Tangled Bank 94 is up at Life before Death, full of biological diversity and goodness. Best part about it? The host is a bee-keeper! (I think I may have apiarist-envy.) She hasn’t actually posted on bees since 28 September, but it is winter so there can’t be all that much to write. I would love to have an expert’s view on the latest news on Colony Collapse Disorder in the US, which is that it is not the result of bees imported from Australia carrying a virus imported from Israel.
Tasty rice
I’m at IRRI in the Philippines the whole week (and the next, actually, but that’s another story) for a workshop to develop a global ex situ conservation strategy for rice genetic resources. More on that later. Right now, I just wanted to show you a photo I took today during a rice variety tasting the T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Centre laid on. There were about 20 different genotypes from around the world: normal and fragrant, white and black, loose and very sticky. They included Carolina Gold, which I blogged about a few days ago. It’s amazing how different rice varieties can taste.
Food choice at truck stops
Truckers want healthy foods. Yeah, right.
Literary Corner
Two books, two quotes, re two posts on maize domestication and maize preferences.
I quite imagine that huitlacoche, the corn fungus, may have been the ambrosia of the Aztec gods. I never find it quite enough to eat quesadillas filled with them, so every summer that I am in Mexico I go to the Bola Roja in Puebla to eat a large plateful of the fungus served with strips of creamy white cheese and lots of hot tortillas.
The word is derived from the Nahuatl words huitlatl, meaning “excrement,” or “excrescence,” and cochtli or cochin, of uncertain etymology, although, according to Sahagún, it may be connected in some way to the verb coch, which means “to sleep”.
“The cuisines of Mexico” (Diana Kennedy)
Three truths keep bubbling to the surface in a search for a good piece of corn bread.
Southerners like their corn bread thin — about one inch deep in the pan. they want it made with white cornmeal. White looks pure.
The North likes a thick corn bread — sometimes three to four inches deep in the pan — and made with yellow cornmeal. Yellow looks rich.
Few Europeans care for corn in any form. They consider it a “gross food.”
“The Complete Book of Breads” (Bernard Clayton Jr)
A week ago I asked a random sample (of two), 50% northern and 50% southern, and they were in total agreement with the first two truths. The third “truth” is patently not true, but no matter.
African Coffee Research Network endures
Having been in at the birth of the African Coffee Research Network fifteen years ago or whenever it was, it’s nice to see them making the mainstream African press. On the other hand, the list of things they are planning to do looks remarkably like the one we came up with at the early meetings. Fifteen years ago.