Brainfood: Food shift, Food footprint, Periodic Table of Food, Nutritious food, Diverse food, Food seed kits, Food meta-metrics

Nibbles: VACS, FAO forgotten foods, African roots, Hopi corn, Adivasis rice, Sustainable farming, Llama history, Vicuña sweaters, Portuguese cattle, Mexico genebank, NZ genebank, Bat pollination, Eat This Newsletter, WEF

  1. More on the US push for opportunity crops.
  2. Oh look there’s a whole compendium on African opportunity crops from FAO.
  3. Many of them are roots and tubers.
  4. For the Hopi, maize is an opportunity crop.
  5. For the Adivasis, it’s rice.
  6. And more along the same lines from Odisha.
  7. Llamas were an opportunity for lots of people down the ages.
  8. …and still are, for some.
  9. Portugal eschews llamas for an ancient cattle breed.
  10. I bet Mexico’s genebank offers some amazing opportunities.
  11. And New Zealand’s too.
  12. Let’s not forget bats. Yes, bats.
  13. Jeremy’s latest newsletter tackles turmeric, pepper and sweet potatoes, among other things.
  14. And the best way to frame all of the above is that the World Economic Forum wants governments to ban people from growing their own food because that causes climate change.

Nibbles: Indian millets, Indian rice, Neolithic bread, Andean potatoes, UAE genebank, Niger onions, Lentil domestication, Italian rice, Sea cucumber

  1. The trouble with millets. Because there’s always room for a Star Trek allusion.
  2. Growing heritage rice varieties in Goa. With hardly any trouble, it seems.
  3. Really, really old bread. And more from Jeremy.
  4. Breeding company and CIP collaborating to save potato diversity in the Andes.
  5. Another genebank opens in the Gulf.
  6. The story of Niger’s Violet De Galmi onion. Or is it Niger’s?
  7. The latest crop to be called humble is the lentil.
  8. New varieties may help save risotto, but better water management will probably have to feature too, I suspect. Otherwise lentils could stand in I suppose.
  9. In the end, though, maybe we should all just cultivate sea cucumbers.

Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle