Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Happy Food Diversity Day!

On Friday January 13th, from 9am to 7.30pm, some of the UK’s leading scientists, writers, chefs, farmers, campaigners and entrepreneurs will be taking part in a continuous feed of discussions, storytelling and information sharing – all about the wonders and importance of food diversity. These discussions will be made available for free via Eventbrite, live-streamed on YouTube and available to view after the event. Explore the resources for each of the sessions here.

This seems to be the brainchild of Dan Saladino, who recently published the wonderful Eating to Extinction.

LATER: And then there’s this talk from the Seed Detective on the 25th to round things off.

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Nibbles: Diets, Millet seedbank, Healthy rice, Kazakh genebank, Decentralized seeds, Planet Local, White sage, White olive, Talangana collecting, Nature-based, Italian food, Citron, Indian quinoa, Crop expansion

  1. And…we’re back!
  2. Nice new infographics derived from that classic paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
  3. Video on a millet community seedbank in India.
  4. I hope all these healthy Indian rices are in seedbanks somewhere, community or otherwise.
  5. Kazakhstan is getting a new genebank, and I don’t mean a community one.
  6. yeah but genebanks are not enough: enter INCREASE.
  7. Wait, there’s a World Localization Day?
  8. Looks like white sage might need less localization and more seedbanks.
  9. I see your Mexican white sage and raise you the Calabrian white olive.
  10. The Telangana equivalent of white sage is probably safe, though, if this collecting programme is anything to go by.
  11. IFAD pushes nature-based farmers. White sage unavailable for comment.
  12. The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
  13. Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
  14. Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
  15. All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
  16. Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.
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Brainfood: Neolithic microbiomes, Transeurasian languages, Rice history, Chinese Neolithic, Indo-European origins, Chalcolithic stews, Indus Valley hydrology, Bronze Age opium, Cassava storage

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Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture

  1. Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
  2. Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
  3. There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
  4. Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
  5. The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
  6. Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
  7. Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
  8. Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
  9. Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…