- Nancy Turner, great food anthropologist, deconstructs dinner on air.
- Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? Eucarpia conference in Paris in December. Love the ?
- Ford Denison on evolution in reverse: crops that become weeds.
- Nature on evolution in forward: crop breeders look at roots.
- “Shade-coffee farms support native bees that maintain genetic diversity in tropical forests.” Good to know.
- Want to know about Access & Benefit Sharing negotiations? We thought so.
- Ancient people moved their asses.
- Selection during domestication differs from selection during diversification. For the ass too?
- Expect to see Dioscorea hispida appear in spam emails very soon.
- And today’s answer to malnutrition is a blue-grin alga from Lake Chad. Kidding apart, it’s an interesting story.
Nibbles: Protected areas, Sturgeon, Geographic indications, Ugandan yams, Tomato controversy, Maya agriculture, Alternatives to slash-and-burn, Asian veggies, Food composition
- Bird people say: Critical migratory waterbird sites need urgent protection. Tomato and potato crop wild relative people say: What, only the critical ones? You’re lucky, mate!
- Toffs everywhere start stocking up on caviar.
- Tequila and cheese geographically indicated. Foie gras says: Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
- Uganda Government minister says yams cause cancer. Oh, come now, steady on.
- Are Tomatoes Fruits or Vegetables? Asks mental_floss. Oh no, I’m not going there, says me.
- “…where there is a market, the Maya will work to develop supply capability; where there is no market, traditional subsistence methods are better than the introductions.”
- Building a better slash-and-burn agriculture.
- Nice Asian greens. I’m hungry already.
- Crop Composition Database gets facelift.
Nibbles: Niu kafa, Rice origins, Monsanto seed donation, Soils, Red junglefowl
- More on Roland’s quest for the biggest coconut in the world.
- Rice cultivation in Lower Yangtze dates back to 6th millennium, and took a millennium to establish itself.
- Yet more on Haiti’s “hybrid hate.”
- Soil scientist says soils are important.
- “ARKive is creating the ultimate multimedia guide to the world’s endangered species”: including a wild relative or two.
Nibbles: Wild coffee in Uganda, Grasspea, Land Institute, Biopiracy, Frog endangered by tea
- Conservation project fails to work. But lessons are learned.
- The archaeology of grasspea. Mainly Aegean, as it turns out.
- Artificial selection can help fill gaps left by other kind.
- Nestlé accused of stealing roiboos.
- Tea or frog?
Nibbles: Recognizing breeds, Cannabis in New Zealand, Farming systems data, Maize inbreds, Zinc in wheat, Markets for nature, Ramie, Milk and drought, ELBARN
- Computer program recognizes cattle breeds.
- NZ dope getting stronger? Maybe, and I hope so, but probably impossible to tell from this study.
- Need farming systems data?
- Psst, wanna know how to determine the essentially derived status of maize inbred lines?
- High zinc wheat works.
- Michael Jenkins of Forests Trends on using markets to save biodiversity.
- The phylogeny of ramie and its wild relatives sorted out. Sort of.
- Pearl millet landraces are the best under drought.
- Area action plans for local breeds in Europe are out.