To all our Ethiopian readers: Enqutatesh! Melakam Addis Amet!
Latin American drinks deconstructed
Alcademics has a couple of cool Peruvian booze stories. And Time has a photo essay on yerba mate. Amazing the diversity of drinks you can make from agrobiodiversity.
Ghanaian buffet
Ghana has forty-seven different kinds of edible green leaves, each with a distinctive flavor.
I bet. And the diversity doesn’t stop there.
I think of Ghanaian cuisine as a kind of culinary jazz. The pepper, tomatoes, and onions, and possibly the oil, form the rhythm section. The stew is one musical form, like blues, the soup and one-pot dishes are others. Like a successful improvisation, the additional ingredients—vegetables, seeds and nuts, meat and fish—harmonize and combine into vibrant, mellow creations.
Dip into the sampler CD at Global Voices Online.
Good news from Zimbabwe?
“I’m looking for maduni, my son. This millet variety was grown for ages by our ancestors, but it’s gone,” she says. “We grew it in our fields when we were young. We liked it because it had a good taste unlike some of the new varieties we have now.”
Long piece by Sifelano Tsiko in the Zimbabwe Herald about the search for forgotten varieties of traditional crops and wild species.
“If humanity mourns the loss of wild plants, we should really worry about the extinction of cultivated ones. These plants sustain our lives,” one renowned agricultural development activist once remarked.
I wonder who that was?
Nibbles: Columbian coffee, tomatoes, rice art, Kenya
- Colombian coffee growers on the run from climate change. Say it isn’t so, Joe.
- Man picks heirloom tomatoes, lives to tell the tale.
- Greenpeace jumps on the rice art bandwagon.
- Solving Kenya’s Food Crisis, One Indigenous Crop at a Time.