Britain’s oldest recipe sounds as awful as more recent fare.
Hot peppers celebrated
Damn, I missed the Peperoncino Festival!
Live to eat
Learn about culinary tourism.
The Ojibwa and wild rice
Smithsonian Magazine has a short article, photos and a video online about a Native American tribe called the Ojibwa, who live in northern Minnesota, and their close connection with wild rice, “manoomin,” or Zizania aquatica. ((Thanks to the Food Museum for pointing to the story.)) We talked about this before. Ricing is central to the Ojibwa’s founding story, and also a welcome source of income (unemployment is at 50%):
The White Earth Land Recovery Project, run by political activist and tribe member Winona LaDuke, was started 18 years ago to preserve the harvest and boost the tribe’s share of the proceeds. It operates a mill on the reservation and markets Native Harvest wild rice to specialty stores around the country (and through nativeharvest.com). Ojibwa wild rice is one of only five U.S. products supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, an international organization based in Italy that aims to preserve traditional or artisan foods.
Screening potatoes for micronutrients
Yet more about iron (and other assorted micronutrients). A recent post of mine elicited a comment from Glenn to the effect that breeders have screened germplasm collections of the major staples for micronutrient composition. I was skeptical about the extent to which this has been done (though not, I must add, about the fact that there will be much more of it in the future). Another post, this one by Jeremy, suggested that there was precious little information out there about variety-level nutritional information.
Well, I’ve now come across a paper that allows us to put some numbers on the amount of screening that has been done for one staple crop, the potato. There’s only an abstract freely available online, but a paper by CIP scientists reports (among other things) on micronutrient levels in native potato varieties in Peru:
Several studies have reported mineral concentrations in improved potatoes… However, limited information was available about the mineral concentration of potato germplasm and breeding materials until 2006. A detailed study was undertaken to determine the levels of Fe and Zn in 37 native varieties, both grown by farmers as well as from the collection under custody at CIP.
The potatoes were grown in a couple of different places. There was lots of variation, both genetic and due to the environment where they were grown, and also an interaction between these factors. And the heritability was high, suggesting that there is potential for improvement through selection and breeding.
But let’s remember that the total CIP potato collection amounts to over 7,500 accessions. That means that some 0.5% has been screened. A good start, but still only a start.