Fascinating article in Aeon magazine by Jill Neimark, exploring the role of specific, older varieties in the experience of taste. I won’t steal her thunder here, just urge you to read it. I will, however, cavil at one statement:
All commercial apples, including Granny Smiths, have been hybridised to a sugary monotone.
That’s simply not true, unless hybridised means something else in Georgia.
If they’re called Granny Smith, their genetics should be the same. If they taste dreadful from the supermarket, and astonishing picked up from a roadside stand “by a white-frame house on a curving, shady lane by Lake Allatoona,” that’s the result of nurture, not nature.
But please ignore my quibbles — and I have others — unless you agree that sometimes accuracy matters.
A recent blog post by the World Agroforestry Centre described their idea of a phenologically varied “fruit tree portfolio” to provide nutrition throughout the year. In Machakos, Kenya, where the portfolio is being tested out, these would be the species involved, a mixture of the local and the exotic:
A nice idea, and it reminded me that you can also do something similar by exploiting within-species diversity in seasonality. The example I know best comes from Diane Ragone’s work on breadfruit. This is from a presentation she gave recently at USAID.
Planting multiple varieties carefully chosen from each of these different groups means you can count on having some fruit throughout the year, most years. Great to have diversity at multiple levels to play around with.
There really is nothing like photos of agricultural biodiversity to set the pulse racing. Well, at least in our weird little corner of cyberspace. It’s been crazy over on Twitter and Facebook, what with frenzied sharing of, and commenting on, a couple of stories about, of all things, watermelons. Well, it is summer, I guess: they don’t call it the silly season for nothing.
To recap for those who do not follow us on other media, 1 people seem to have really been impressed by the photos which accompanied a story on the sequencing of the watermelon genome. Although it dates back to three years ago, for some reason it resurfaced again last week.
Flesh diversity from undomesticated to domesticated watermelon. These watermelon plants were grown at Syngenta Woodland station in CA.
It may well have been resurrected because of a Vox.com story on how James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, is using Renaissance paintings of watermelons and other produce to illustrate the changes that have been wrought by modern plant breeding. The story was later taken up by others, and bounced around a lot. And all long before National Watermelon Day. And also before the AoB post on watermelon origins.
Well, let me add to the hysteria. Courtesy of my friend Dr Yawooz Adham, here’s another fantastic agrobiodiversity photo, of tomatoes this time.
The farmer’s name is Shiek Jamally Karbanchi 2 and he lives in a village near the town of Chamchamal, between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He tends 22 different tomato varieties, and is clearly incredibly proud of them. Though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t charge Euros 20 each for them. I don’t know if they’re all commercial varieties or whether there’s a few local heirlooms in there, but either way it’s damn impressive.
