The pomegranate is everywhere in Armenia. And I don’t mean just in the markets. A famous film is named after the fruit. Tea and wine are made from it. And its image features on everything from church walls to tourist souvenirs. I suppose it goes back to pre-Christian mythology, in which it was a symbol of fertility and abundance — something to do with the belief that each fruit contained exactly 365 seeds, perhaps. Anyway, here’s a compendium of pomegranate iconography from my recent trip. Couldn’t get much information on diversity, I’m afraid, how much there is of it and to what extent it is endangered. Something for the next time.
Women with Cows #BAD11
Thanks Miss Haworth for the tip-off. This does look like a documentary worth seeking out.
Nibbles: Book, Breeding, Labour, Tallante’s chickpea, Bacardi yeast, Solutions, Sandwiches, Mapping resistance, Cucumber history, Maya nuts
- Can a person called Rushing really have written a book on Slow Gardening?
- Genetic Engineering vs. Breeding. No contest, really.
- Georgia peaches, rotting in the sun. Can the consequences of clamping down on immigrant labour really have been unintended?
- Tallante’s chickpea back from the brink. No, I don’t know why as species of Astragalus is called a chickpea. Is it even a CWR?
- Bacardi and its yeast. A tale of derring-do and intellectual property rights. h/t CAS-IP.
- Back40 takes aim at Solutions for a Cultivated Planet, so we don’t have to.
- UK productivity 5,263 beef sandwiches per hectare(bsp/h), compared to 2,439 bsp/h in the mid-18th century. h/t The Tracing Paper.
- Another great interactive map, this time of bacterial diversity of the worst kind.
- Cucumbers in Europe: a history. AoB blog explains all.
- The good old Maya nut to the rescue again.
Nibbles: Livestock films, Sea cucumbers, Plant collecting, Nutritional composition, Intensification, Mongolian pastoralists, Low resource tolerance
- More livestock films than you can shake a stick at.
- The Consortium all at sea.
- Road trip! Herbarium specimen collecting in Nepal.
- Call for nutritional composition data on the staples of Papua New Guinea.
- Wanna intensify agriculture in the highlands of East Africa? Here comes the PowerPoint.
- The Tragedy of the Commons averted in Mongolia through collective action.
- A new approach to functional traits? I don’t see the difference myself, but I’ll take their word for it.
Nibbles: Food insecurity, Resilience, AnGR
- Someone else has looked at Food Insecurity in the World 2011 … so we don’t have to.
- That Kenyan meeting on Knowledge exploration agricultural biodiversity, resilience and transformation starts this week.
- 17th meeting of the Assembly of European National Coordinators for Animal Genetic Resources. 17th? Wow.