Cooking

Nibbles: Magic beans et al., Avocado etymology, Honey please, Pig maps, Banana pics, Commons, Diet footprint, Sparing/sharing, Old caviar, Old whiskey, Potato wild relatives, Cassava breeding, Apple double, Ancient potatoes, Ancient grapes, African cooking, Native American craft beer, Agricultural heritage site, Aboriginal biodiversity, Svalbard 10th, Alpaca calendar.

Telegraph op-ed on agricultural biodiversity. Yeah, you read that right.
No, avocado does not come from the Aztec’s word for testicles. It’s the other way around.
Why honey is a keeper.
Mapping the hell out of pigs.
Photo database to help tell bananas apart.
Deconstructing the Tragedy of the Commons.
The C footprint of your diet.
“We can spare 50 percent and share the rest.”
Cave man caviar.
Whiskey with that?
Potato wild relatives and food security.
Cassava and food security. No word on its wild relatives.
Wales finds a new apple.
Maybe someone will take a cool picture of it.
Potatoes were always for the masses. Ok, but not sure anyone ever thought otherwise, though.
Grapes, on the other hand…
The cuisines of Africa get their shot.
Some of those will go well with craft beer.
Agricultural heritage list gets saffron and argan. Bet they go together well.
Maybe wild kiang tea will get there too someday.
Or the Aboriginal Australians. Not really agriculturalists, but still.
Is this alpaca exploitation? Maybe you can take the promotion of agricultural biodiversity too far.
Will the Svalbard Global Seed Vault qualify one day? Ten years on, still going strong. And return to top.

Lawrence Haddad on how to start transforming the food system.
Here’s an idea: CIMMYT genebank recognized for restoring agricultural diversity in Guatemala.
And another. Cash transfers are better than more conventional interventions for malnutrition, but they have to be real money.
But, of course, they don’t always work. That’s one of many development myths listed in this fun Twitter thread.
We also need metrics, sure, but the right ones, and we may already have them.
The first ecologist remembered. That would be Humboldt.
Terrible visualizations of the changing geography of American agriculture.
But where are heirloom grown? Rice, say?
And where are all the pomegranate farmers?
I’m sure there are plenty of grape maps of France somewhere. But what’s with all these varieties? And are there more than in pomegranate?
IUCN launches a new Red List website.
Laos launches a sort of Red List website on traditional foods. Here it is. No word on linkages with Ark of Taste.
Belgian lambic beer threatened by climate change. Now it’s personal.
In Italy, the landscape needs people to keep it safe.
Even olive landscapes, which maybe need to be more promiscuous.
Early agricultural migrations fuelled by cheese.
Early eggplant migrations fuelled by elephants.
Microbes to the rescue.