- A shaman’s grave from the verge of agriculture.
- Mushroom improves violin’s sound.
- Good news for California’s livestock.
- Linking climate and the rise and fall of China’s dynasties.
- I love pictures of gigantic fish, don’t you? Not farmed, thankfully.
- Making butter.
Assyrian food culture in the Old and New Worlds
The BBC has an interesting photo essay on wine-making’s struggle for survival in Turkey among Assyrian Christians. Interestingly, a scion of the Assyrian community is something of a food guru in the Bay Area. Expatriates again…
Nibbles: Toms, Virus, Svalbard, CIRAD
- More on those purple tomatoes. And there’s lots more where that came from.
- Virus weakens the response of genes that normally boost defense against pest.
- “Superman had it right.”
- Yeah, but France has genebanks too.
- Dispatches from Terra Madre: “How are you fighting racism in your food community?”
Chocolate industry meets all over the place
The cacao community is meeting in Ghana under the sponsorship of Mars to draft a plan for sustainable cacao farming in Africa:
Topics on the table range from multifunctional agriculture, genetics and germplasm, to pest and disease, and science and leadership.
I hope they will also consider the kind of value-adding that is being discussed at the just-opened annual Paris chocolate show.
Nibbles: Wild food, Sisal, Cucurbits, Carnival, Rice blight
- Zimbabwean take to wild foods, and not in a good way.
- “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see my sisal flooring.”
- Gourds+Halloween=Jawdropping Creativity.
- Tangled Bank 117.
- “Terror agent” listing for Xanthomanas oryzae blights US rice research.