History

April 3, 2008April 3, 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 lâ€™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.Â Yet.

March 25, 2008October 26, 2021

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”.

March 17, 2008March 17, 2008

Nibbles: Bees, weird food, wagyu cattle, medieval agriculture, beer

India to research bees in detail.
Yak knob to go with your yak milk, sir?
George Lucas does his bit to conserve a weird cattle breed, the Japanese wagyu. Well, kinda.
Was the typical English village founded around 900 AD as a result of monastically-driven agricultural innovation?
Diverse healthy reasons to drink beer; Luigi unavailable for comment.

March 10, 2008March 10, 2008

Nibbles: Gene smuggling, teaching, UG99, fungi, fermentation, horse, livestock

Customs unit seizes smuggled chromosomes, Sri Lankan academics uncooperative.
Teachers urged to use Global Seed Vault in lessons; native Memphian available for comment today!
No UG99 in Pakistan (yet). Optimism abounds everywhere.
Cool new book: Fungi in the Ancient World.
And on a related topic: full text (kinda) of old(ish) book on fermented foods.
New book peddles old how-horse-domestication-changed-the-world (or at least Europe) story. Prof. Renfrew has already commented. Lengthily.
Livestock need a Svalbard too. Old, but the videos are nice, and I don’t think we linked to this before.

March 3, 2008

Indigo in the Americas

I knew a bit about indigo — but not that in addition to the Old World’s Indigofera tinctoria there’s a separate species in the same genus that was used in ancient America for making dye. I found out because of some interesting detective work on the Maya pigment. I figured that the indigo plant mentioned in the research was something completely different, but it turns out to be I. suffruticosa. Although there do seem to be other genera that produce the colour.