Hyperactive nutritionist and dear friend Lois Englberger in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia tells me that the Community Food Data Tables of their Pohnpei case study have now been posted on the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) website. Pohnpei was one of the twelve case studies in the global health and indigenous foods project led by CINE’s Prof. Harriet Kuhnlein. There’s background information and the main findings of the Pohnpei study based in Mand, a list of the research team members, as well as photos of Karat (banana), Meikole (seeded breadfruit variety), Simihden (well-liked giant swamp taro variety), pandanus and fish liver. Yummie.
When’s lunch?
The Food Timeline.
Book: Artisanal cheeses in the US
Carlo Petrini of Slow Food waxes lyrical over the growth in American artisanal cheeses.
To celebrate these cheeses, I’d like to quote the great Italian writer Italo Calvino who, in his book Palomar, poetically described the value of the diversity of artisan cheeses:
Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries.
From now on we can ideally add to these images the vast expanses of America with their “different greens and different skies”.
Petrini wrote the foreword to “Atlas of American Artisan Cheese”.
Eat weeds
A weed is just a plant in the wrong place. Round here, alas, three of my favourite weeds — purslane (Portulaca oleracea), amaranth (Amaranthus sp.) and fat hen (Chenopodium album) — are very much in the wrong places; on the streets and by the tips where they are the object of far too many dogs’ attention. If they weren’t, I’d hurry over to Vindu’s blog to print out her recipe for Thotakura pappu, dal with amaranth leaves.
Come rainy season, our backyard used to be so full of these plants almost like weeds that the only dishes on the table would be thotakura stir fry or thotakura pappu (actually it still is like that back home)
Perfection, really. Eat the weeds and do yourself some dietary good at the same time. But it does raise the whole thorny question of what to call those species. Neglected? Underutilized? Only by scientists and the mainstream. For local people who depend on diversity, they’re neither.
TV news bites on “eat insects”
 We weren’t the only ones to be tickled by efforts to promote minilivestock.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19ztpXqqhcg