Cooking

Nibbles: Coconut & biodiversity, Nutrition, Maize volatiles, Tea history, OFS online, AGRA, Forage breeding, Grapevine editing, SDG indicators, Black Lives Matter

Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
The cost of poor diets is considerable.
Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.

Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
All the tea in India. And Ireland?
The rise of craft chocolate.
And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
NBPGR does medicinals.
You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.

The future of Australian wine in maps.
A Svalbard for the human microbiome?
Plant breeders on the edge of the mainstream.
From FAO, a bibliography on seed systems and seed relief.
Book review: The Archaeology of Food: Identity, Politics, and Ideology in the Prehistoric and Historic Past.
Training seed producer groups can help their non-member neighbours too.
There will be marmalade for tea. But, spoiler alert, it might not be what you think.

Nordics upgrade genebank database.
Crowdsourcing Wollemi pine conservation.
Corals need a genebank too. And a database and crowdsourcing as well, no doubt.
Though I’m not sure they’ll be able to make the food security argument.
Or bring chefs on board.
What would a community genebank look like for coral, I wonder. And are they hiring?

The Stairway to Heaven of barley breeding for whiskey involves thinking about taste a bit more.
Taste comes into maize breeding too.
Jeremy talks taste with Margot Finn. Oh and there’s his latest newsletter.
Farmerama podcasts on cereals in small-scale farming in the UK and beyond.
Nothing small-scale about ancient farming in the Nile Valley.
Make ancient Roman bread during lockdown. Then compare and contrast with the Egyptian kind?
What did the Romans ever do for the rural economy of Britain anyway?
Course on communicating the value of biodiversity. Wasn’t all the above enough?