Category: History

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Selling touselle

In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.

That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. ((This is a companion piece to breadmaker Andrew Whitley’s The bread we eat, published in 2007.))

Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare ((Is this a misprint? I think it should read “Gard.”)) region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.

Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.

It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. ((“[L]’une des premières collections européennes.”)) This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.

Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.

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Pulses and the Renaissance

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of an intriguing, vaguely familiar assertion about legumes made by Tom Jaine in his recent Guardian review of a clutch of food books:

the 12th-century renaissance that gave us Heloise and Abelard was due mainly to better agriculture and more protein-rich legumes rather than heightened sensibility or appreciation of the classics — for Abelard, not so much cherchez la femme as cherchez le pain.

Intriguing, but ambiguous. Legumes which were more protein-rich? Or more legumes? More yield of legumes, or more species of legumes? I remembered having read similar things in the past — medieval agricultural innovation and all that — but I had never looked into the subject in any detail.

I suppose the easiest way to find out more would have been to read the source of the statement, Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity. This is about how foods have influenced history, which sounds pretty interesting. And hopefully one day I will get to it. But until then, there is the internet. ((Edible History is not yet on Google Books.))

The most accessible elucidation I’ve been able to find online of the assertion that pulses drove the 12th century mini-Renaissance is an article by Umberto Eco. He points out that the population of Europe began to increase again at the turn of the second millennium after a long period of stagnation, perhaps tripling in the next 500 years. Why? Eco suggests that agricultural innovation was behind this explosion of population, and of physical and intellectual energy. There was a new(ish) three-field rotation, iron horseshoes, a new collar and ploughing methods. But there were also beans, peas, vetch and lentils.

All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). …[T]his poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields.

So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.

I tried to find out a bit more online about the dynamics of the spread of these crops through Europe, presumably from their Mediterranean heartland, but was not all that successful. There’s a little something in a book on medieval population growth.

And also a bit in a book on medieval agriculture. But nothing on exactly how pulses were adopted across the continent. Best I can figure is that they were already known to some extent, and perhaps cultivated on a small scale in gardens, and were gradually incorporated into the field system, replacing bare fallows, as suitable agricultural land ran out and intensification became necessary. ((I wonder if modern examples of crops moving from homegardens to commercial fields and orchards might offer a suitable parallel for this process.)) Anyway, surely the process is fairly well understood by historians and I’m just showing my ignorance here. Who will instruct me?

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Hiroshima trees live on

Today is the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It is amazing to think that some trees survived the explosion — the so-called hibaku trees. Hibaku means “something that has experienced a nuclear bomb.”

Dr. Riki Horiguchi, Hiroshima’s resident caregiver to all Hibaku trees in the city, maintains and nurtures the specimens that are still standing 64 years later. So many of the trees in The Hiroshima Botanical Garden and in the surrounding vicinity of the blast were irrevocably altered in appearance, and yet new life continued to spring forth from them. With Horiguchi’s dedication to the seed collecting and cultivation of authentic Hibaku trees, he has managed to safeguard the existence of second and third generation Hibaku trees.

Artist Hiroshi Sunairi, a professor at NYU’s Department of Art and Art Professions, and a native of the Hiroshima region, “shares Horiguchi’s hand-collected Hibaku tree seeds with anyone in the world who is sincerely interested in honoring their collective vision and intent.” He has second and third generation round leaf holly, persimmon, chinaberry, Firmiana simplex, Japanese hackberry and jujube trees.

Whether you live in New York or New Delhi, Sunari will happily provide you with a Hibaku seed (depending on what variety will thrive in your planting zone) as long as you cover the expense of shipping via FedEx.

You can join his Facebook group. Via.

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Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI

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    Old maps used to track down hops in Sweden

    ResearchBlogging.orgI’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking about the theory and practice of germplasm collecting in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across an example similar to the one described in a recent paper in Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. ((Strese, E., Karsvall, O., & Tollin, C. (2009). Inventory methods for finding historically cultivated hop (Humulus lupulus L.) in Sweden. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. DOI: 10.1007/s10722-009-9464-9.))

    In it, Swedish researchers describe how they took advantage of a couple of interesting quirks in the history of Sweden to devise what I think is a pretty novel strategy for sampling agrobiodiversity. They were interested in collecting germplasm of hops (Humulus lupulus) for a new genebank that’s under development. Now, the thing is that, although this crop is no longer grown in Sweden now, for 400 years from 1442 doing so was compulsory, in order to guarantee sufficient domestic production for beer-making. Very sensible, too.

    Initially, all peasants were required to grow at least 40 hop poles. By 1483, the quantity was increased to 200 hop poles. The law was not formally repealed until 1860. As a result of this law, the plant has left several financial, fiscal and legal imprints on Swedish history.

    The second historical curiosity about Sweden is that it boasts a unique set of some 12,000 large-scale maps dating back to the mid-17th century. Because of the hops law, hop gardens are actually marked on these maps in some detail (click to enlarge).

    hops

    So the collectors used what they call a “history to plant” method to identify likely areas for collecting, using not only maps such as the one reproduced above, but also…

    …medieval charters from the fifteenth century files of land belonging to the abbey of Vadstena, documents from the expeditions of Carl von Linné and his pupils from the eighteenth century and also documents from the breeding program in Svalöf from the beginning of the twentieth century.

    And a pretty successful strategy it was too.

    We found no hop plants at locations which were not indicated in the maps as hop gardens. Today living plants were possible to find in more then 33% of the total inventoried sites, indicated as hop gardens on large-scale maps.

    As I say, I can’t think of another example of the use of historical maps to locate specific crops for sampling. No doubt the specific circumstances that made this possible in Sweden are not all that common around the world. Anyway, if you know of similar work, let me know. Always interested in keeping up to date with the latest in germplasm collecting.