Category: Fruits and nuts

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Bye bye, Miss American (Apple) Pie?

Maybe it was the discussion about apple varieties during the 60 Minutes piece on Svalbard:

…in the 1800s in the United States people were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples. 7,100 different varieties of apples that are catalogued,” Fowler explains.

“And how many are there today?” Pelley asks.

“We’ve lost about 6,800 of those, so the extinction rate for apples varieties in the United States is about 86 percent,” he explains. 

More likely it was just the general interest in genebanks and crop diversity generated by the Svalbard phenomenon. In any case, it is great to see a mainstream publication like The Alantic Monthly waxing lyrical about apple conservation. Via The Fruit Blog.

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Resources on PNG food plants

Bruce French taught Food Crop Production at Vudal University in the 1970s and wrote a number of books on the food plants of PNG. These are now sadly out of print, but fear not. I’ll let him take up the story:

In recent years I have continued to put together information for PNG, along with my wider project of trying to describe all the food plants of the world. At this stage I have several books written, available as computerised books in pdf format, on Food Plants, Pests and Diseases and Food Composition for PNG. These are all available on the website, www.foodplantsinternational.com, and can be downloaded. As they are fairly large books, and may take a while to download, it may be easier for me to send them to people within PNG on DVD/CD. There are also other resources such as photos, databases, etc. that could also be made available. The information should be useful for agriculture workers, teachers, health workers and other interested people.

You can find the publications here. They’re wonderful.

Via Didinet Issue 8, 2008 (not online).