Category: Cooking

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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.

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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?

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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.”
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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.