- The Real Olive Oil Story. Via.
- Soil Atlas of Europe. Only images, though, it looks like. Via.
- South Carolina farmers embrace heirloom crops.
Nibbles: Bees, Training, Fertilizers, Darfur, Tourism, Vinegar, Gardens
- Commercial bees infecting wild ones.
- Ag graduates put to work in Punjab.
- Humanure. You heard me.
- Agricultural rehabilitation in Darfur.
- “Increasing farm yield should not just be aimed to reduce the local dependency on imported food items as much as it should be tied in to the tourism industry.”
- “One day he said he wanted to have a vinegar festival.”
- Edible landscaping.
- Peach mojito. Yummie.
Nibbles: Funding, Grains, Wildflowers, AVRDC, Cloning, Salinity, Education, Sheep dogs, Swans, Writing, Fisheries, Big ag
- Silver lining: IRRI funding up 20% so far this year.
- Foodie discovers diversity: Amaranth, Himalayan Red Rice, Teff, Farro, Triticale, Sorghum … How have I never tried any of these?
- Texans save wildflower seeds.
- “We are not trying to use vegetables as a substitute for food, but rather as an addition to the food basket, to help farmers become better nourished and grow out of poverty.”
- Jurassic Park video.
- Olive varieties differ in response to irrigation with saline water.
- BBC’s One Planet podcast on urban agriculture in Kampala.
- St Kitts kids learn about sweet potato diversity. From the Taiwanese.
- Even in the struggle between shepherd and wolf the issue is uncertain.
- Agricultural biodiversity rituals corner: swan upping. Ah, swan terrine.
- A roundup of Britain’s nature writers. A sort of nature writer upping, I guess.
- Remember that catfish post a couple days back? This completes the trifecta.
- “…the crop from ground, washed, packed and stacked in supermarket-ready trays in just six minutes.”
La Zucca
That early stirring of globalization that was the Columbian Exchange changed Italian food and cooking forever. That’s well known. What would pizza be like without pomodori and peperoncini, after all? There’s also polenta — and pasta e fagioli. And no doubt also traditional potato-based dishes, though I can’t think of one just now. But the third member of the Mesoamerican Trinity is often forgotten when the usual suspects of the exchange are trotted out, as I’ve just done.
Which is a pity, because the pumpkin features in some pretty nice dishes. ((Ok, I cheated a bit. The Mesoamerican trinity is maize, beans and squash, rather than pumpkin, but you know what I mean.)) So it was nice to see it celebrated last week in Tolentino. We found this sculpture in the piazza which houses the regular fruit and veg market.
On the wall is the text of an ode to the vegetable (or fruit, but I’m not going there) by the local poet Giovanni Sebastiani (1874-1959). You can read “La Zucca” here. But don’t ask me to translate. The local Marche dialect is all but impenetrable to me.
Nibbles: Coffee, EU, Homegardens, Cooking, Pollination, Agricultural origins
- “How did the scientists at the National Zoo get involved in the coffee business?“
- Water! The EU Agriculture Commissioner has a blog. Who knew?
- Refugees in Jamaica “eat what they grow.” Thanks, Mary.
- Culinary conservatism. Next up: culinary neo-conservatism. Saints preserve us.
- Texas wild rice bad at sex.
- The hydrological roots of agriculture in Yemen.