Cooking

Nibbles: Neolithic farmers, Minoan DNA, Cretan food, Olive history book, Organic dreams, Fairtrade experiment, Value chains, Jamaican breadfruit exports, Climate smart successes

Neolithic farmers spread into Europe by sea.
And it looks like the ones who got to Crete eventually gave rise to the Minoans.
And ate food not unlike what Cretans ate up to a hundred years ago.
Well of course the olive is important to all that.
Ten thousand years later, we find that organic is an impossible dream.
And Fairtrade may or may not work.
But value chains will make you free. Although that’s easier said than done.
And you have to be climate-smart to boot. Really, who’d be a farmer, in the Neolithic or now.

Banana germplasm gets around.
Kenyan urban cows get around. Not local breeds, though…
Can agriculture deliver both resilience and nutrition? FAO thinks so.
Yeah, about that: we’re gonna need better data.
Participatory varietal selection in Nepal. Not as novel as made out here, surely.
Brazil nut gets it all.
Today’s beer story comes from India.
Sorting the sheep from the goats, the molecular way.

“Productivism” skewered one last time. Until the next time.
The Malagasy Bean Renaissance. No, really.
The science of beer foam. Now there’s no excuse.
Cocktails can be biodiverse too. You bet they can.
CIAT’s new strategy makes a splash. Genebank front and centre.
New ICIPE director tells all. She used to work at CIAT, did you know?
First edition of The State of the World’s Forest Genetic Resources is out. Now to do something about it.
Italy’s traditional rices preserved. Yes, Italy’s, you heard me.
Agriculture was invented in the current interglacial. Why then, and not in the Eemian?
Quinoa macronutrients exzzzzzzzamined.
Your what-to-do-now guide to the medieval farm. Progress? Not what it’s cracked up to be.
People of the Toluca valley! Expect researchers looking for wild potato genes resistant to late blight.

A Wheat Germplasm Database To Rule Them All. No, not from CGIAR.
New livestock maps of the world. Yes, from CGIAR.
Kashmir ponders an apple genebank.
More from Game of Strawberries.
Wanna study the population genomics of cheese fungi? Course you do.
Domesticating local fruit trees good for nutrition, but need secure tenure and good planting material.
Building better broccoli, the genome way.
Early domesticated dogs helped in mammoth hunts.
Current extinction rate about 1000 times higher than background. Databases can help with that, believe it or not.
Building a national PGRFA system in Bolivia. When will they ratify the ITPGRFA, though?

Totally forgot if we already linked to this latest pean to open source seed.
Climate-smart agriculture described in three paragraphs.
Hope someone explains it to European farmers, and soon.
Italy is increasingly wooded. But only because farms are being abandoned. Maybe not climate-smart enough?
If only those farms had better links to markets, like in E. Africa…
Dutch food writer on the Jewish (maybe) origins of the Surinamese national dish. Gotta love edible aroids. Jeremy does his podcast thing.
Step 1: Breed your hops.
Step 2: Find a funky yeast.
Step 3: Crack the Kenyan beer market.
Back to real life: USAID’s brand new multisectoral nutrition policy. Now, then, what’s the betting that the agricultural interventions supported by USAID avoided the risks that such things often hold for nutrition (incomes, prices, types of products, women social status and workload, sanitary environment and inequalities)?
SeedMap.org breaks down crop wild relatives.
Somebody mention crop wild relatives? Yes, Sandy Knapp.
Somebody mention parientes silvestres de cultivos? Yes, Nora Castañeda.
How many CWR will go the way of Arabidopsis? Because southern populations of that species in genebanks are already doing better than local populations in northern sites.
How many crop wild relatives in Kew’s meadows?