- How can you do Eggplant’s Rich History and not wonder why this generally huge, generally purple thing is called an eggplant?
- Domestication of the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe cactus; exceedingly complex. Oh and there’s a cool photo here.
- How berries protect the brain from age-related malfunction. Are you listening, Dmitry?
- Protect medicinal plants, says letter-writer.
- The world doesn’t understand drought tolerance, says another letter-writer.
- Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica conference.
- Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings from Annals of Botany. Must-read stuff.
- A wild relative contributes trait for early morning flowering to rice, allowing it to escape sterility induced by high temperatures.
- The Cornelian Cherry and the Baobab explained.
- Voice of America devotes Special English report to Pavlovsk. If that ain’t viral, what is?
- Genebanks on a roll in China. In Australia, not so much.
- Dam dataset online. Let the mashups proliferate.
A novelist on Pavlovsk and hunger
Elise Blackwell wrote a novel — Hunger — about the Siege of Leningrad and the people who starved at the Vavilov Research Institute rather than eat the seeds in their care. I haven’t read it, yet, although I have read interviews with the author. The Atlantic asked her to reflect on what is going on at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station. Very clever.
Genetic diversity is crucial to human survival and food is a central part of our history and heritage, but aesthetics matter too. In the place of an apple famed for its winter heartiness and a berry prized for its perfect sweetness will sit a commercial real estate development, the money earned off the bulldozed land going to those who successfully claimed in court that the Pavlovsk collection does not exist because it was never officially registered. Soon they will be accurate in more than legalistic terms: it won’t exist.
One thing puzzled me about her piece, though, and that was a reference to a bean she once grew, which she calls “the Tarahumara carpenteria,” italicized just like that, which suggests it could be a genus and species, but with a definite article, which suggests that if it is, Blackwell doesn’t know how to use a binomial. ((And why should she; I couldn’t write a novel.)) I know of the Tarahumara people, and I have grown one of their heirloom sunflowers. But I could find no trace of this bean either in the interwebs or in my copy of the 2010 Seed Savers Yearbook. Blackwell doesn’t indicate what kind of bean it might have been: bush or pole; common, runner, lima or tepary. I checked them all. It isn’t there. I checked the USDA. It isn’t there. I checked Native Seeds/SEARCH. It isn’t there. Please, someone, tell me I am wrong.
This is not to cast doubt on anything Elise Blackwell wrote. Really. It is to suggest two things. First, if anyone is still growing a bean called anything like Tarahumara carpenteria, would they please, please ensure that someone else has it too, and not just as memory-laden specimens for weighting down pie crusts. And secondly, as someone long ago once told me; “write it down, because the weakest ink lasts longer than the strongest memory.” ((Or did I read it somewhere? A self-referential footnote.))
Nibbles: Bent, Rice, Cheez, Pavlovsk, Millennium Seed Bank, Livestock, EUCARPIA
- Fine memoir of Sir Bent Skovmand. Thanks Dag.
- Rice yields falling — and not just in experimental stations. The paper.
- In all the eulogies to the inventor of the Cheez Doodle, a note of truth.
- You could buy the Pavlovsk genebank site for just USD3.3 million, it says here. Is that even doable?
- Meanwhile, over in England, Researchers Rush to Fill Noah’s Ark Seed Bank While Politicians Bicker.
- Meanwhile, in Australia, worries about declines in livestock diversity.
- EUCARPIA’s meetings calendar. Handy.
Nibbles: GM canola, Maize, Conference, Chefs, Prices
- GM canola goes wild, Jeremy is not surprised
- More — much more — on maize cultivation in Chaco Canyon.
- Conference in London on Securing Future Food. Agrobiodiversity should be present.
- Chefs embrace agrobiodiversity — in Maine.
- Price spikes: climate change or knee-jerk policies? (Both?)
Farming and schoolchildren
I had really hoped to find something strikingly modern in a pamphlet linked by Marion Nestle, so that I could challenge you all to guess when it was written. Alas, it is too steeped in the language and context of its time. In 1917 John Dewey, the noted psychologist, educator and general all-around thinker, was urging the schools of America to encourage pupils to garden.
There will be better results from training drills with the spade and the hoe than from parading America’s youngsters up and down the school yard. ((I would not have been able to resist punning drills.))
He adduces many convincing arguments which could, with a minor rewrite, be deployed today. Indeed, Nestle makes the connection between child nutrition bills “languishing in [the US] Congress” and Dewey’s exhortations. My question is: did they work then? A quick search reveals that Dewey’s ideas about experiential learning influenced at least a few current school gardens. However, there’s no easily-unearthed evidence that American schools took up farming and garden in 1917-18. Now if only Dewey had had an impact pathway.