- Cologne has a mustard museum and I want to visit it.
- Lecture on the role of sugar in supporting slavery and capitalism. Where is the sugar museum?Ah here it is.
- The cassowary may have been domesticated in New Guinea ten thousand years ago (with sugarcane?). Deserves a museum.
- Speaking of domestication, here is how that of citrus happened. There’s actually a number of different citrus museums out there.
- Nice PhD opportunity Sweden studying beans in Rwanda. There are museums in both places, I’m pretty sure.
Nibbles: Ethiopian gardens, Potato history, Early tobacco, Byzantine wine, American grapevines, Farmers & conservation
- Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
- Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
- (Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
- Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
- Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
- Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.
Nibbles: Ancient Levant, Guinness cherry, NBPGR, Maize in Africa
- More than milk and honey.
- A very large cherry.
- A very large genebank.
- Let them eat sorghum, Zambian president says.
- That’s not an option for the Hopi.
Nibbles: Humble spud, Perry obsession, Eating to Extinction, Peasant studies
- The story of the potato in Poland.
- The story of one man’s obsession with the pear.
- Nice extract from Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino. Get the whole book to get the full story!
- Free version of the classic Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions by Philip McMichael. The story? “Revaluing of food system diversity, and public and planetary health, reformulates the current agrarian question, rejecting food regime capital-centrism.”
Fruit portraits
Masumi Shiohara was born in Nagano Prefecture in 1974. He worked as a development engineer at a microfabrication manufacturer. After leaving the company, he took over his family’s orchard from his parents, and is now running the farm. He is also involved in breeding and has developed a number of varieties.
He also takes amazing photos to record the characteristics of the different varieties he grows.
When filing a plant patent application, we keep records to identify each of the varieties and to compare those with other similar varieties. A collection of these records is called a characteristic table. As a fruit farmer and breeder, I continue to use photographic techniques to illustrate all of the important items in the trait table in a single piece of work. My photographs become a form of botanical art.
Art indeed. For a more mundane approach to varietal identification, however, check out these resources on Orchard Notes.