Nibbles: Crop change, Chinese chocolate, Food system, Eating local, Heritage wheat, NTFPs, Distinguished ethnobotanist, Pumpkins, Garum recipe, Fermentation, Archaea, NBPGR interview

  1. IFAD says farmers might need to change crops. Farmers unavailable for comment as presumably they’re too busy changing crops.
  2. Case in point: China moves into cacao.
  3. The food system is at the centre of all our ills. But I’m not sure switching from maize to sorghum is going to cut it.
  4. And neither will watching those food miles, alas.
  5. Example of a farmer changing crops, watching food miles and diversifying the food system.
  6. I suppose we could also just eat more trees?
  7. We’ll need ethnobotanists for that.
  8. And there’s clearly plenty of pumpkins out there.
  9. Maybe garum would go well with some of those NTFPs, and pumpkins.
  10. Do they teach garum at Fermentation School?
  11. Whoa, I did not realize archaea in the vertebrate gut feed on bacterial fermentation products.
  12. And let’s not forget to put everything in genebanks before it’s too late so we have a chance to do all of the above.

Nibbles: Black sheep, Salty rice, Spanish melons, Olive diversity, Food sculpture, Seed art, Navajo peaches, Grain amaranth, PNG yams, Avocado recipes, Abbasid cooking

  1. Just back from a nice holiday, and greeted by Jeremy’s latest newsletter, which includes, among many delights, a post from Old European Culture on black sheep in the Balkans.
  2. Traditional salt-tolerant rice varieties making a comeback in India.
  3. Traditional melon varieties exhibited by genebank in Spain.
  4. Trying to make the most of traditional olive varieties.
  5. Traditional foods are depicted in stone on Seville’s cathedral.
  6. And more recent attempts to celebrate biodiversity in art.
  7. I guess one could call traditional these old peaches that used to be grown by the Navajo. Have blogged about them before, check it out.
  8. No doubt that amaranth is a traditional crop in Central America. I doubt that it will “feed the world,” but it can certainly feed a whole bunch more people. Thanks to people like Roxanne Swentzell.
  9. There’s nothing more traditional than yams in Papua New Guinea. For 50,000 years.
  10. How to remix a traditional food like stuffed avocado.
  11. How many of the traditional recipes in these Abbasid and later Arab cookbooks have been remixed, I wonder?