Brainfood: Balanced diets, Diverse diets, Diverse flavonoids, Micronutrients and GHGE, African traditional diets, Tef diversity, Intercropping, Sleeping crops, Cluster bean, Taste

Nibbles: Indian vault, Sundarban rice, Community seed banks, Fiji cassava, Georgia documentary, Kenya seed network, Nigeria mobilizes, Coffee prizes, Slow Food guardians, Peasant seed sovereignty, World Economic Forum seed pean, Seed sector shindig, Genesys acceleration

  1. Times of India says “India needs a new doomsday seed vault.” Why not just use the one already there in Svalbard?
  2. Meanwhile, women in the Sundarban are doing it for themselves.
  3. Maybe it’s community doomsday seed vaults that India needs?
  4. Fiji’s cassava is facing a doomsday of its own.
  5. Georgia — the country — is working on a documentary on crop diversity which will no doubt include their seed deposit in Svalbard.
  6. Kenya has a pretty good community genebanks video of its own.
  7. Nigeria is all over crop diversity. Not just once, but twice.
  8. Coffee prices going up? Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t conserve enough of its diversity?
  9. Want more examples of the coolness of crop diversity and its guardians? Slow Food has your back.
  10. La Via Campesina needs to encouragement either, where “peasant seeds” and their guardians are concerned.
  11. Even the World Economic Forum wants in on the act.
  12. And yet the seed sector seems…reluctant?
  13. Good job Genesys is getting faster, eh?

Brainfood: Complementarity, Temporality, Communality, Fonio trifecta, Atriplex domestication, Egyptian clover in India, Genebank information systems

Brainfood: CC & crop diversity, Dietary Species Richness, CC & banana, European genebank representativeness, Effective Population Size, VarScout, Borlotti bean diversity, Oaxacan? Green Dent, Sorghum mucilage, Gut bacterial diversity

Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity, HealthyDiets4Africa, Warwick genebank, NPGS trifecta, Florida potatoes, On farm, Guatemalan community seed banks, Welsh black oats, WorldVeg genebank, Turkish olive genebank, Citrus genebank, Orchard of Flavours, Piper diversity, Ancient Egyptian food, Chocolate & world history, Ancient DNA & breeding

  1. What has agrobiodiversity ever done for us? Kent Nnadozie of the Plant Treaty lays it out.
  2. Michael Frei of the HealthyDiets4Africa project doesn’t need it laid out.
  3. Neither do the people who awarded a prize to Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank.
  4. What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
  5. Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
  6. Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
  7. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
  8. Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
  9. Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
  10. And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
  11. And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
  12. Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
  13. You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
  14. I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
  15. Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.
  16. No, not using ancient DNA, but actually