Category: Mainstream

PAR has developed an online compendium of methods for assessing agrobiodiversity. Drawing on experiences from around the world, the Compendium was created to support the documentation, co-creation and sharing of knowledge about diversity and its management. The Compendium provides guidelines for the collection and analysis of data about the diversity of crops, livestock, pollinators and harvested wild plants.

PAR is the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research. They’ve been very quiet on its various online channels since July, but clearly they haven’t been idle. Good stuff.

Oh, and since I’m on here, let me link to the latest offerings from Uli Westphal by way of agrobiodiversity illustrations, featuring the maize collections of Native Seeds/SEARCH and CIMMYT.

Jennifer Jordan’s Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods can be downloaded free as an ebook from the University of Chicago Press website during October.

Sandra M. Gilbert, author of The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity
“Edible Memory is a compelling exploration of the lure and lore of foods that have become culinary ‘heirlooms,’ especially some kinds of tomatoes, but also apples, stone fruits, even leeks and turnips. A meticulous scholar and an incisive sociologist, Jordan writes with verve and wit throughout this beautifully nuanced study. Exploring the many varieties of culinary nostalgia, she avoids sentimentality while investigating our sometimes paradoxical yearnings for fruits and vegetables we may not even have eaten in our own lives and our curiously Proustian longings for (even) Jell-O molds and boxed cakes. Her book is an important contribution both to food studies and, more generally, to the history of taste.”