Indigenous knowledge systems

Nibbles: Taro recipes, Pawpaw Kickstarter, Pica, Slow seeds, Forest foods, Pork rises, Landscapes, Best friend, Cooking & CC

Ok, now you have no excuse not to eat taro.
Do your bit to help pawpaws (Asimina triloba) go viral. No, wait, that didn’t come out right.
“Pica is an unexplainable food curiosity—the overwhelming desire to eat the inedible.” Or, as we say in my house, German food.
Tuscan seed journey.
Living off forest foods can be fun.
Pork beats beef.
Picturing the Earth. Some of it ain’t pretty. But even then it’s pretty.
Picturing working dogs. All of them pretty.
Kenyan chef Ali L’artiste tucks into Rwandan bananas and beans before it’s too late.

I say ale, you say beer.
Ireland has a patron saint of beer. Well of course it does.
The bread of the Gauls was made from beer foam.
Reviving ancient beers. Wait, what’s with all this beer today?
Genetic Resources in Plant Breeding: Conservation, Characterization and Utilization, 17-28 August 2015, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Alnarp, Sweden: More detailed information on this course coming soon…
Not that these guys in Florida need it.
Pix of kids’ breakfasts from around the world.
Development and biodiversity can coexist: here come the data.
African leafy veggies have truly arrived, haven’t they, if they’re getting the Fairtrade treatment.
But it might be too late for some medicinal plants.
Phytoliths 101.
What’s that you say? You want to integrate agrobiodiversity in your climate adaptation plans? Got just the thing for you.

Draft technical guidelines from FAO on conserving crop wild relatives at national level.
Small farms are beautiful.
Finding the climate adaptation needle in the genomic haystack. Hint: supercomputers needed. DivSeek alerted?
Emma Cooper asks: “…have you got a favourite ‘forgotten’ edible plant that you’d like to champion?”
James Wong talks about that kind of thing too, and much else garden-related besides, on his new website.
Rejoice, Google Earth Pro is now free!
Wageningen UR course on Food For All.
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is offering ten $10,000 postgraduate Food and Farming Journalism Fellowships. ‘Nuff said.
Speaking of fellowships: the 2015 call for Bioversity’s Vavilov-Frankel Fellowship is open.
Possible new Cannabis species from Australia: watch them do the DNA work and spoil it. Gap analysis, anyone? … As you were, didn’t need DNA after all.

Tonga joins the ITPGRFA. About time too. I started talking to them about it 10 years ago.
What exactly does it mean to be “amped” about seeds? And do they have to be organic? And do these Filipino ones qualify?
Enough with the banana scare stories already!
Go on, nominate someone for the World Food Prize.
Mushroom beer? Yeah, ok.
USDA waxes nerdy about cover crops.
Gateses’ Big Bet for African agriculture. Move along, nothing to see here.

The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research breaks down this week’s Fifteenth Regular Session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture for ya.
Kew looking for a crop person! I wonder if the successful candidate is in Rome today.
Mauricio Bellon on why smallholder farmers need crop diversity to adapt to climate change. He’s in Rome.
Multi-Parent Advanced Generation Inter Cross (MAGIC) deconstructed. Compare and contrast with above.
The SDGs in one cool interactive infographic. But where’s nutrition?
Where is overhunting for bushmeat occurring? Gotta get your nutrition where you can…
Want to invest in a biofortified crop like iron beans? Here’s how to work out where you should do it. Interesting to cross-reference with that bushmeat thing above?
Ancient Greek tree preservation order.
Ethiopian forest dwellers protect wild coffee. No preservation orders needed.
Tracking honey. Follow the money.
Could say the same about nutmeg.
Meat stew with garden eggs. Sounds yummie. Not much used in Kenya these days any more, alas.
Delving into Armenian Ottoman foods. Because we can. No sign of garden eggs.