Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Verdura di campo needs to be identified

In the first warm days of early spring Caterina’s mother — from the generation that lived through the wars — still roams the fields in search of that wonder of wonders… le verdure di campo (wild “vegetables”).

I bet she does. Read all about it in ItalianNotebook, and you’ll be salivating within seconds, like I was.

But fight the urge to rush out and harvest the roadside verges long enough to read the comment made by Barbara Modica at 2:39 pm on May 24th:

In the spring, there is a weed which resembles a rhubarb plant, except it is smaller, has a green stalk and green leaf shaped and about the same size as rhubarb. My husband’s family (from Sicily) boiled the stems, discard the leaves, then breaded them and fried them in olive oil. They called them gardoni (or something similar to that). Are you familiar with them? They are only edible in the spring, later on turn into a tall plant. We carry on the tradition and our grandchildren love them also.

Any ideas?

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Nibbles: Prickly pear, Corridors, Nutrition, Backyard chickens, SW agriculture, Non-wood forest products, Mexican ungulates, Chinese sheep

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The glut of bugs in your gut

A long article on The Why Files discusses changing attitudes to the human gut flora:

These critters, mainly bacteria, vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, and we are utterly dependent on them. Bacteria make vitamin K, essential for clotting blood. As they do in cows, bacteria play an essential role converting our food into usable chemicals. And bacteria form a complex barrier against invading pathogenic microbes.

The realization of which has led to an explosion of proper scientific work on probiotics ((“Live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host,” according to the WHO.)), formerly confined to the lunatic fringe.

A springboard for the growing interest, Huffnagle ((Gary Huffnagle, professor of internal medicine and microbiology at the University of Michigan Health System.)) says, was a discovery by Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University, who found that bacteria “can talk to the epithelial cells that line the GI tract, which can turn on different genes depending on who is living nearby.”

What’s the connection to agrobiodiversity? More from the article in The Why Files:

Probiotics can be taken in supplement pills, or in many cultured products, such as yogurt, cottage cheese, tempeh and kefir. It’s not clear which mechanism is better, says Sanders ((Mary Ellen Sanders, executive director of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics.)), who consults to the dairy industry on microbiology. “Often probiotics are incorporated into the production of a food product, but we don’t really have a good sense of how important that might be. During the fermentation of milk into a dairy product, they may … produce organic acids or peptides that contribute to the health effects of a probiotic yogurt, but unfortunately there is no good research to sort out the benefits of a fermented dairy product versus a dry supplement.”

So microbial agrobiodiversity doesn’t just result in a huge range of delicious products with strong niche market potential. It’s also good for you.

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Using photos to share knowledge about agrobiodiversity

ResourceShelf reported on a Library of Congress blog post on the photographs in the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection, the most popular among which are now available in a Flickr group under the heading FSA/OWI Favorites. That led me to some wonderful colour photos from the 30s and 40s from the same source. One of them particularly caught my eye. Not because it’s particularly well framed or for its dramatic subject matter. It’s just a pretty standard shot of some harvested oats fields in southeastern Georgia taken in May 1939. But someone — a Mr Raymond Crippen, actually, who sounds as if he has first-hand experience of wartime Georgian oat fields — has taken the trouble to annotate different parts of the image:

The most common grains in shocks were wheat, oats, barley. Farmers hated working with the barley. The “beards” stuck to sweaty arms, found their way down shirts – and they caused great itching.

This strikes me as a great way of documenting and sharing indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices and biodiversity. Has it ever been tried in a more formal way?

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Nibbles: Biodiversity loss, Mapping, Mongolia, Ag origins, Polynesian voyaging, Hybrid fruits, Apricots, Bedouins, Donkeys, Chile, Cuba