- Breeding cacao in Ecuador.
- Supporting specialty crops in the US.
- Tasty Chinese piglets.
Sacramental varieties
The CIMMYT genebank holds about 13,000 wheat lines (from a couple hundred populations) from Mexico that they call “sacramental wheats.” This collection was put together by the late Bent Skovmand, who established the CIMMYT genebank back in the 1970s. Sometimes collected in monasteries and cemeteries, and generally restricted to the fringes of cultivated zones, these mainly spring bread wheats are the remnants of the varieties introduced by the Spanish into the New World. You can see the collecting sites in the map above right. They were brought across the Atlantic both to provide familiar food, but also to make the sacramental bread used for Holy Communion. An excellent book relating this history is “Que vivan los tamales! Food and the making of Mexican identity” by Jeffrey M. Pilcher.
Here’s my question. Are there some varieties that would have been used only for Holy Communion? I’ve heard it said that this was the case for grape varieties and sacramental wine, although I can find no evidence online for that, or indeed for purely sacramental bread wheat varieties. So I’m turning to the wisdom of the crowd. That means you. Are you aware of any wheat or grape varieties that are (or were) used solely (or mainly, let’s give ourselves some room for maneuver here) to produce sacramental bread or wine for the Eucharist? Or do you know someone who might know? Either way, leave us a comment, please.
Nibbles: Darwin herbarium, Saving seeds, Hunger Season, Grafting, Farmers’ rights, Vitamin A scandal, Plant hunting
- Did you know Darwin collected crop wild relative specimens on the Beagle?
- Saving the Running Conch. And its stories.
- Melinda Gates plugs “Hunger Season.” Including to AGRA, presumably.
- I want a fruit salad tree too.
- If you know how to implement Farmers’ Rights, the ITPGRFA would like to hear from you.
- Don’t keep taking the (vitamin A) pills.
- Hunters, pirates. You pays your money…
Nibbles: Diversification talk, Gene award, Community genebanks, GCARD, Natural products, Nutrition talk, Wild bees, GM for drought fail, Face of breeding, Cheese, Bird, Cacao smuggling, CWRs, Perreniation
- ICRISAT DG agrees with Bioversity DG. Kinda. CGIAR DGs communicating via blog. Who’d have thunk it.
- Borlaug Global Rust Initiative gives its first Gene Stewardship Award to Nepali breeders. I wonder if they work with community genebanks at all. Or what they think about them. Or even if they know they are there.
- GCARD 2 is coming, socially networked up the wazoo. Be afraid.
- Authenticating natural health products via barcoding.
- FAO discussion on making agriculture work for nutrition.
- Nice photos of wild bees.
- Not sure if we already linked to the big report on why biotechnology is not delivering drought-resistant crops.
- Meet a Breeder. Conventional, natch.
- Who moved my artisanal cheese?
- Bird diversity on intensive farms like happy Tolstoyan familes: the same everywhere.
- What’s a poor cacao farmer to do? Obey the law and make a loss, or break it in the hope of breaking even?
- Kew does the crop wild relatives thing for Plantwise, and check out that picture!
- Nature discovers perreniation as salvation of African soils; can resilieficiency be far behind?
Nibbles: Organic breeding, Agroforestry, Metallophytes, Fermentation, Grain storage
- Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
- Farm Radio does tree farming.
- A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
- As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
- This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.