I guess it’s a bit old, but I was impressed by an FAO manual for teachers of agriculture, food and nutrition in Africa, in particular its chapter on diversity in diets. The message on agricultural biodiversity and its role in healthy diets has to start going out as early as possible.
Archaeology of food
Speaking of conferences, there’s another one that’s worth keeping an eye on, which I learned about via Eurekalert. It’s called Food and Drink in Archaeology 2007 and will feature a keynote address by Professor Martin Jones of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge entitled “Feast: Why Humans Share Food.”
Why is this relevant to us here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog? Well…
Whilst the importance of nutrition for survival has long been recognised, recent studies have increasingly stressed the cultural significance of the production, distribution and consumption of foodstuffs through out all archaeological periods. An understanding of diet in past societies is therefore crucial to an understanding of daily life, and the relationships between different classes and societies throughout the world.
Traditional farming in Spain … and elsewhere
National Geographic has a fine feature called Photo of the Day. Today’s shows a Spanish farmer with a wooden, sled-like contraption with sharp rocks embedded in the bottom. It’s a threshing board, used at harvest time to cut up straw, separate cereal grains from chaff and break open chickpea pods. Now, unfortunately I can’t just take the NatGeo photo and put it up here for you to see, you’ll just have to go to their site, but I did look around for an illustration that was in the public domain, and I found it at Answers.com, in a fascinating article on the history of these tools. The NatGeo photo is worth seeing, though. While surfing, I also ended up at the Food Museum Online, which I’d never come across before. It’s not the prettiest looking site, but it has some great content, including illustrations of traditional farming practices and tools. There’s also a blog, with a feed.
Photo of a Spanish “trillo” by José-Manuel Benito
Alternative livelihoods
Do wander over to the latest edition of New Agriculturist, which, among other things, has a great feature giving examples of farmers adopting new crops and other ways of making a living as alternatives to illicit, environmentally damaging or otherwise inappropriate ones.
Wikiseedia: what is it?
There’s a long and detailed message from the folks at WorldChanging about something they call SeedPOD. It isn’t clear exactly what this resource will be. A sort of information exchange, but also a network for exchanging seeds and maybe too a platform for sharing experiments and results in more sustainable agriculture. As they describe it:
an imagined toolkit to keep seeds moving, farmers thriving and communities fed in the face of massive environmental change. Perhaps it will trigger some interesting thinking out there: at very least, we hope you find it briefly diverting.
All this seems to be organized through something called the Wikiseedia, but as far as I can see there is no link to this fabulous beast. Go to www.wikiseedia.com, however, and you see a bare bones installation of a wiki (a special kind of web site that anyone can contribute to and edit) that contains no content (yet?) and that has not been changed since 5 March 2007. WorldChanging’s post is dated 27 April.
There’s something happening out there. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But it will bear watching. At least, I hope it will, because it sounds really exciting.