- CIFOR has a blog!
- Nice series of videos on eating weeds.
- Video on Peru’s “Andean rodeo.” You heard me.
- Africa needs drought-tolerant maize. Ok, fair enough, but here’s my question. Shouldn’t they have done this study before doing all that breeding? Oh, who knows, maybe they did.
- “Biofortification will thus remain relevant to poor rural populations in the years to come, as their incomes will still be far too low to afford a more diversified diet.” What? Who says a diversified diet need be expensive?
- Russia faces looming buckwheat crisis. At least the genetic resources are safe in the Vavilov Institute. Unless of course somebody decides to, I don’t know, build luxury villas there, or something.
Nibbles: Melaku Worede, Musa, Coconut water, Gates outreach, Bolivian food, Ag and health, Climate change, Diet, Macadamias, Maya Nut Institute
- An interview with the legendary Melaku Worede.
- Rwanda has to go from 100 to 30,000 ha of bananas, apparently.
- Coconut water good for athletes. And the rest of us too, actually.
- Gates Foundation launches a “community page.”
- Bolivians going back to their food roots.
- “…better integration of health and agricultural interventions and policy” needed. Seconded.
- “[A] graphical accounting of the limits to what one planet can provide.” Groovy climate change stuff.
- And if that left you gasping for more, here’s “Socioeconomic consequences of climate change in Sub-equatorial Africa related to the agricultural sector”.
- “Mediterranean” diet set for World Heritage Listing. Maybe. Spaniards, Greeks to object?
- Kenya’s macadamia crop threatened, but help is at hand. In other news, Kenya has a macadamia crop.
- Equilibrium goes Nuts.
Nibbles: Oca etc, Diseases, Pigs, Dzud, Sex, Rice
- There’s a Facebook group for that: unusual root crops, sponsored by the inimitable Rhizowen.
- ILRI says herders are important to identify disease outbreaks in livestock. Makes sense to me.
- ILRI also says local breeds should be included in Indian pig-breeding programmes. Again, no argument.
- More on livestock: what Mongolia’s harsh winter has wrought. BTW, there’s also a discussion at DAD-Net of the effect of Pakistan’s floods on livestock.
- Aspen trees need occasional sex. Don’t we all.
- Climate change not good for rice. I knew that, I think.
Itadakimasu!
Just before digging in, whether it be a seven-course dinner or a sample at a supermarket, it’s polite to say “itadakimasu” (I will receive).
In Japan that is. But does it really just mean “I will receive”? According to my source on all things Japanese a fuller rendering would in fact be:
Thank you to everything and everyone involved in providing this food to me — the sun and the earth and the water for making it possible, the plants and animals that grew to be the food, the farmer who grew them and the person who took it to market and the person who sold it in the market and the person who bought it and the person who prepared the food and the person who laid the table, and everyone who enabled these people to play their part.
Does any other culture heap praise on the whole food system in this way at every snack and meal?
Loafing on Lammas Day
Surprise! Today is Lammas Day, traditionally marked (at least in some traditions) with a celebration of the first harvest and the baking of Lammas loaves from the newly-milled flour of the year. I was doing a bit of reading around the subject for another blog post somewhere else, and came across the video above, shot in Tenerife. It’s clearly a fine celebration of agricultural biodiversity, and you don’t need much Spanish to understand that, as one blogger put it, “it looked more like an excuse to have a frolic in the hay to us than the most efficient way for threshing wheat”. 1
These celebrations are, I think, as much about sustaining today’s communities as celebrating yesterday’s, and it is interesting how fascinating people find them. When was the last time you thought about travelling to have a big knees-up and watch a giant combine rumbling across the prairies?
Do they have the same “first loaf” tradition in Tenerife and elsewhere? Nobody seems to care enough to pint it out. And why does a simple search for Lammas turn up such woo-woo goofiness wherever one looks? People just don’t seem able to accept a harvest festival for what it is. A focus for a campaign!