History

Nibbles: Quinoa, Chilean landraces, Planetary sculptors, Offal, Eels, Grand Challenges in Global Health, ILRI strategy, Artemisia, Monticello, Greek food, Barley, Rain

The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?

Ruth deconstructs her local tomatoes.
New Mexico State University reaches out to CATIE’s genebank.
Montana gets a genebank.
Long Cymie Payne UBerkeley lecture on international law and biodiversity.
Milking the data.
Speaking of milk, indigenous lassi probiotics isolated, sequenced and deposited in genebank.

40 years of AVRDC celebrated. Lots more stuff on vegetables below, so stick around if that grabbed you.
Breeding with farmers, an ICARDA manual. Are there any examples with vegetables, I wonder?
Let’s Go Local! See the ABC piece before it disappears from the front page. But it’s not just karat bananas that you need, of course.
Going local in Philippines too. And India for that matter. And, ahem, Arkansas. Oh and Amazonia.
Another use for baobab. I feel a factsheet coming on.
And here are some utterly different fruits.
Talking AnGR in Latin America.
GIFT tilapia in India! Look it up, we did a Brainfood on it.
A Belgian milestone. Put out more flags.
Is it Cinco de Mayo yet? Well, break out the tequila anyway.
Is it World Donkey Day yet?
“Farmer associations hope TME 419 will soon spread across the whole country.” That would be a fancy new cassava in DRC. Anybody worried about that at all?
Plant diversity key to zzzzzzzzzz…
Well this will wake you up.

The CGIAR Consortium finds a CGIAR success story. While the Guardian does another.
Talk on honeybee diversity at UC Davis. Hopefully Robert will be available for comment. Meanwhile, across the Pond…
Seeing the food security for the trees.
Yeah I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea to name a new avocado variety Uzi, no matter how good it may be.
Deconstructing the global land rush. And here’s the data… Jatropha everywhere.
The deep roots of globalization. Move over jatropha.
More on that paper on how to recognize a relatively drought-tolerant species.
All tangled up in natural fibres.
How to read organic agriculture debates. Just in case you actually want to read them.
An Indian prepares for the Convention on Biological Diversity‘s meeting in Hyderabad in October. Not too early, is it?
Bean breeders! Funding alert! You have nothing to lose but your diversity.
India posts world record rice harvest — using System of Rice Intensification. Take that, doubters.