Cooking

June 22, 2011June 21, 2011

Making the most of bitter gourd diversity at AVRDC

Another interesting agrobiodiversity piece in AVRDC’s newletter today:

The AVRDC Nutrition group is locked in a struggle with a cucurbit – and so far, warty Momordica charantia appears to be winning! As part of the project “A better bitter gourd: exploiting bitter gourd to increase incomes, manage type 2 diabetes, and promote health in developing countries,” researchers have begun preparing samples of the vegetable for later laboratory analysis.

Interested? “Like” the project’s Facebook page then!

June 17, 2011June 17, 2011

Nibbles: G20, Chickens, Yucca flowers

Advice to the G20: “hunger is neither the result of demographic problems nor just the result of a mismatch between supply and demand”.
Let there be chickens! Picture goodness from National Geographic.
How to cook yucca flowers. And eat them, obviously.

June 11, 2011June 12, 2011

Andean products on display

The Fifth Potato Festival is underway in the Surco district of Lima, Peru. It sounds like fun, but all the information about it online at the moment is in Spanish only. If you don’t read the language, and can’t be bothered fighting with the results of Google Translate, you can read a short piece on last year’s event in English. It’s actually about much more than just the potato. There are stands on a whole range of new Andean products:

…black quinoa, royal quinoa, red quinoa, quinoa sajama, maca, instant amaranth, instant cañihua, wheat, red corn, corn chullpi, bean mashco, barley mashco, black potato, white potato flour, etc.

June 10, 2011June 20, 2011

Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. ((NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system. Caption by Holli Riebeek.))

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. ((And can I take this opportunity of thanking Google for the Google Earth license?)) Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

June 6, 2011June 3, 2011

Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas

Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.