A blog post at Alcademics.com precipitated a very educational bit of surfing yesterday. I found out about the existence of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization dedicated to the study and preservation of the heritage of the Old West, which of course includes its drinks. I found out that there’s a drink called pisco punch, which I now desperately want to taste. I found out that there’s a dispute between Chile and Peru over the name “pisco.” And I found out that the deadly Pisco earthquake of 2007 destroyed most wineries in the area, though the vineyards (the grape used to make pisco is mainly muscat, but there are other varieties as well) themselves largely survived. What I haven’t been able to find out is how the rebuilding is going. A year ago the news was not good. You can still find pisco on the shelves, so I guess the wineries are back in action. Or is it mainly the Chilean stuff?
Nibbles: Databases, Hell squared, Genebanks, Goats, Olives, Safe movement, Pouteria, Roman wine
- iSPOT to map common names to Latin names. Jeremy says “Good luck with that.”
- International Conference on Biodiversity Informatics. Jeremy says “Good luck with that too.”
- Online discussion forums for the ICBI, above. Agriculture! Forestry! Fisheries!
- Uganda joins the rush to Svalbard global genebank.
- Scientists to clone pashmina goat. Er … why?
- Adopt-an-Italian-olive-tree.
- International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) meets so we can eats.
- Inverted root grafting of canistel at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.
- In vino veritas.
Notes from Cartagena
I’m in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia at a conference on the state of plant genetic resources in Latin America and one of the presenters this morning said that people in the region of Iquitos in Peru consume 193 fruit species, of which 57 are found in local markets. I had never run across this statistic, and was a bit skeptical, but it’s clearly extremely solid, coming from a paper by one of the greats of tropical American botany. Only thing is, the paper is 20 years old. Would be good to count again. I bet that number will be down a bit.
Another interesting little bit of information that emerged is that Chile has, since 2006, a “…Comité Agro Gastronómico, entidad público-privada que busca unir la producción agrícola y del mar con la gastronomía chilena, de manera de poner en las mesas de Chile y el mundo preparaciones que rescaten productos que reflejen la identidad nacional.” ((“…a private-public entity which seeks to unite the harvest of land and sea with Chilean gastronomy, so as to put on the tables of Chile and the world dishes that feature products that reflect the national identity.”)) This kind of thing can be taken too far, and I don’t know whether a committee is necessarily the best way to do it, but the idea of promoting agrobiodiversity through gourmet “ethnic” cooking is not a bad one.
Poppies 2 Pomegranates
Down an “Active Pretox Drink,” plant a pomegranate in Afghanistan. Local varieties, I trust.
Wallacean agrobiodiversity overlooked?
There was an International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallacea in Makassar last December. Wallacea is of course one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, a link between the Sahul and Sunda landmasses. I was only able to find a sketchy programme on the internet, so I don’t really know in detail what was covered. In particular, was agricultural biodiversity included in the discussions? There have been fleeting mentions of “Long-term biodiversity monitoring including that of the Anoa dwarf buffalos on Buton (Phillip Wheeler, University of Hull)” as one of the papers. ((Why was this thing never domesticated?)) But what about spices, for example? Does anyone know?
Incidentally, while looking into this I came across some great pictures of the house where Wallace lived on Ternate. Another site to add to the list for our long-planned tour of the Spice Islands, Robert?