Category: History

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Erna vs Otto

Is it possible to distil the ongoing debate over how to conserve plant genetic resources into the contrasting views of two people?

For Julia Nordblad of the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, the answer is a resounding yes, if the two people are Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, both very much friends of the blog. She sets out her argument in a paper that is just out:

…Frankel and Bennett exemplify that there are indeed different versions of planetary temporalities that imagine the entanglements between the social and the planetary differently, and thus end up promoting distinctive politics for amending diversity loss and saving evolution. For Frankel, the solution lay within the temporality of development. Modern technology could be used to replace the storage of evolutionary time in the “primitive” agriculture, and progressive norms could emerge that would achieve protection of wild evolutionary time in the natural world. For Bennett in contrast, development was not the only possible historical trajectory, but a particular historical process driven by economic and political interest. Her vision of how evolutionary time should be protected was to let it be decentralized in varied agricultural practices shielded from corporate interest that would otherwise quickly drive diversity down and eclipse the evolutionary temporal horizon.

So it’s possible. But is it helpful?

Well, I’m torn. You can certainly find descriptions of the early days of the crop diversity conservation movement that have a larger cast of characters. Like for example the equally recent Australia’s Search for Greener Pastures: The Foundations of the Global Genetic Resources Movement, 1926-1980 by Derek Byerlee. Or the earlier but still canonical Scientists, Plants and Politics: A History of the Plant Genetic Resources Movement, by Robin Pistorius.

But there’s something satisfyingly protean about Bennett and Frankel — and indeed their sort-of-rivalry. So I’m going to say that it is indeed helpful — at least to get you started understanding this history.

And speaking of protean: where would Vavilov stand? If I read another recent paper correctly, by Jeffrey Wall of the University of Turku, somewhere in the middle. Probably a good place to be.

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Nibbles: Maize history, Maize in Tanzania, WorldVeg feature, Pigeonpea speed breeding, Valuing nature in food, GIAHS, Ancient Egyptian brewing redux

  1. The history of maize — according to Pioneer.
  2. The importance of maize — according to Dr Mujuni Sospeter Kabululu, Curator, National Plant Genetic Resources Centre—Tanzania.
  3. The future of vegetables — according to WorldVeg.
  4. The future of pigeonpea — according to ICRISAT.
  5. How should we value nature in our food systems? By true cost accounting — according to TABLE.
  6. A good way to value nature in our food systems is through recognizing Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems — according to FAO.
  7. How strong was ancient Egyptian beer? Not very — according to ethnoarcheobotanists. But it’s still worth trying to reproduce it — according to me. Seneb!
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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…
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Digging up the pig

I’m sure you enjoyed Jeremy’s fascinating conversation with Jordan Rosenblum on how the pig and the eagle diverged as the history of Jewish dietary law and custom played out. Which means you’d probably welcome another helping of Prof. Rosenblum. Well, you’d get that, and much more, in the excellent brief summary of the deep history of the animal — the pig that is, not the eagle — in the Levant coincidentally just out in Archaeology Magazine. Prepare to be surprised:

…the inhabitants of the earliest cities of the Bronze Age (3500–1200 b.c.) were enthusiastic pig eaters, and that even later Iron Age (1200–586 b.c.) residents of Jerusalem enjoyed the occasional pork feast.

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Save our coffee!!!

The American Geographic Society had a very informative post about coffee prices on Facebook a few days back. I don’t really want to link to it, but I’m sure you can find it if you want. Anyway, here’s the text.

Coffee prices have hit a 50-year high due to a combination of rising costs of production, supply chain disruptions, and climate change–related declines in crop yields. Coffee plants are sensitive to changes in precipitation and temperature, and recent droughts in Brazil and Vietnam resulted in poor harvests. Coffee companies are passing on the extra costs to customers, with the average retail price of ground roast coffee increasing 15 percent in American cities in the past year and peaking at over $7 a pound. As climate change will continue to threaten coffee harvests in the years to come, projected to shrink the land available for coffee cultivation by half, prices are expected to keep rising.

They also helpfully link to three recent supporting articles in the NY Times, The Independent and on ABC News.

And they reproduce a map from a National Geographic article from a couple of years back.

“This map depicts the predicted change in suitability for growing coffee in different regions between 2000 and 2050 based on climate projections.”

Social media as it should be done.

And since we’re on the subject, there are some very cool resources on coffee diversity on the website of Christophe Montagnon, a renowned expert on the crop. For example, I really like this summary of the global history of arabica.

Shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

We’re going to need those resources — and indeed that diversity — if we want to keep drinking coffee.