- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…
Nibbles: Traditional medicine, Agroforestry, IK and adaptation, Paprika, Sustainability, Wheat, Rape, Wild foods, Beetroots, Potatoes, Curcurbits, Guar bonanza, Shipwrecked nuts
- Kenyan herbal medicines in the spotlight.
- Kenyan indigenous trees in the spotlight. The intersection of those two sets would be interesting to explore.
- And then if you mash it up with this…
- … you might still never predict rural Malawi to explode with interest in paprika.
- And yet, (a small bit of) rural America embraces (a version of) sustainability.
- While Bangladeshi farmers embrace participatory wheat variety selection. No idea what they found; the link there is down.
- Next up, participatory selection for efficient use of phosphorus by rape?
- This week’s super-modern chef sourcing strange stuff from the semi-wild gets it in New Jersey.
- Beetroot diversity. Ignore the recipes; focus on the chart of nutrition; has that research been published?
- As for potatoes, the People’s Plot thrives on Olympic glory.
- Quick now: what links Sicily to Kenya? Both make meals of cucurbit leaves!
- OK clever clogs: what links a neglected legume with destructive energy recovery practices? Fracking guar gum, that’s what! (h/t BPA.)
- Nuts, isn’t it? Anyone up for sequencing some 16th century coconuts?
Nibbles: AVRDC, PPB, Local foods, Emergency food, AnGR meeting, Tilapia, Agave, Asses, New cassava, Diversity for services, Climate change and phenology
- 40 years of AVRDC celebrated. Lots more stuff on vegetables below, so stick around if that grabbed you.
- Breeding with farmers, an ICARDA manual. Are there any examples with vegetables, I wonder?
- Let’s Go Local! See the ABC piece before it disappears from the front page. But it’s not just karat bananas that you need, of course.
- Going local in Philippines too. And India for that matter. And, ahem, Arkansas. Oh and Amazonia.
- Another use for baobab. I feel a factsheet coming on.
- And here are some utterly different fruits.
- Talking AnGR in Latin America.
- GIFT tilapia in India! Look it up, we did a Brainfood on it.
- A Belgian milestone. Put out more flags.
- Is it Cinco de Mayo yet? Well, break out the tequila anyway.
- Is it World Donkey Day yet?
- “Farmer associations hope TME 419 will soon spread across the whole country.” That would be a fancy new cassava in DRC. Anybody worried about that at all?
- Plant diversity key to zzzzzzzzzz…
- Well this will wake you up.
Nibbles: Acorn harvest video, NordGen news, Kolkata Seed Festival, Peopling the Planet, Rye, Ancient Roman diet
- From little acorns…
- Thanks for sharing, NordGen!
- Thanks for sharing, Kolkata!
- Nature special issue on Peopling the Planet.
- Rye soundbites.
- How to eat like a Roman.
- Videos on India’s pastoralists.
Nibbles: Data visualization, Soil, Heirlooms, Organic, Bugs, Veggies, Rome, AnGR, Meat, Mexico, Date palm pollination
- Cool infographics on food, trade and, well, a particular sort of trade. And how to make your own.
- Soil would be a cool place to start.
- The bananas of your grandchildren and the carrots of your grandparents. Plus a funny peculiar idea about how to keep seed of such stuff for 50 years.
- Which you don’t need to do anyway because “[r]eplacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” at least in South Africa. Unlike in the EU, I guess. Oooooh, did I just say that? Such a naughty muppet.
- Ok, let me make up for that with some thoughts on breeding for the sorts of places where those traditional seeds might be found, in Africa and in Europe.
- Of course, in such places, you have to know your aphids. Before they go and eat a bacteria and change their DNA. Tricky to breed for resistance to that, I would guess.
- Oh, but here are also the views of someone in Europe who would rather not have anything to do with traditional seeds and their accompanying aphids at all. Why can’t we just get along?
- Why, for example, can we all not get to love mboga za watu wa Pwani. You heard me. And no, residing far from the Swahili Coast is no excuse. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- He did, however, point out that “[t]he value of male prostitutes exceeds that of farmlands.” Yep, Robigalia time again.
- Meanwhile, not far from the Swahili Coast, some people are thinking that man does not live by mboga alone… No, he must have nyama too.
- And speaking of which: giving sausages a name. On this, I am with Bismarck. No such porky nonsense from the French.
- “Nine thousand years of Mexican agriculture” online. And five hundred on the stove.
- Pollinating date palms just got a whole lot easier. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other nibbles, but I thought it was cool.