Cooking

Nibbles: Coronavirus double, HSL, Safaa Kumari, Australian forages, Foodways journal

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.

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.