I’m sure you enjoyed Jeremy’s fascinating conversation with Jordan Rosenblum on how the pig and the eagle diverged as the history of Jewish dietary law and custom played out. Which means you’d probably welcome another helping of Prof. Rosenblum. Well, you’d get that, and much more, in the excellent brief summary of the deep history of the animal — the pig that is, not the eagle — in the Levant coincidentally just out in Archaeology Magazine. Prepare to be surprised:
…the inhabitants of the earliest cities of the Bronze Age (3500–1200 b.c.) were enthusiastic pig eaters, and that even later Iron Age (1200–586 b.c.) residents of Jerusalem enjoyed the occasional pork feast.
The American Geographic Society had a very informative post about coffee prices on Facebook a few days back. I don’t really want to link to it, but I’m sure you can find it if you want. Anyway, here’s the text.
Coffee prices have hit a 50-year high due to a combination of rising costs of production, supply chain disruptions, and climate change–related declines in crop yields. Coffee plants are sensitive to changes in precipitation and temperature, and recent droughts in Brazil and Vietnam resulted in poor harvests. Coffee companies are passing on the extra costs to customers, with the average retail price of ground roast coffee increasing 15 percent in American cities in the past year and peaking at over $7 a pound. As climate change will continue to threaten coffee harvests in the years to come, projected to shrink the land available for coffee cultivation by half, prices are expected to keep rising.
“This map depicts the predicted change in suitability for growing coffee in different regions between 2000 and 2050 based on climate projections.”
Social media as it should be done.
And since we’re on the subject, there are some very cool resources on coffee diversity on the website of Christophe Montagnon, a renowned expert on the crop. For example, I really like this summary of the global history of arabica.
Shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
We’re going to need those resources — and indeed that diversity — if we want to keep drinking coffee.
Beautifully written piece on the use of heritage varieties — and much else besides — in breeding hazelnuts in the US. If you only read one of these Nibbles, read this one.
Old shipwrecked rye seeds may end up in whiskey. Best place for them.
