like. ((To which, naturally, I have no intention of linking.)) And that puts some peoples’ backs up. But there is also probably a lot of good sense in making use not only of a diversity of ingredients, but also in a diversity of ways of processing them, outside and inside the body.
Verdura di campo needs to be identified
In the first warm days of early spring Caterina’s mother — from the generation that lived through the wars — still roams the fields in search of that wonder of wonders… le verdure di campo (wild “vegetables”).
I bet she does. Read all about it in ItalianNotebook, and you’ll be salivating within seconds, like I was.
But fight the urge to rush out and harvest the roadside verges long enough to read the comment made by Barbara Modica at 2:39 pm on May 24th:
In the spring, there is a weed which resembles a rhubarb plant, except it is smaller, has a green stalk and green leaf shaped and about the same size as rhubarb. My husband’s family (from Sicily) boiled the stems, discard the leaves, then breaded them and fried them in olive oil. They called them gardoni (or something similar to that). Are you familiar with them? They are only edible in the spring, later on turn into a tall plant. We carry on the tradition and our grandchildren love them also.
Any ideas?
Nibbles: Prickly pear, Corridors, Nutrition, Backyard chickens, SW agriculture, Non-wood forest products, Mexican ungulates, Chinese sheep
- How to make a cordial from tuna. No, not the fish.
- Looking beyond the borders of protected areas.
- NY Times op-ed on “hidden hunger.”
- Google reveals backyard chicken coop bubble in US.
- 3000-year-old irrigation system found in Arizona.
- New NWFP-Digest out.
- An overview of ungulate conservation in Mexico.
- Protected wolves threaten sheep flocks in China.