- “The legume that giveth can also taketh away.”
- Content Coordinator at Slow Food Nation asks: “Am I a coniglio?“
- Tracing Pacific migrations through stomach bugs.
- Rethinking school lunch.
- “There is still a stigma to the flower.†Er, yes, and your point is?
Nibbles: Spices, Tequila, Tea, Potatoes, Archive, Africa, Carotenoids, Calcium, AGR, Ethiopia, Wheat blast
- Where do spices come from, mummy?
- Even “good” tequila can be bad for you. Well I never.
- Sparkling tea? Call it a microwine. Via.
- More potatoes. …
- … but the kicker is the historical archive she links to.
- AGRA and Earth Institute to collaborate. Africa not available for comment.
- More Pacific food crop nutrition goodness from Lois et al.
- Children may not like their veggies because of the Ca content.
- Canada down to 95% Holsteins. Oh dear.
- “The large crop genetic diversity that already exists in Ethiopia will make adapting agricultural systems to the locally changing conditions relatively easy.” Well, maybe…
- Screening Kansas wheat varieties for resistance to wheat blast.
Darwin’s kitchen
By Jacob van Etten
It’s January 2009, the Darwin storm breaks loose. A taste of things to come is the publication of a revived and illustrated version of Emma Darwin’s recipe notebook. When authors Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway heard about the booklet in the Cambridge University Library they were “very concerned they wouldn’t be able to get a book out of it.” Yet they tried out every recipe and converted dust into gold by publishing them in a colourful cookbook.
Weslie Janeway says:
One of the things that is very clear is that people ate much more seasonally then – although we see the beginnings of modern food supply. For example, they married in 1839, and the railroads were being built. And it began to be possible to have fish away from the coast. Rice was arriving from the rice plantations in America. Basically, they had root vegetables all winter.
The recipe for boiling rice is in Charles Darwin’s own hand.
Nibbles: Earth, Cheese, Silkworms, Biodiversity, Food, Cows, Pigs, Blog, Oysters, Organic
- Stunning images of Earth from space. Direct agricultural (biodiversity) interest at 3, 6 and 15.
- A cheese that’s full of agrobiodiversity. In more ways than one.
- Agrobiodiversity useful in space. And from space.
- Biodiversity in Africa. Agriculture mentioned, and not just in a bad way. Nice maps too.
- Eggplants. Agrobiodiversity. Cooking. Sex. Video.
- Sad story of a farmer losing his cows. Not just cows, “the oldest pure breed on Earth.”
- Farmers bred colourful pigs for the sheer hell of it.
- CABI blog reviews 2008.
- Keeping oysters healthy is hard.
- Legendary breeder Khush says organic rice not a good idea.
- Variation Under Domestication. Darwin’s Origin blogged.
Cooking the books
The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:
…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.
Wish I’d thought of that…