Information

May 4, 2016

Will international tea party include genebanks?

Announcements such as this from UC Davis, of the launch of the Global Tea Initiative, make me wish there was a market for roving agrobiodiversity bloggers and tweeters. Alas, I’m reduced to the usual ploy of asking participants if they’d like to blog the thing for us.

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Will genebanks be discussed? There aren’t that many collections around the world, and one of them, in Japan, accounts for 7,500 of the 11,700 accessions WIEWS knows about. And where’s China? Can’t help thinking that’s not altogether healthy. Lots to talk about…

May 3, 2016

Nibbles: Coffee strategy, Agroforestry, Superfoods, Cyperus, Potato history, Precious tea, Wheat disease, Crowdfunding conservation

Strategizing about coffee. Over cappuccinos, I suspect.
Treesilience. I like that.
Enough with the superfoods already.
Which is not something anybody ever called tiger nuts.
You can now officially blame the potato for the fall of civilization.
A really expensive cup of tea.
Wheat blast reaches Asia.
Crowdfunding tree conservation on Hawaii.

April 24, 2016

Talking non-biotech coffee

I have said before that I would have a priori doubts about anything calling itself Talking Biotech. But I stand by what I also said in that post about the actual podcast of that name, by Dr Kevin Folta of the University of Florida, being largely free — though by no means entirely, alas — of the narrowness, nerdiness and preachyness that the name conjures up, at least for me. And so I congratulate Dr Folta on receiving a few days ago the Borlaug CAST Communications Award, given out annually by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). The recent episode on coffee, which we have have already Nibbled, is a pretty good introduction to his podcast, if you’re new to it. And I don’t say that just because I’m somewhat involved in the development of the coffee genetic resources conservation strategy mentioned therein.

April 21, 2016April 21, 2016

Nibbles: Drying seeds, Saving citrus, Shakespeare’s food, Ganja double, TPP, Aurochs art, Coffee diversity, Biofortification, Training, Breeding booklet

Zeolite finds its genebank niche. Remember when we blogged about it?
The USDA citrus genebank at Riverside gets the podcast treatment.
Shakespeare, because it’s the 400th anniversary of his death: food and animals.
Weed, because weed: taxonomy and breeding. Could literally apply to any other crop on earth.
What will the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) do to farm-saved seeds?
Bring back the aurochs!
Barista Magazine on coffee diversity. In other news, there’s a Barista Magazine.
The chemistry of banana carotenoids.
Master of Arts in Food Studies in San Francisco! What’s not to like.
From plant to crop: The past, present and future of plant breeding. Nice booklet.

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016

Filling up at the Food Tank

Ok, so let me not make the same mistake again. The Food Tank Summit is on right now, and is being livestreamed. Among the forthcoming highlights, our friend Simran Sethi, author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, will be moderating a panel on Beyond Calories: The Need for Nutrient Dense Diets in a couple of hours:

Over the last 50 years, research organizations, governments, and development agencies have focused on increasing calories available per person–yet, today, nearly 1 billion people continue to go hungry and another 2.3 billion people are overweight or obese. Clearly, filling people up is not enough — we need to actually nourish them with nutrient dense crops and foods that are good for both people and the planet.

Join in using #foodtank.