That Nibble yesterday about the BEGIN Japanology TV programme on roots and tubers led to some more digging around, as it were, and eventually I unearthed this gem on wasabi.
Which reminded me that one of my early posts on this blog was about Wasabia japonica. What’s strange about that old post 1 is that six years on I can’t imagine writing something like that without including a link to a WIEWS report on how many genebank accessions there are of the crop around the world. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. Anyway, two, as is happens, and not where you’d think. There. I feel better now.
Seeds! From Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, that is. In a database. Or two. Online.
Japanese tubers! If anyone can find the actual video, I’d be very grateful. It’s not here yet. Or here. And I also want to find out more about the mythical Professor Sweet Potato.
Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow. Image taken from Geograph project collection. Copyright owned by Keith Evans. Image licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.The BBC has a fascinating series of short talks about Anglo-Saxons. Not the people, mind you, but people. Individual men and women, known by name, names such as Hild and Penda and Eadfrith. Well, for the most part known by name, because Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology and Head of the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, devotes her 15 minutes to the average Anglo-Saxon farmer, unnamed but not, as it turns out, unknowable. It’s a very entertaining romp through three hundred years or so of medieval agrarian history, worth listening to in its entirety, but the bit that struck me particularly starts at 5 mins in and is a brief mention that in the latter 7th century Anglo-Saxon farmers left behind subsistence and started to produce a surplus for the market. That made me wonder whether there has been any interaction between historians of that period and students of similar, more recent (and continuing), shifts in places like Africa. One might have thought that there could be interesting things that each might learn from the other. Especially since the 7th century Anglo-Saxon peasant didn’t have IFAD, the CGIAR and the Gates Foundation to help the transition along.
Report on the state of UK capacity in taxonomy. How many countries have reports on the state of their taxonomy? Anyway, here’s some of that capacity at work.
Defra’s latest Biodiversity News has stuff on the importance of insect biodiversity to pest control and pollination in orchards.
The International Year of Quinoa, which is next year, has a website, and all sorts of associated social networking goodness. And here’s a nice little student video on the crop, for a somewhat different perspective.
“Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius?” Scientific American excerpts a bit of purple prose from from Frederick Kaufman’s “Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food.”
And a book on how (some) food (i.e. weeds) started being food.
