- Interventions for sourcing EAT-Lancet diets within national agricultural areas: A global analysis. Half the world’s population can eat healthily off the land in their own country, and 95% could.
- Reframing the local–global food systems debate through a resilience lens. Yeah, but there’s more to resilience than local vs global.
- Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems. Local people know all about sustainability and resilience.
- Global principles in local traditional knowledge: A review of forage plant-livestock-herder interactions. Yes, even — especially? — pastoral people.
- Using botanical resources to select wild forage legumes for domestication in temperate grassland agricultural systems. Not that said local people might not need a little help…
- The herbarium of the future. …for example from the herbarium of the future. Which actually sounds a lot like the genebank of the future.
- Multidimensional impacts from international agricultural research: Implications for research priorities. You want income growth? Invest in fruit and vegetables research and development. You want anything else? Cereals.
- Safeguarding and Using Fruit and Vegetable Biodiversity. Somebody mention fruit and vegetable R&D? Here’s how to start. Spoiler alert: the genebank of the future…
- In Vitro Conservation through Slow Growth Storage Technique of Fruit Species: An Overview of the Last 10 Years. …will need to be into cryo.
- Does the high dietary diversity score predict dietary micronutrients adequacy in children under 5 years old? A systematic review. This is why we need fruits and vegetables. But to eat them, not just to grow lots of them. How many of these kids are on the EAT-Lancet diet anyway?
- Integrating genomics and genome editing for orphan crop improvement: a bridge between orphan crops and modern agriculture system. And lots of fruits and vegetables are so-called orphan, and might need a helping hand, I suppose.
- The old, the new, or the old made new? Everyday counter-narratives of the so-called fourth agricultural revolution. A helping hand from technology you mean? Maybe, but best to mistrust grand narratives.
- Achieving win-win outcomes for biodiversity and yield through diversified farming. Adopting orphan crops can be route to farming system diversification, which can be good for both yields and biodiversity. How’s that for a grand narrative?
- Rapid transgenerational adaptation in response to intercropping reduces competition. Staple crops bred are adapted to monoculture? Not necessarily.
- Agroecology in the North: Centering Indigenous food sovereignty and land stewardship in agriculture “frontiers”. All this diversification is beginning to sound a lot like some kind of agroecology. Even in the Global North. And I mean very North.
- Regenerative food systems and the conservation of change. Ok, but agroecology is not about the practices employed, but rather how the system is organized. Always good to occasionally step back and theorize.
- Sustainable management of transboundary pests requires holistic and inclusive solutions. None of the above is going to work if we’re knee-deep in pests.
- The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault. Apocalypse. Hope. Escape. No grander narrative than that for the most iconic genebank of the present.
- Carrier Seeds: A Cultural Analysis of Care and Conflict in Four Seed Banking Practices. Genebanks (maybe even Svalbard?) conserve more than just seeds: the theory and the practice deconstructed.
- Why facts don’t change minds: Insights from cognitive science for the improved communication of conservation research. Ok, but how to communicate all the above for maximum impact? Spoiler alert: forget about disseminating scientific facts widely to change individual minds. Instead, target the behaviour of strategic groups through values and emotions…
- Spread the word: Sharing information on social media can stabilize conservation funding and improve ecological outcomes. …using social media. Wait, does that mean I have to TikTok all this stuff now?
Nibbles: Agroforestry, Old tea trees, Rare magnolia, New Brachiaria, Animal-based food, Oman livestock genebank
Mo’ better agrobiodiversity graphics
Wouldn’t want you to miss out on this nice find from Jeremy’s last Eat This Newsletter of 2022, just because we’re in a new year now. But why not subscribe, eh? Incidentally, since we’re talking about the movement of crops around the world, and fancy graphics, you might as well also check out Bloomberg’s cool re-visualizations of the data in the 2014 paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
In the decades after 1492 “a massive multidirectional transfer of biota, diseases, technology and humans occurred between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas”. But if you look at the standard maps of these movements, collectively known as the Columbian Exchange, you miss almost all the complexity and context of what moved, where, why, and what else was going on.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper: (Re)Mapping the Columbian Exchange. Suggestions for an Updated Cartography. The paper itself is behind a paywall, although one of the authors is a friend of the podcast so I may well invite him on to discuss the story in more detail. Thankfully, the maps themselves are available to download, and even a superficial glance shows that the story is much more interesting than the standard maps imply.
Each of them overcomes the “overly constrained geographic scope, chronological compression, non-depiction of the contemporaneous movement of important cultural, technological and biological elements of each product, ethnocentrism and the obscuring of human consequences” of the standard map, and I look forward to reading the new plant biographies just as soon as I get hold of the paper.
Nibbles: Diets, Millet seedbank, Healthy rice, Kazakh genebank, Decentralized seeds, Planet Local, White sage, White olive, Talangana collecting, Nature-based, Italian food, Citron, Indian quinoa, Crop expansion
- And…we’re back!
- Nice new infographics derived from that classic paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
- Video on a millet community seedbank in India.
- I hope all these healthy Indian rices are in seedbanks somewhere, community or otherwise.
- Kazakhstan is getting a new genebank, and I don’t mean a community one.
- yeah but genebanks are not enough: enter INCREASE.
- Wait, there’s a World Localization Day?
- Looks like white sage might need less localization and more seedbanks.
- I see your Mexican white sage and raise you the Calabrian white olive.
- The Telangana equivalent of white sage is probably safe, though, if this collecting programme is anything to go by.
- IFAD pushes nature-based farmers. White sage unavailable for comment.
- The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
- Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
- Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
- All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
- Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.
Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture
- Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
- Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
- There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
- Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
- The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
- Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
- Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
- Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
- Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…