Fruits and nuts

November 29, 2014November 30, 2014

A meaningful date

There is a wonderful piece by the Kitchen Sisters on US National Public Radio about the history of dates in California — and about plant exploration, politics, and people.

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There are about 3400 ha of date palm in the Coachella Valley, a Southern California desert. Here is a road side view (note how you can you can estimate the growth rate by comparing with the 2007 street view photo) and here is another grove. Wikipedia says that that the Spanish introduced the date palm to lower California (Mexico) in 1765; but Walter Swingle gets the credit for bringing the plant to the USA (see this letter by David Fairchild). In 1903 he collected Deglet Noor in Biskra, Algeria, and in 1929 he collected the prized cultivar Medjool in Morocco.

Coachella date grower Patricia Laughlin has this to say about that:

When the Medjool dates came in, there were only nine offshoots that all of the present trees come from. These medjools came from the oasis of Bou Denib. It’s been wiped out by a disease in Algeria and Morocco. We have sent back good plant stock to return to those areas from which they originated. My husband and I visited. It’s over the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech — out really in the desert. When we got to Bou Denib, the mayor came out to greet us. It was a big occasion. And he said why would anyone from the United States want to come to Bou Denib? We had worked with the Medjool dates for so many years and to see where they originated was very meaningful for us.

November 28, 2014November 29, 2014

Nibbles: Quasilocavore, Returning potatoes, Singapore veggies, Floating gardens, Timber trees, Allanblackia, Cranberry glut, Wild turkeys

Sure, eat locally. But not too much.
Andean farmers don’t have much of a choice about eating locally, but at least now they have more potato varieties to choose from.
Growing your own is about as local as you can get in Singapore.
Maybe they should do it the Bangladeshi way.
A list of the world’s commercial timber trees (pdf). Can’t help thinking they should have made more of this.
Which doesn’t include Allanblackia.
Let them eat cranberries.
Wild turkey with that?

November 27, 2014November 27, 2014

Super bananas in the dock

The Gates Foundation has sunk $15 million into developing GMO ‘super bananas’ with high levels of pre-Vitamin A, writes Adam Breasley. But the project is using ‘stolen’ genes from a Micronesian banana cultivar. And what exactly is the point, when delicious, popular, nutritious ‘red bananas’ rich in caroteinoids are already grown around the tropics?

That provocative lede to an article in The Ecologist provoked a number of responses when I posted it on Facebook ((The link to the banana accession in question I’ve added myself, and for the record, I really cannot see how you can call its use biopiracy)). As not everyone can post comments there, and nobody at all can post comments at The Ecologist, I’ve decided to move the whole thing here.

A couple of comments were actually questions. Anastasia Bodnar asked: Are the existing red banana cultivars suitable for growing where this new variety is intended to be grown? And Sarah Hearne added: And do the red bananas have the same farmer/consumer acceptance in East African and beyond as existing varieties? Good questions all. And Alexandra Zum Felde addressed them, and more, in her comment:

Red bananas — at least ones like those in the photo, not Fe’i bananas — can and are grown where Cavendish are grown (so basically all over the tropics), though they — like many traditional cultivars — are not as productive as Cavendish bananas. But Cavendish are not the issues here — in Uganda the staple banana is Matooke (East African Highland Banana), of which over 180 cultivars exists … and all of which are pretty beta-carotene poor … but local leafy vegetables are full of (pro)vitamins! It would be easier and more cost-effective to re-vamp the image and attractiveness of traditional foods, than to introduce one single GMO variety.

So, are red bananas, whether traditional cultivars or the ones genetically engineered in an Australian lab, the wrong answer to the right question? Discuss.

November 26, 2014November 26, 2014

Nibbles: Hunger Games, Nutritious markets, Plant secrets, Nutrition soundbites, Buckwheat panic, Olive oil panic, Cannabis breeding, Wild turkey genetics, Quinoa wars, Domestication infographics, Howard-Yana Shapiro

Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
“When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
Cool crop domestication infographics.
Plant geneticists are from Mars.

November 24, 2014November 17, 2014

Brainfood: American pigs, Chinese cherries, Sustainable olive oil, Striga diversity, Low Cd durum, Amaranthus in Africa, Ramie core, Campania beans, Forage breeding overview

Genetic characterization of local Criollo pig breeds from the Americas using microsatellite markers. 17 populations from 11 countries derive from 11 ancestral populations, with geographic clustering in some places but not in others.
Physicochemical characterisation of four cherry species (Prunus spp.) grown in China. They’re all different.
Extra-virgin olive oil production sustainability in northern Italy: a preliminary study. Not quite there yet.
Genetic diversity of East and West African Striga hermonthica populations and virulence effects on a contrasting set of sorghum cultivars. Most of the variation in the parasite is within populations, but the most virulent populations are from Sudan.
Assessing diversity in Triticum durum cultivars and breeding lines for high versus low cadmium content in seeds using the CAPS marker usw47. Durum accumulates toxic Cd more than other cereals, but some varieties are better than others, and there are DNA markers to tell you which they are.
The Potential for Utilizing the Seed Crop Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) in East Africa as an Alternative Crop to Support Food Security and Climate Change Mitigation. There is some.
Development of a core collection for ramie by heuristic search based on SSR markers. 22 accessions is all you need to represent 108. Which doesn’t seem particularly useful given the total collection is over 2000.
Morphological and genetic diversity among and within common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) landraces from the Campania region (Southern Italy). There is a bit, some of it even in agronomic traits.
Forage Breeding for Changing Environments and Production Systems: an Overview. Summary of 4th International Symposium of Forage Breeding. If you want to include all trending topics in one study, apply genomic selection to breeding for persistence.