Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms

  1. Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
  2. Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
  3. I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
  4. Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
  5. Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
  6. Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
  7. The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
  8. Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
  9. They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.

Brainfood: Healthy diets, Healthy foods, Nature dependence, Farm size, Climate-smart ag, Monitoring diversity, Pollinators double, Intensification, WTP, Mexican booze

Nibbles: Crop change, Chinese chocolate, Food system, Eating local, Heritage wheat, NTFPs, Distinguished ethnobotanist, Pumpkins, Garum recipe, Fermentation, Archaea, NBPGR interview

  1. IFAD says farmers might need to change crops. Farmers unavailable for comment as presumably they’re too busy changing crops.
  2. Case in point: China moves into cacao.
  3. The food system is at the centre of all our ills. But I’m not sure switching from maize to sorghum is going to cut it.
  4. And neither will watching those food miles, alas.
  5. Example of a farmer changing crops, watching food miles and diversifying the food system.
  6. I suppose we could also just eat more trees?
  7. We’ll need ethnobotanists for that.
  8. And there’s clearly plenty of pumpkins out there.
  9. Maybe garum would go well with some of those NTFPs, and pumpkins.
  10. Do they teach garum at Fermentation School?
  11. Whoa, I did not realize archaea in the vertebrate gut feed on bacterial fermentation products.
  12. And let’s not forget to put everything in genebanks before it’s too late so we have a chance to do all of the above.

Questioning maps

As regular readers know all too well, I can’t resist a map mashup. So when I saw the latest data on deforestation in the Amazon, I fired up MapWarper and GoogleEarth and got to work.

And here’s a look at how recent deforestation in Brazil relates to the localities of past cassava collecting, at least as far as Genesys knows about it.

Now, I don’t know in what way deforestation (and associated disruptions) relates to loss of cassava diversity, but there’s a chance that it might. Could make an interesting PhD project for someone.

Anyway, encouraged by my pretty result, and remembering that I wanted to do something with some shiny new maps I had heard about, I next mashed up sorghum accessions and poverty in Burkina Faso. Here’s what I got.

What’s going on? Why are there relatively fewer sorghum accessions where poverty is higher (more red)? Are those places just harder to reach? Or do people there really grow less sorghum.

Again, I don’t know. But I think it would be interesting to find out.

All speculation welcome in the comments.

Brainfood: RICA, AEGIS, CWR, Agrosavia, DSI, CRISPR, Tradition, SNS, Stability, Birds, Sparing, Genetic erosion