Category: Featured

Rahul Goswami offers a big comment on a little Nibble, worth sharing more widely here:

Hullo, hullo? The Times of India has deigned to notice jowar? More significant in spades than the people it quotes is that this newspaper of upper middle class urban India is talking about what used to be stolid farmers’ fare. Yes, once in while when travelling through rural parts we ate the enormous ‘rotis’ made from jowar. Those, with some spicy mango pickle and a fresh-cut red onion and a dry cooked vegetable, was the staple lunchtime favourite, to be enjoyed in quiet contemplation under a neem or ‘jambul’ tree, while bold goats eyed your tiffin. Now, in the mall-lined main streets or urban Mumbai or Delhi, twee bakeries with cookie-cutter yuppies for clients display their ‘creations’ ‘enriched’ with jowar. Humble pickle? Robust allium cepa (the red onion)? Rural India? We don’t do rural, they say, and slide into their new BMWs, pleased with their new-organic-quaint discovery of jowar.

Michael Hermann asks “what constrains the use of breadfruit”?

The tree is to be found everywhere in the tropics, but except for Oceania is hardly ever used to any significant extent (except as an ornamental tree). I am afraid, awareness of the nutritional value won’t change that, as food choices continue to be mainly influenced by texture, taste and colour and other culinary attributes.

So, what are the constraints, and how might they be overcome?

Dag identifies a possible fly in the soothing ointment of DOI genebank identifiers as a link between data and accessions:

The second social obstacle, if people *want* to share their descriptive information is another issue.

Indeed it is.

Hugh has a question for Roland:

Or is the Rangiroa Red Dwarf the impostor?

And ends his exploration of that question with a paen to the coconut:

Coconuts, like people, are cosmopolitan; free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; at home all over the world.

Well, I wish.

Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, Curator of IRRI’s genebank, offers some insights into germplasm documentation and the necessary conversations, and brings up an important caution:

[I]t is a common mantra to call for recipients to return data “to add to the store of information the genebank has on its accessions”. Be careful you don’t encourage genebank curators to attach recipient’s data to their own accessions. That would be wrong. You have to keep the data associated with the recipient’s germplasm, and link their germplasm back to the genebank accession. You need also to know and record the nature of that link. For example, how did they choose the plant to genotype, and how likely is it to be typical of the original heterogeneous accession?

The ICIS mantra is that’s why we use ICIS, not a traditional genebank database. Traditional genebank databases don’t allow you to define links between the genebank’s accession and the recipient’s sample, so you can’t do what you want. If you seriously want to connect recipients’ info back to the accessions, you’d better think seriously about incorporating germplasm tracking into GRIN and Genesys.

ICIS, in case you were wondering, is the International Crop Information System. There are different implementations for different crops. I don’t know whether they talk to each other or to anything else.