There’s a great article at Common-Place about the Great American Ham. No, not Kevin Bacon. We’re talking how to cure “the thigh of a back leg of a hog, [with its] three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip.” It’s down to the “three s method: salt, saltpeter and smoke.” Sugar sometimes features as a fourth s. Fascinating historical stuff, and something of a (welcome)Â antidote to our incredibly popular mini-pig nibble.
A history of viruses
We’re fond of reminding ourselves here that agrobiodiversity isn’t just crops and livestock and their wild relatives — it’s also pests and pathogens and weeds and pollinators and earthworms and brewer’s yeast. It’s one of our leitmotifs. Another is that agricultural and “wild” biodiversity interact. Here’s a paper that kind of brings these two leitmotifs together, into a sort of counterpoint, if I may be allowed to push the metaphor ((C.M. Malmstrom et al. (2007) Barley yellow dwarf viruses (BYDVs) preserved in herbarium specimens illuminate historical disease ecology of invasive and native grasses. Journal of Ecology (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1365-2745.2007.01307.x)).
Carolyn Malmstrom and her team at Michigan State University isolated RNA of barley and cereal yellow dwarf viruses from old herbarium specimens of Californian grasses, dating back to 1917. They used such historical samples to trace the history of these agriculturally important viruses back through time, building up a sort of family tree. The analysis suggests that the viruses were present in the Californian native flora in the 18th and 19th centuries, when invasive Eurasian annual grasses (some of them weedy crop relatives) displaced native perennial grasses. In fact, they may have facilitated this invasion by helping the exotic grasses outcompete the natives ((“Non-native invaders amplify spring aphid populations and increase BYDV infection in natives, which in turn suffer substantially reduced survivorship when infected.”)).
The team also found “potential correspondence in the timing of virus diversification events and the beginning of extensive human exchange between the Old and New Worlds.” Humans may have caused the branching of the family tree of some viruses by moving them and their hosts around the world.
Here’s Malmstrom on the significance of her work:
This work points out that the virus world does have an active, long-term role in nature, not just in agriculture… We very much need to understand how viruses can move and influence our crops. If we care about our crops, we need to care about what’s happening in nature.
So: aphids, viruses, native grasses, exotic weedy invaders, crops. Quite a fugue.
Undermining colonialism
Australian Aborigines “not nomadic.”
Safflower in Japan
Pollen find pushes back date of safflower move to Japan.
Natura morta
From EurekAlert: “The American Society for Horticultural Science has published multimedia podcast files of 98 horticulture presentations from the 2007 Annual Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.” Check out, in particular, James Nienhuis of the University of Wisconsin, Dept. of Horticulture, talking about Renaissance art and agrobiodiversity, more specifically vegetable domestication. Wonderful stuff.