- CIAT’s new genebank is a real looker.
- Rome’s new cooking museum sounds like fun.
- Give seaweed salad a chance.
- What the hell is happening with hemp in the US?
- The College of the Rockies really wants to put its genebank to work for the local community.
- NBPGR building awareness of the importance of medicinal and aromatic plants in Arunachal Pradesh.
The three S’s of medieval salads
There’s a thread on the Twitter feed of The Delicious Legacy Podcast about that holy trinity of somewhat weird medieval root vegetables: skirret, salsify and scorzonera.
THREAD:
Skirret, Salsify, Scorzonera…
These are root vegetables, once popular, and eaten in almost every meal, in a pottage style stew mainly; it was the staple of many farmers…
What happened to them? Why don't we eat them any more?
1/x pic.twitter.com/V3iqLid9LZ— The Delicious Legacy Podcast (@DeliciousLegacy) March 6, 2022
If you don’t like the bird site, check it out on ThreadReader.
I’m not sure I agree with everything in there. For example, potato and sweetpotato can absolutely have complex flavours, and I doubt any of these three admittedly now marginal roots could ever have been described as staples. But it’s nice to be reminded of crops which are going out of fashion, and could presumably come back into it, given a little push.
Nibbles: Zimbabwe breeder, Indian genebank, Zambian genebank, Chinese genebank, Pakistan & Uzbekistan, Manchester planting
- Sorghum and millet breeder honoured in Zimbabwe. Always good to see.
- Germplasm evaluation efforts of Indian national genebank make it into the mainstream financial press. Also very good to see.
- Zambian national genebank does some much-needed safety duplication. More good news.
- Possibly good news, hard to say: Russian news agency on what seems to be a new wild rice genebank in China.
- Always good news to see two countries agree to collaborate on genetic resources.
- Manchester viaduct gets a greenlift. Good to see it, despite no genebanks being involved.
White strawberry privileged
Great piece from the always reliable Gastro Obscura on Chile’s white strawberry. It truly has all the canonical agrobiodiversity tropes: interdependence for diversity, the importance of wild relatives, the downside of reforestation, genetic erosion and how chefs can help. Oh, and biopiracy. The only thing that’s missing, in fact, is genebanks. Can’t have everything. But it could be used to teach the subject.
Nibbles: Chinese crop diversity, Reforestation, Seed swapping, Biofortification
- China does a census of crop diversity for its genebank.
- Getting birds to help replant forests in early modern Japan.
- Swapping seeds in Bristol.
- The complementary roles of fortification and biofortification.