- Blogger waxes lyrical about African mushrooms.
- Nigeria’s cacao tree need replanting. Will they be? And if so, which varieties will be used? And will they be grown organically?
- Arabidopsis followed farmers into Europe.
- “With the kiwi, there is adventure.“
Happy Robigalia!
Today is the Major Rogation. Big deal, I hear you say, what’s that got to do with agrobiodiversity? Not so fast, friend-o. Fact is, this Christian holy day is nothing more than a relatively recent take-over of the ancient Roman festival of Robigalia, which was meant to ward off the fungal disease of cereals we know as rust (and probably others). I think we are all the poorer these days for not observing such festivals anymore, when people could paint their eyes like prostitutes, dance and play cymbals in vile tiberian rites.
Plants and health
Yes, yet another thematic trifecta. I swear I don’t go out looking for these, they just pop up every once in a while. CABI’s excellent blog had a piece today about CABI’s own fungal genetic resources collection and its value as a source of useful compounds. It includes Fleming’s original penicillin-producing strain so it does have form in that regard. Then Seeds Aside has a post on variation among olive varieties in a gene for an allergenic protein found on the pollen grain. And finally, over at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a thumbnail sketch of the redoubtable Phebe Lankester, who wrote extensively on both botany and health — and occasionally on the link between the two — in the latter part of the 19th century. ((Ann B. Shteir. (2004) “Lankester, Phebe (1825–1900).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/58526, accessed 10 April 2008].))
Yams in New Caledonia
Danny has just sent me this great old postcard from New Caledonia: “Preparations for a family celebration.” You can see how central yams are to Kanak culture. In 2004 the Kanak Traditional Senate established a Conservatoire de l’Igname. I never visited it, but I saw photos of it when a couple of the people responsible, including a senator, came to our regional plant genetic resources network meeting in Fiji a couple of years ago, and it looked great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much of an online presence. Yet.
Nibbles: Aromatics, local food, rice, trade, cetriolo mate, maize, sweet potato, media
- The International Symposium on Aromatic and Medicinal Plants, 3-6 November 2008 in Noumea, New Caledonia. Anyone interested in live blogging it for us? He asked, to thunderous silence.
- Modern Forager on the traditional diets of some funky places.
- IRRI flickrs rice photos. Another day, another neologism. Via.
- The lengths people will go to exchange agrobiodiversity. Sorry, I have a thing about maps of trade routes. Via.
- Australian woman adopts Italian cucumber.
- Corn domesticated even earlier in Ecuador.
- Sweet potato may have got to the Pacific islands by chance.
- The truth about those hipster farmers; “it must be true, I read it in the paper”.