Cooking

Nibbles: Robin Graham RIP, Fred Bliss award, Seed production, Chile spuds, Indian goats, Ancient bread, Horner Bier, Cheap food, Vigna, Singing dog, Fungal diversity

Remembering Robin Graham, prophet of biofortification.
Honouring plant breeder supreme Fred Blisss.
Need to produce seed of all those new varieties that breeders come up with.
And save the stuff they will replace: The Economist does the potatoes of Chiloé.
Hey, it’s not just about the crops: conserving goats on farm in India.
The experimental archaeology of bread thrives under corona. And if you were intrigued by the potato detoxification reference, find the details on Bill Schindler’s website. And not only bread and potatoes, also beer…
Like Mozart’s oat beer? Which was apparently killed off by lager back in Austria but is now available in Denver.
Food shouldn’t be cheap, it should be affordable, and not only for those who consume it. Ancient Egyptian bread will be exempted.
No way Kenyan coffee can be described as cheap. h/t Jeremy’s newsletter: have you subscribed yet?
I don’t know how cheap mungbean is in Myanmar, but it seems to be very valuable.
The PNG singing dog is not extinct in the wild after all? Priceless.
Combination of key and photo guide to the identification of European fungi. Worth its weight in truffles. Source.

Not-so-suffering sassafrass.
Another seed library, this one in Canada.
Fruit breeder Dr David Cain gets 2020 Wilder Medal from American Pomological Society.
PowerPoint on plant breeding. Dr Cain unavailable for comment.
Which species can you bank anyway? With video goodness. Which I agree is not all that unusual these days, but still.

A Svalbard for data, in Svalbard.
IPES-Food critiques OneCGIAR as being insufficiently decentralized, context-specific, agroecological, and power-equitable.
Tequila FAQ. Probably need a shot after the above.
Seed saving made easy; maybe too easy.
The above, applied, in the Pacific.
The above, applied, everywhere.
The ROI of conservation. In situ only, alas.
Jeremy’s latest newsletter: Brazilian agribusiness, boycotts & slavery, cashew boom, peanut crash, Jay Rayner’s suggestions. Do subscribe.

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.