History

Nibbles: Cheddar cheese, Chickpea festival, Senegal rice, Great Plains, Brazilian fruit, Hungry Eye

There’s a national chickpea championship, but in Spain.
Senegal is getting its rice back. No word on any championship.
The Great Plains are not coming back, alas. Spoiler alert: rice and chickpeas are not to blame.
Cheddar is trying to get its cheese back, though, and has a chance.
Cool book on the fruits of Brazil. I bet some would go great with cheddar.
Review of what seems a cool book on the history of food in Europe. I wonder if it explains the whole cheese-with-fruit thing.

Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.

IFAD says farmers might need to change crops. Farmers unavailable for comment as presumably they’re too busy changing crops.
Case in point: China moves into cacao.
The food system is at the centre of all our ills. But I’m not sure switching from maize to sorghum is going to cut it.
And neither will watching those food miles, alas.
Example of a farmer changing crops, watching food miles and diversifying the food system.
I suppose we could also just eat more trees?
We’ll need ethnobotanists for that.
And there’s clearly plenty of pumpkins out there.
Maybe garum would go well with some of those NTFPs, and pumpkins.
Do they teach garum at Fermentation School?
Whoa, I did not realize archaea in the vertebrate gut feed on bacterial fermentation products.
And let’s not forget to put everything in genebanks before it’s too late so we have a chance to do all of the above.

Cologne has a mustard museum and I want to visit it.
Lecture on the role of sugar in supporting slavery and capitalism. Where is the sugar museum?Ah here it is.
The cassowary may have been domesticated in New Guinea ten thousand years ago (with sugarcane?). Deserves a museum.
Speaking of domestication, here is how that of citrus happened. There’s actually a number of different citrus museums out there.
Nice PhD opportunity Sweden studying beans in Rwanda. There are museums in both places, I’m pretty sure.

Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
(Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.