- Latest New Agriculturist online with nice piece on the alpaca y mucho mas…
- A call for the consumption of more traditional foods in Botswana — “one-stop shop for the best health and nutrition.”
Nibbles: Gene smuggling, teaching, UG99, fungi, fermentation, horse, livestock
- Customs unit seizes smuggled chromosomes, Sri Lankan academics uncooperative.
- Teachers urged to use Global Seed Vault in lessons; native Memphian available for comment today!
- No UG99 in Pakistan (yet). Optimism abounds everywhere.
- Cool new book: Fungi in the Ancient World.
- And on a related topic: full text (kinda) of old(ish) book on fermented foods.
- New book peddles old how-horse-domestication-changed-the-world (or at least Europe) story. Prof. Renfrew has already commented. Lengthily.
- Livestock need a Svalbard too. Old, but the videos are nice, and I don’t think we linked to this before.
Agriculture and learning
Even if seeds survive climate change and mass extinction in a bomb-proof vault, will anyone remember how to cultivate them?
That, for me, is the money question in an admittedly parochial article from a blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Should a Liberal Education Include an Agricultural Education? wonders whether American colleges should be teaching liberal arts students where food comes from, and makes several interesting points along the way. Like, for example, the fact that one can view just about any subject through an agricultural lens. But why restrict it to Liberal Arts students? (A term, incidentally, that I confess I have never fully understood.) Wouldn’t it be good, and useful, for all students to know a little bit more about the food supply and all its ramifications?
Nibbles: Meeting, UG99, carnival, autocthonous cattle, nutrition, blackberry, garlic
- Seed Savers Network 20th annual meeting on 28 March near Mudgee, NSW, Australia.
- UG99 wheat rust reaches Iran.
- Tangled Bank 100 1 is up. Are all those spelling mistakes ironic?
- Czech red cow in bad shape, no bull.
- USDA tries in different ways to raise the nutrient content of crops. Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- Guess where the world centre of blackberry breeding is. Did you say Arkansas? Didn’t think so.
- Thai garlic is best, say Thais.
Nothing to eat
19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century is a slide show that sets out a jaw-dropping agenda to study the near future. The slide are wonderful, so is the concept. One can but hope that the results will be too. Just one little niggle: nowhere among the 14 “subjects of exploration” does the word “food” appear. Health, yes. Nutrition, no. Water sources, yes. Agriculture, no. Maybe sustenance will find its way into all the explorations, but somehow I doubt it. 2