- Counting on saffron in Afghanistan.
- Counting on GRIN-Global in genebanks.
- Counting on teff as the new super grain.
- Counting on heirlooms.
Nibbles: New grape variety, Irish food, LegumeCHOICE, Arabica diversity, Breadfruit summit
- Bronx Seedless finally hits the shops.
- The Irish Iron Age Diet.
- Choosing the right legume. But where’s the tool?
- The answer to better coffee is Ethiopia.
- Pacific Global Breadfruit Summit honours Diane Ragone. In other news, there’s a breadfruit summit.
Peruvian genebank to get bigger, but how much?
There’s much excitement over on my Facebook page about the announcement of a cash infusion for the Peruvian genebank.
I’ll be here, holding my breath.
How to sample for diversity
Attentive readers may remember a two-part post from about a year ago from Dr Sean Hoban, on how to maximize genetic diversity in seed collections. Well, Sean has a piece in the latest Samara magazine from Kew on much the same topic, but with better illustrations. Plus you get a bunch of other articles as well.
Finger on the pulse in Rio
My latest from the work blog:
There seems to be a bit of an issue over at the Olympics with fast food marketing, but if athletes in Rio, or indeed spectators, want a simple, cheap meal that’s also healthy, and hopefully sourced more sustainably, they could do a lot worse than tucking into the Brazilian staple of rice and beans (but don’t forget the vegetables and the tropical fruit juice). This is such an established part of Brazilian life that EMBRAPA, the country’s agricultural research organization, has a whole research unit called Arroz e Feijão – Rice & Beans.
Unfortunately, the level of attention beans get in Brazil is not typical around the world, even in other places that eat a lot of them, and the situation is even worse for other pulses – the general term often used to refer to the dry seeds of members of the plant family Leguminosae (technically, it’s now called the Fabaceae, but life is too short as it is), crops like chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, cowpeas and a host of others. That, at least, is the contention of a paper just published in Nature Plants 1, which also sets out to show that this relative neglect has been bad for global food and nutritional security.
Table 1 from the paper, which I discuss in the post, is also available as a website listing various resources for each pulse species.