- What is the best beef in Europe?
- When was the first yoghurt of the Neolithic?
- How do you measure smallholder resilience? Or vulnerability, for that matter…
- How does this Kenyan seed story differ from this Malian one?
- How do you address iron deficiency in Rwanda?
- What’s the value of a genebank?
- There’s a downside to plant-derived smoke?
- So what’s the latest paradigm shift on that ancient-people-in-the-Amazon thing?
- How are the Spanish people coping with the crisis?
- How come those transcribed podcasting, medal winning conservationists still don’t get it?
- What are Ethiopians doing in Amazonia?
Nibbles: Gathering, Tubers, Quinoa, Africa-American heirlooms, Deforestation
- Edible weeds, anyone?
- Nope, Slate says the answer is tubers. And they may have a point.
- But Evo Morales thinks it’s quinoa.
- Meanwhile, Ms. Kimble cultivates her vegetable garden.
- And Luigi enticed by new mapping tool to explore deforestation on Sumatra.
Nibbles: Big cheese, Perennials, Maize, Plant breeding, Tiny corn, Communicators, Traditional Foods, Forest peoples, Guar
- IFAD’s organic Moldovan cheese wins big.
- Advice for Rwandan coffee and banana farmers to cope with climate change.
- Advice from Mexico’s campesinos on how to cope with climate change.
- Do they – or you – need to participate in plant breeding? This toolkit could help.
- These folks don’t … From little corn plants, big efficiencies grow. I think.
- Newly trained press officers to support agriculture on Indian Ocean islands.
- Hurrah! A conference on traditional foods, with street food seminar accompaniment. h/t CFF.
- The diversity of forest peoples, united in their dependence on forests.
- Alternatives to guar: “Even though all the ingredients are acquired from food suppliers, the CleanStim fluid system should not be considered edible.”
Uniting the conversation
We recently read Sweeping the Sleaze, by Oliver Reichenstein, ((Thanks to Daring Fireball.)) and agreed with much of what he said. So we got rid of the various sharing buttons on this blog, which weren’t actually being used all that much. But then, how to bring the conversations on various social sites together? Reichenstein answers the same rhetorical question thusly:
Is there a better way to “integrate Social Media”? Well, why don’t you just post the best reactions on the bottom of the article? Like this:
So we might try that. Over on Facebook, for example, Dirk Enneking, who thinks sourdough is superior to yeast ((With which I agree.)) had this to say in response to my comment that a sourdough without yeast would be a very sorry affair.
@ Jeremy, it depends on who you subscribe to, some sourdoughs include yeasts, others are more purist: lB=Lactobacillus Lb. sanfransiscensis, Lb. farciminis, Lb. fermentum, Lb. brevis, Lb. plantarum, Lb. amylovorus, Lb. reuteri, Lb. pontis, Lb. panis, Lb. alimentarius, W. ciboria (F. Leroy, L. De Vuyst / Trends in Food Science & Technology 15 (2004) 67–78_
To which I responded:
@Dirk Enneking I wonder; the article you cite is a specifically industrial view of a culture for fermentation that is designed with uniformity and other “important functionality” in mind. I would be willing to bet that any starter culture (and sourdough is often a misnomer as the resulting bread can be not in the least sour) used by artisanal bakers and home bakers would contains yeasts as well as lactobacilli and other bacteria. But then, you probably know that: http://sourdough.com/forum/fake-sourdough
That last link is a dig at the fact that Dirk is in Australia, home of major fake sourdoughness.
The big question, of course, is whether we should continue to follow Reichenstein’s advice and copy conversations here. What do you reckon?
Nibbles: GIBF, Identifiers, Farming animals, Geomedicine, Seed saving, Seeds of Success, CWRs, CORA 2012, Sourdough culture bank, Phenology, Wild Coffea, Cassava conference, Condiments, Gulf truffles, Cashew nut, Home gardens, Tea, Bacterial diversity
- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…