Cooking

Nibbles: Monticello, Breeding, Seed saving, Neolithic cultures, Ube

Monticello has heirloom crops. But not only, lest we forget.
The need for public sector breeders. And their genebanks.
Let’s all save our seeds.
Although of course seeds are not enough to define a culinary tradition, now or in the Neolithic.
Yeah, what exactly is ube? Dioscorea alata? Ipomoea batatas? Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever: purple is the new orange.

If that looks familiar, you can help…

Simran Sethi’s Svalbard speech. See everything below for other examples of the importance of agricultural biodiversity.
Egypt did not take good care of its cotton germplasm, and it went badly for them.
AgroecologyNow has regular updates. Great name, by the way.
Breeding for salt tolerance.
Breeding for photosynthetic rate.
Breeding as both science and art? Not entirely convincing, but ok.
Making the most of sugarcane. Yeah, you guessed it, rum. There’s certainly an art to that.
Not sure what brought on another humble-bragging potato piece, but I’m not complaining. Two pieces, in fact.
Hey, we’re going to have a world banana map soon. Yes, another one. But this one will be different…
Beans are climbing the list of important African crops. See what I did there?
Vegetables have wild relatives too.
Arizona has some interesting foods, old and new. Including vegetables.
Cashew is the new avocado.
Blockchain for Mongolian cashmere? I can’t rule it out.
Sorghum is set to take over the South. Of the US, that is.

Ag diversification was a thing even in medieval Iceland.
Not to mention contemporary Lebanon.
Dumping qat for coffee is the good news we all wanted to hear. Jeremy provides the context.
Ghana gets some new cowpeas. I just think it’s cool that they made the news.
The joys of seed saving: the backstory of SeedShare.
Procuring a hamburger in ancient Rome. This is a great sub-Reddit, BTW.