- Google Map of British protected food names. Where’s fish and chips? Or the cream tea. Japan next?
- Indian genebank in the record books for characterizing wheat.
- And with no help from CIMMYT!
- Getting those damn smallholders to innovate already.
- Ghana gets a new cowpea to innovate with. Well, almost.
- And there I was thinking smallholders had been innovating for thousands of years. Even in the frozen north. Winter may be coming, but we’ve got grog. Which you know is good for you.
- As is chocolate, so go ahead and submit your heirloom cacao beans for evaluation. But don’t be tempted to cheat. We’ll know if you are.
- Oh damn, it’s Green Week.
- The story behind the methods used in a recent paper on dog diversity. Wonkish.
- We seem to have slipped off the Berry Go Round treadmill, which means we missed some gorgeous photos of broad beans.
- And another belated treat: UNESCO’s round up of World Heritage agricultural landscapes.
- …one of which is not tea in China, but maybe it should be, before it’s too late.
Nibbles: Kangkong, Fun labwork, Breadfruit beer, Saving juniper, Green Week
- Ipomoea aquatica in the news.
- DNA extraction made fun.
- Samoa launches breadfruit beer.
- Gin maker protects his livelihood.
- The Treaty goes to Green Week.
Food globalization under Mowbray’s Cupola
One of the highlights of my recent trip to India was dinner with Prof. Swaminathan and some of his colleagues at the Madras Club. That’s me under the club’s famed 18th century cupola. The Madras Club is reputed to be the birthplace of mulligatawny soup, so I was planning a post showing how this quintessentially Indian concoction illustrates global interdependence in food products, complete with map of the worldwide origin of the ingredients. A map like this.
But it was Italian night, and I had minestrone.
Nibbles: Papaya relatives, Agrobiodiversity monitoring, Orange breeding, Corn mutant, Cashew processing, Pecan pie, Communications history, Wheat research video, Agroforestry, Breeding, AG research in USA, Philippines typhoon, Eating insects, Indian blog, Open data, Microbes & wine, European databases, Afro-Indian Millet Alliance
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As Jerry Seinfeld famously once said, I’m getting a little backed up here. Travel and work and, well, life, have conspired to keep me away from Nibbling for the past week and more, so apologies if what follows proves a little difficult to digest.
- The closest relative of the papaya looks nothing like a papaya. But will it be monitored, along with the rest of agrobiodiversity?
- We might have to look further afield than near relatives to save the orange. But closer to save corn.
- Cashews are bad? Say it ain’t so. And as for pecans…
- CGIAR comms guys (and it is all guys) reminisce about the good old days of agricultural research. And here’s an example, using wheat, of what they’re up to now. Nice shoutout for breeding and genebanks. Though of course it’s not just about the breeding.
- Crop improvement is one of six ways of feeding the world. Just. CGIAR comms guys probably on it. Barbara Schaal certainly is.
- IRRI maps rice areas affected by the recent typhoon. I did ask, and farmers there apparently mostly grow modern varieties. FAO provides more context.
- More insectivorous hijinks.
- Great new blog on chai wallahs.
- Big, open ag data will save us all. That sound you hear is the zeitgeist catching up. And the CGIAR is on it.
- You say terroir, I say microbes.
- Report on a descent into Genebank Database Hell, European Chapter. Ah, but it’s open.
- India reaches out to Africa, millets in hand.
Nibbles: Fungi, Beer, Cupuaçu, Tearless onions, Melaleuca, Tomatillo, Seed takeover, Katy Perry’s seeds, Bruges fries, EU ag
- They got an awful lot of fungi in Norwegian wood.
- Waiter, there’s a mushroom in my beer.
- Kew seed scientist discovers the taste of the Amazon.
- That “tearless onion” is good for the heart story? The article is behind a paywall, so I don’t know how the boffins suppressed lachrymatory factor synthase. And frankly, I don’t really care.
- A new guide to Melaleuca species. Be still my beating heart.
- The world’s oldest tomatillo clocks in at 52.2 million years.
- French seed company Vilmorin buys 25% of Zimbabwe’s Seed Co. Ltd. What could possibly go wrong?
- “Katy Perry’s latest album, Prism, is Number One in Australia, but that hasn’t stopped the country from declaring it a potential biohazard.” Can anyone explain the significance of this story? Or who Katy Perry is?
- On the whole, I’d rather be at the frites museum in Bruges.
- “Clearly, when it comes to agriculture, productivity matters.” Here comes the science.