Ever since I was a kid I’ve wanted to visit the Sardinian Bronze Age megalithic edifices known as nuraghe. Finally managed it last week. Very exciting. And what should I find at Lu Brandali?
Yes, you guessed it: a crop wild relative.
Day made.
Nibbles: Black sheep, Salty rice, Spanish melons, Olive diversity, Food sculpture, Seed art, Navajo peaches, Grain amaranth, PNG yams, Avocado recipes, Abbasid cooking
- Just back from a nice holiday, and greeted by Jeremy’s latest newsletter, which includes, among many delights, a post from Old European Culture on black sheep in the Balkans.
- Traditional salt-tolerant rice varieties making a comeback in India.
- Traditional melon varieties exhibited by genebank in Spain.
- Trying to make the most of traditional olive varieties.
- Traditional foods are depicted in stone on Seville’s cathedral.
- And more recent attempts to celebrate biodiversity in art.
- I guess one could call traditional these old peaches that used to be grown by the Navajo. Have blogged about them before, check it out.
- No doubt that amaranth is a traditional crop in Central America. I doubt that it will “feed the world,” but it can certainly feed a whole bunch more people. Thanks to people like Roxanne Swentzell.
- There’s nothing more traditional than yams in Papua New Guinea. For 50,000 years.
- How to remix a traditional food like stuffed avocado.
- How many of the traditional recipes in these Abbasid and later Arab cookbooks have been remixed, I wonder?
Nibbles: Eat like a Roman, Diverse palate, Sustainable diet myths, Trees
- Wanna eat like an ancient Roman?
- But was ancient Rome’s food system geographically diversified?
- And how healthy and sustainable were their diets anyway?
- Well, I bet they had agroforestry.
Apple domestication visualized
The chapter on the Origin of the Domesticated Apples in the recent book on The Apple Genome has a really useful diagram which I hope I won’t get into trouble for reproducing here.
That really is worth a thousand words and more. Wish we had similar ones for all crops.
Nibbles: Trees & poverty, Climate change myths, Trees & landscapes, Trees in the pandemic, Community genebanks
- How trees can alleviate poverty.
- How trees can help fight climate change. And how they cannot.
- How trees can contribute to diverse sustainable landscapes.
- How wild fruit trees (among other things) helped in the Covid-19 crisis.
- Not entirely sure if there are any trees among the burgeoning community seedbanks of China.