Cooking

Nibbles: Medieval Iceland, Lebanese wine, Yemeni coffee, Ghana cowpea, SeedShare, Roman hamburger

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.

Getting trade to contribute to nutrition. Hard row to hoe.
Elegiac introduction & postscript by Robert Macfarlane to a fabulous pean to wild Kazakhstan apples by the late, great Roger Deakin called East to Eden.
And the connection between the above and “wild” apples in Scotland.
An expensive poster showing how domesticated apple varieties relate to each other. I have to say I’m sorely tempted.
Sorely tempted by this documentary on some cidermakers’ trip to Kazakhstan too.
Nice to see my map of barley genebank accessions used in a blog post about mapping human DNA phylogenies.
Your regular reminder that “PCLG is an international network of organisations coordinated by IIED that promotes learning on the linkages between people and biodiversity conservation” and that their newsletter is well worth subscribing too.
And here are IIED’s best publications of 2019, including “Biodiversity loss is a development issue,” which is one of the great titles of our time, and not a bad paper either.

How many different kinds of bread do you think there are ancient Greek words for?
“As phenomenally important as the USDA [seed banks] and the Svalbard [Global Seed Vault] are, they are repositories for biodiversity, not places we can call up to get seeds to plant five acres of corn.”
As above, but in India.
As above, but from a seed company.
Barbara Schaal on domestication. With video goodness.
A Food System Dashboard to rule them all: describe, diagnose, decide. Not there yet, but almost. It says here.