Brainfood: Domestication, Maize roots, Dental calculus, Psychedelic drugs, Green manures, Forage millet, VIR radish, Wild beans, Siberian dogs, Maize taxi, Dairying history

Brainfood: Diversification, Diverse diet, Urban forests, Local seed systems, Heterosis, Oil palm core, Black Sigatoka resistance, Pearl millet diversity, Alfalfa diversity, Barley evaluation x2, Ganja origins, Apple origins, Millet diversity, Pepper diversity, Grapevine domestication, Vanilla diversity

Nibbles: Deforestation, Grizzly genetics, Animal domestication, Wheat drones, Okra experiments, Millet survey, The Common Table

  1. 26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
  2. Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
  3. But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
  4. Drones and wheat breeding.
  5. Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
  6. Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
  7. The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.

Brainfood: Predicting society, Andean Neolithic, Ancient watermelon, Iberian silos, Scythian lifeways, Rabbit domestication, British cockerels, Azeri buffaloes, E African caprines, Persian fruit miniatures

Boffins unravel mandarins

I was just going to include the paper Diversification of mandarin citrus by hybrid speciation and apomixis in a forthcoming Brainfood, but the very different approaches taken in the two articles on the paper that I have seen convinced me to give it a bit more space.

The piece in The Packer has very much the industry take, and highlights the contribution of the University of Florida authors: this new information will make breeding easier, including to fight citrus greening.

On the other hand, the press release from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology makes much more of how the paper unravels the origin of shiikuwasha and tachibana, which are culturally important citrus fruits in Japan, though not very significant economically.

Something for everyone.