Ah, the intersection of medicine, nutrition, archaeology and other stuff. Recently published studies from a team at Manchester University have revealed that priests in ancient Egypt suffered heart disease as a result of scoffing the sacred food offered to the gods. But it’ll take more than a pinch of salt to persuade me. OK, so Egyptian toffs ate loads of fatty goose. Clearly they didn’t drink enough wine. Either that, or perhaps they weren’t susceptible to the Gascon Paradox. Probably they just didn’t get enough exercise.
BBC Radio investigates the seed trade
BBC Radio 4 dedicated The Food Programme earlier in February to an investigation of seed exchanges and plant breeding. Here’s what the programme has to say:
Since the earliest times humans have selected particular seeds to resow next season, noticing mutations that they liked and in so doing have shaped the nature of food. This shaping has never been greater than today, when technology makes our ability to shape our future food enormous, but who is to control what qualities we want in our peas or tomatoes?
Sheila Dillon traces the history of plant breeding from neolithic times to today’s GM era with Noel Kingsbury, author of Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding. Early examples of tasteless strawberries well suited to the railroad, and fights between farmers and millers over which wheat variety to grow, inform today’s battles for control.
Much of it will be familiar to readers here, and experts will doubtless find nits to pick, but overall well worth spending 25 minutes to listen.
Nibbles: Heirloom veggies, Rubber, Breadfruit
- Royal Horticultural Society asks Welsh gardeners to “bring out their dead” (TM Cherfas).
- Rubber photos.
- More on breadfruit from our friend Diane Ragone.
Nibbles: Chocolate, Cucurbit, Molecular genetics, CGIAR breeding
- “The mysterious extract soon worked its neurotransmitter magic. We gazed enraptured into each others now-blazing eyes, and fell madly in love.”
- Identifying Darwin’s gourd. Both via.
- When are genetic methods useful for estimating contemporary abundance and detecting population trends?
- CGIAR going to evaluate the impact of their varieties. Again.
Nibbles: EoL, Mixed farming, Conservation medicine, Indicators, Vitamin A, Hamburger, Rewilding, Tejate
- Did you know the Encyclopedia of Life does crop wild relatives?
- Smallholders with mixed crop and livestock systems are the key to it all. My mother-in-law says: I agree.
- Deforestation is bad for the health.
- 2010 Biodiversity Indicator Partnership launches National Biodiversity Indicators Portal.
- Aussies trial a new, secret orange spud. Yeah I can really see that being a huge success.
- The McItaly kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like your stomach after you’ve eaten one.
- The “rewilding” kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like those herds of wildebeest roaming majestically across the Great Plains.
- Rewilding an ancient pre-Hispanic drink. Ooops, I guess that should be reviving.