- Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
- Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
- When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
- The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
- Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
- San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
- New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Brainfood: Nutrition edition
- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
Brainfood: Archaeology edition
- Editorial: Food matters. Antiquity‘s editorial puts food at the centre of archaeology, a window onto societies, economies, identities and power: a fair place to start a run of items that dig into the evidence.
- Pottery residues provide earliest direct evidence for domestication and dairy processing in equatorial Mainland Southeast Asia. Molecular traces in ancient pottery provide direct evidence for animal domestication and dairy processing 3000 years ago where the rest of the archaeological record can be frustratingly coy. Complicates assumptions that dairying was restricted by tropical conditions or in pastoral societies.
- Agricultural Practices of Rice and Millet at the Largest Zhou Dynasty Settlement by the Weishui River in South-Central China. How rice (mainly) and millets (foxtail and broomcorn) were grown, processed and consumed side by side, 1046-256 BCE.
- Ancient DNA reveals early use of melons in China’s Song dynasty. Genetic evidence from archaeological remains pushes back the record of melon use in China (960-1279 CE). They weren’t domesticated there, though. And they weren’t sweet.
- Origin and Dispersal of Domestic Chickens in Africa: Integrating Archaeological, Genetic and Historical Evidence. Archaeology is combined with genetics and history to trace how chickens arrived and spread across the continent in waves: via Egypt around 300 BC, then Indian Ocean connections during the first millennium AD, the trans-Saharan trade, Bantu movements and regional exchange networks.
- Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug. Not just food though. The archaeological record for habitual plant-drug use turns out to reach back a long way, approximately 25,000 and 16,000 years ago to be not-so-precise.
- Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East. No, plants are definitely not just food. A new volume treating plants as active participants in religion, art and symbolism, with chapters on plants as persons in Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and on meeting gods under trees in the Hebrew Bible.
Nibbles: Pasiega cow, Goat-cow, Badri cow, Zimbabwe festival, Heirloom apples, South Korea genebank, Marmottier, Radiation breeding
- Cantabria is putting the Pasiega cow in the bank. Just in case.
- Spain’s “goat-cows” are fighting wildfires the old-fashioned way: by eating the fuel. I hope they’re in the bank too.
- India has made a Badri calf in a lab. Conservation meets IVF.
- Old apples are having a revival. Turns out forgotten apple varieties can taste pretty good. Well I never, is it that time of year already?
- Zimbabwe’s Mbire district celebrates seed, food and culture with a festival. What, no cows? Or apples?
- South Korea is looking for partners to save climate-resilient plants. A seed vault is better with friends.
- The marmottier can’t decide whether it’s a plum or an apricot. Botanists sympathise.
- In the atomic age, gardeners irradiated seeds and waited for something interesting to grow. Sometimes it did.
Brainfood: Biodiversity works through relationships
- Plant diversity modifies multi-trophic interactions in croplands, grasslands and forests. Increasing plant diversity changes the interactions between plants, herbivores and their natural enemies, but exactly how depends on the ecosystem. Diversification’s pest-suppression magic looks like a farming-specific trick, not a universal law.
- High-resolution carbon and biodiversity mapping shows correlated losses across space and agricultural products. Carbon loss and biodiversity loss from farming turn out to hit the same ground: two-thirds of both concentrated on one-third of agricultural land, with beef and milk alone responsible for 41% of the biodiversity damage. Good news for anyone hoping one policy lever could do double duty.
- Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health. Soil to gut, it’s all one network, linking ecosystem function, food production and human health across the entire agri-food system.
- Breeding for beneficial microbial associations. If microbiomes matter that much, why not breed for them? A proposed framework pairs crop traits that recruit good microbes (root exudates, architecture) with soil practices that keep those microbes around, since good genetics on ruined soil gets you nowhere. This means designing crops as participants in ecological networks rather than as isolated organisms.
- Host genetics and social relationships jointly shape fitness-associated microbiome variation in a population of feral horses. Nature’s own microbiome-breeding program: seven years of horse poop from Sable Island shows gut microbes predict winter survival, and related horses share microbes more than chance allows. So the functional unit of adaptation is the animal plus its microbiome.