Category: Fruits and nuts

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Kids eat more if fruit and veg are home-grown

A survey in the US has discovered that children eat more fruit and vegetables, and have a more positive attitude to those foods, if they have been grown in a home garden. That’s great, for children at homes with gardens. For the rest, school gardens can help:

“Students at schools with gardens learn about math and science and they also eat more fruits and vegetables. Kids eat healthier and they know more about eating healthy. It’s a winning and low-cost strategy to improve the nutrition of our children at a time when the pediatric obesity is an epidemic problem.”

I happen to think a garden is one of the finest teaching aides ever, but then, I’m biased.

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Smorgasbord: take what you need

Like a perfectly assembled buffet, everyone should be able to find something nourishing in Fidel Castro’s latest essay: Where Have All the Bees Gone? And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide ((Actually, I don’t know whether that is the title he gave it himself, but it’ll do)). Ranging across more topics than you can shake a stick at, he says a couple of things that I happen to agree need saying. Like criticising the modern mania for biofuels: it’s a sick joke in developed countries. As The Economist said two weeks ago, “It is not often that this newspaper finds itself in agreement with Fidel Castro, Cuba’s tottering Communist dictator. But …” ((In fairness, they were commenting on an earlier essay by Castro, but one that contained the same points))

(Disparities between Cuba’s infant mortality rate and medical services and those of the United States are not the subject of this blog.)

Then there are the bees. Here’s Fidel:

Scientists are entertaining all kinds of hypotheses, including the theory that a pesticide may have caused the bees’ neurological damage and altered their sense of orientation. Others lay the blame on the drought and even mobile phone waves, but, what’s certain is that no one knows exactly what has unleashed this syndrome.

There’s enough trickiness around without going into the mobile phone argument. I’d be happy to be proved wrong on this, but for now I’m not even prepared to link to the many, many outpourings on the subject. Let’s just say that mobile phones are the least of Cuba’s worries, with the lowest penetration of any country in South America.

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Sweet smelling durian

Dr Songpol Somsri from Thailand has done a lot of crossing of wild species of durian to come up with one that doesn’t smell like decomposing cats. There should be more recognition for this sort of achievement: it has a greater potential to add to the sum total of human happiness than any number of Nobel Prizes for economics, say.

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School gardens

It seems pretty obvious that school food gardens should be quite useful teaching tools. Kids like nothing better than getting down and dirty. Well, anyway, now there’s proof. A paper in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, whose abstract you can read here, confirms “the efficacy of using garden-based nutrition education to increase adolescents’ consumption of fruits and vegetables.” What an opportunity for also teaching about agricultural biodiversity, highlighting its link to nutrition! Of course, in some parts of the world school gardens actually provide a significant proportion of the students’ diet…

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Trees in Kenya

There were two interesting articles about trees in Kenya in the Money section of this morning’s Daily Nation. Not online, though, so I’ll have to summarize. One piece describes how farmers in Nyeri are adopting a number of short-statured mango varieties from South Africa and Israel, apparently including things called Apple, Kent, Vydke and Tommy. This is not a mango-growing region, but these particular varieties have been found to be a good fit on the small farms of the area, to yield heavily and early, and to be good for juice. So now there’s no need to truck mangoes in from the coast. Good for Nyeri farmers, perhaps not so good for coast farmers? This may not be a zero-sum game: I don’t know enough about the supply of, and demand for, mango in Kenya to predict what will happen, but I would try to conserve those coastal varieties ex situ somewhere just to be on the safe side.

Then there was also a piece on how the Tree Biotechnology Project has been successful in cloning a number of indigenous trees (including for example Prunus africana, whose bark feeds a large international market for a prostate cancer drug) and providing planting materials to farmers. It seems previously the project’s focus has been on eucalypts. This is expected to take pressure off wild populations and contribute to reforestation, but there was nothing in the Daily Nation article about the downside of planting large areas of genetically identical clones. However, this is clearly a problem the project recognizes, as you can see for example by reading on page 28 of this brief on some of its activities:

Planting large areas of single clones will have the effect of decreasing rather than increasing biodiversity, and the risk of narrowing the genetic base needs to be managed to avoid growing pest and disease problems. Mondi has a policy to restrict planting of a single clone to no more than 5% of any planting area, and the project is adhering to this policy. In order to maintain biodiversity, the project team will select a wide range of local tree species of economic value and will feed these into the clonal production system through adaptive tissue culture research. Once the capacity to adapt the techniques of micro-propagation to different species is fully in place, there will be great potential for the project to multiply and disseminate a wide range of improved germplasm of different tree species, including those that are under threat of over-exploitation and extinction, such as ebony.