- How to collect forestry seeds.
- Whole bunch of new maize races collected in Colombia.
- The Türkiye national genebank in the news. Lots of collecting there. Though maybe not as much as in this genebank in China.
- But small communities need genebanks too. Here’s an example from Ghana. And another from India. And a final one from the Solomon Islands.
- Need to use the stuff in genebanks though. Here’s how they do it in the UK. And in Bangladesh. And in Europe with the INCREASE project, which has just won a prize for citizen science. And in Taiwan. Sort of citizen science too.
- Collecting apples in the UK. Funny, the canonical lost-British-apple story appears on the BBC in the autumn usually. Kinda citizen science.
- Or we could do in situ conservation, as in this South African example… Just kidding, we all know it’s not either/or. Right? Probably a good idea to collect seeds is what I’m saying. Could even do it through citizen science.
We have the data on superfoods – now what?
Jeremy tackles superfood in his latest newsletter. Do subscribe.
The ultimate expression of food as medicine is the search for active ingredients. Why go to the bother of eating broccoli or Brussels sprouts if you can swallow a pill of glucosinolates and get all that cancer-fighting power directly? I’ve even seen arguments that beneficial phytochemicals be purified from wild plants and somehow incorporated into the batter for chicken nuggets. So I’ve long been skeptical of an effort launched a while ago to compile a periodic table of food, described as an initiative “for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible diversity”. I didn’t link to the original paper because it was behind a paywall but now that two of the 56 authors have written a kind of press release I’m happier to do so.
Superfood – Unveiling the “Dark Matter” of Food, Diets and Biodiversity explains how little we know about the molecular composition of the vast majority of edible plants, and that to learn more will take “a united scientific movement, larger than the human genome project”. Such a movement, in turn, calls for standardised tools, data and training to ensure that results are comparable.
What have we learned from the tools, data and training, so far? As an example, the authors offer
Broccoli, which achieved “superfood” status several years ago for its antioxidants and its connections to gut health, has over 900 biomolecules not found in other green vegetables.
And? Does that mean the broccoli pill will need more than glucosinolates, which are also present in many other brassicas? What does it mean, other than that we need more research?
There are larger goals. One, I think, is to somehow reverse the current trend for people in the West to fall upon the latest superfood with a cry of glee until the next one comes along, without giving anything back to the indigenous cultures that discovered and preserved the superfood. Calling for capacity-strengthening, the authors say “it is time to start opening the black box of food and create more nourishing food systems for everyone”. M’kay.
Another goal, I think, is to ensure that government dietary guidelines are based on more complete knowledge, despite the fact that even now it is more or less impossible to get people to follow those guidelines. Will having more molecular data help?
Full disclosure: I used to work for one of the organisations behind the Periodic Table of Food Initiative and I count many of the researchers as friends. I still don’t see the point, but please check out the gorgeous PTFI website for yourself and let me know why I am wrong.
Brainfood: UK NUS, German labelling, Indian diversity, Ghana fonio, Kenya veggies, Rwanda biofortified beans, Cassava WTP, Urochloa resources, Perennial flax
- Diversifying the UK Agrifood System: A Role for Neglected and Underutilised Crops. It’s really hard to pick potential NUS winners. So why even try? Support them all!
- Can markets for nature conservation be successful? An integrated assessment of a product label for biodiversity practices in Germany. Labelling agricultural products can support biodiversity conservation, but probably not on its own. Can it support NUS, I wonder?
- On-farm crop diversity, conservation, importance and value: a case study of landraces from Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Plenty of diversity in these study sites, including of NUS, but ex situ conservation still needed.
- Revealing Ghana’s unique fonio genetic diversity: leveraging farmers knowledge for sustainable conservation and breeding strategies. Supporting NUS is going to need the knowledge of farmers…
- African indigenous vegetables, gender, and the political economy of commercialization in Kenya. …especially women farmers. Up to a point.
- Cultivating prosperity in Rwanda: the impact of high-yield biofortified bean seeds on farmers’ yield and income. Ok, beans are not a NUS, but you get the point.
- Increased farmer willingness to pay for quality cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) planting materials: evidence from experimental auctions in Cambodia and Lao PDR. NUS or not, clean planting materials and new varieties attract a price premium.
- Brown-top millet: an overview of breeding, genetic, and genomic resources development for crop improvement. Urochloa ramosa is definitely a NUS. And labelling will probably not be enough.
- Survival analysis of freezing stress in the North American native perennial flax, Linum lewisii. If you want to help your NUS, make it perennial?
What did Jesus eat?
Atlas Obscura: Jesus never ate bananas.
Smithsonian: Hold my Lava Flow.
Brainfood: Biodiversity nexus, Nutrition interventions, European land suitability, Beyond yield, Cover crops, CWR breeding, Rice gaps, Banana info system
- Understanding the role of biodiversity in the climate, food, water, energy, transport and health nexus in Europe. Meta-analysis shows that a lot of things people do affect biodiversity negatively, yet biodiversity affects most things people want to do positively.
- Food Systems Interventions for Nutrition: Lessons from 6 Program Evaluations in Africa and South Asia. Have a strong theory of change, assess a range of outcomes, triangulate methods, including those from other fields, use adaptive and flexible evaluation designs, and document everything transparently. I wonder how many of these boxes the studied analysed above ticked.
- Geospatial evaluation of the agricultural suitability and land use compatibility in Europe’s temperate continental climate region. Europe has run out of land usable for crops, but some currently used land is being used for the wrong crops.
- Beyond yield and toward sustainability: Using applied ecology to support biodiversity conservation and food production. But does “suitability” mean “sustainability”? Probably not so much, but it should.
- Global synthesis of cover crop impacts on main crop yield. Cover crops are good for yield. But didn’t we just say we should go beyond yield?
- Editorial: Trends and perspectives for the use of crop wild relatives in crop breeding. Way beyond yield…
- Global potential distributions and conservation status of rice wild relatives. Still a lot of work to do to save rice wild relatives so they can be used to, you know, move beyond yield.
- Collecting and managing in situ banana genetic resources information (Musa spp.) using online resources and citizen science. Can probably say the same about banana wild relatives as was said above about rice, but I don’t see as much scope for citizen scientists getting into wild rice.