- Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
- Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
- Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
- If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
- Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
- The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
- And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.
The fruits of migration
As chance would have it, following my recent speculative foray into the possible connection between language and crop diversity, an essay by the great Andrea Wulf 1 has just appeared that tells the story of how a remarkable German naturalist used breadfruit and linguistics to work out Polynesian migration patterns long before DNA or archaeology could confirm them.
George Forster sailed with his father aboard the HMS Resolution on Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775) and encountered breadfruit across the South Pacific. He noticed that the trees were seedless and could only be propagated by root cuttings. And also that there didn’t seem to be wild breadfruit trees anywhere in the islands. That meant every tree he saw, and there were many of them, had been deliberately planted by people.
Digging through the university library back in Göttingen, Forster later found that wild, seeded breadfruit with little flesh do exist, but in Southeast Asia. If the Pacific islands only had the improved, seedless types, he reasoned, they must have been carried there by people. That was proof both of sophisticated Polynesian plant management and of a migration route running from Southeast Asia eastward across the Pacific.
Forster combined this with careful attention to language. He deduced that most Pacific languages he encountered were dialects of a single root language, with small, systematic sound shifts. He and his father also charted how the presence of Malay loanwords decreased the farther east an island was located, which suggested that islands closer to Southeast Asia — the home of Malay — were settled earlier.
Where his fellow naturalist Joseph Banks saw the breadfruit purely as an economic resource (later lobbying to transplant it to the West Indies to feed enslaved plantation workers, hence HMS Bounty and all that), Forster saw it as historical and ethnographic evidence. That’s a strikingly different, more humanistic and — to me at least — more appealing way of reading a plant.
Wulf then jumps forward to modern archaeology and genetics, which broadly confirm Forster’s reconstruction. There was an initial human population in the region of Papua New Guinea dating back 45,000 years. This was followed by a second, Austronesian-speaking wave migrating out of Taiwan and thereabouts around 3,500 years ago. They travelled by the stars in “outrigger or double-hulled canoes loaded with hogs, chickens, root vegetables, coconuts, bananas, and breadfruit seedlings.” And they mixed with the descendants of the earlier wave through Melanesia. Their own descendants eventually reached Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and, much later, Tahiti, Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.
The essay closes by tying this to Tongan historian Epeli Hau’ofa’s idea of “Oceania” — the Pacific not as scattered, isolated islands, lost in a vast ocean, but as one interconnected “sea of islands.” Exactly what Forster intuited two centuries before it became conventional wisdom.
We’ve blogged a lot about breadfruit over the years. Check out the archive. And in particular listen to the recently-retired Dr Diane Ragone describe her 40-year journey to understand this remarkable tree.
Nibbles: Festivals, Wheat breeding, Cowpea, Community seed bank, Mint diversity
- Festivals, rituals and seed-saving go hand in hand, as this photo essay on Koraput’s Adivasis shows for World Indigenous Peoples Day.
- Speaking of unlikely alliances, Israeli and Palestinian researchers have teamed up on wheat that can take the heat in a warming, drying Middle East.
- Not to be outdone in the resilience stakes, the cowpea shrugs off both drought and flooding, according to FAO.
- If all this talk of resilient crops has you inspired, here’s a how-to on starting your own community seed bank, in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter.
- And for when preservation is really about nostalgia: Romania’s Buzau genebank is keeping childhood mint flavours alive, chocolate, clove and vanilla notes included.
Brainfood: Avocado history, Brazil commuity seedbanks, Citizen science, Agroecology double, Indigenous knowledge, Turkish seeds, Swiss biodiversity
- Ethnobotanical and genetic assessments of Central American avocado landraces reveal novel sources of biodiversity and ancient migration patterns. DNA from landraces, and interviews with farmers, show that people transported and cultivated avocados across the Americas long before European contact, with landraces from lowland Nicaragua and Honduras in particular showing evidence of ancient migration from South America.
- The Circle of Seeds: An Ethnography of Seed Guardianship and the Making of Agroecological Futures in Paraná, Brazil. Community seed banks depend on relationships of care, reciprocity and collective labour, especially among women farmers, and not just on knowing how to store seeds properly. Though that helps, clearly.
- iNaturalist as a Tool to Improve Agroecological Biodiversity Knowledge: An Ecuadorian Case Study. A citizen science platform can strengthen agroecological biodiversity knowledge, but more efforts are needed to engage farmers.
- Are agroecological practices pro-poor? Evidence from smallholder farms in Zimbabwe. Farmers using agroecological practices were generally wealthier and their farms were more diverse in crop and livestock species, but the association between the use of improved practices and diet outcomes was inconsistent.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Agroecological practices were positively correlated with improved dietary quality and food security, including (though not exclusively) through farm production diversity. No word on the wealth of the farmers involved.
- Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and practices for climate survival. Indigenous knowledge systems, including of farmers, offer tested approaches to climate adaptation and resilience that warrant a central place in responses to environmental change.
- Guardians of Agricultural Biodiversity: Farmer Perceptions and Sustainability of Local Seed Varieties in Turkish Highlands. Farmers continue to maintain local seed varieties, driven as much by social, cultural and market considerations as by agronomic performance. But they need support.
- Religion, spirituality and faith of Swiss farmers in relation to biodiversity-linked farming behaviour. Farmers’ religious and spiritual values can shape biodiversity-friendly management decisions, showing personal belief systems are important in conservation. Even in Switzerland.
Nibbles: Museum of Cider, Aport apple, Rattan genebank, Sri Lanka rice, Saudi coffee landscapes
- In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
- Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
- Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
- Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
- Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.