Mainstream

Nibbles: Beer edition

Genebank saves beer!
Not so fast…
So, lets get back to basics shall we, and the dawn of brewing, recreated (again).

Britain gets a tree seed bank. Wait, it didn’t already have one? St Helena seems to, sort of. And Cameroon. And why they’re needed more than ever; and more. Although in Brazil trees can be the bad guys.
Bill Gates praises CIMMYT, and the CGIAR as a whole.
A Renaissance garden recreated in NYC.
A survey on moringa. And one on achocha and oca.
And speaking of deconstructing weird crops, how about saffron?
Yet another one of those GMOs-are-not-as-bad-as-you-think pieces. Is any of this getting through, I wonder?
Free range pigs in Kenya and the USA.
Speaking of free range livestock… Well, a species distantly related to livestock anyway. Oh, and here’s another restoration story, from another continent.
Free range glass eels too. And salmon, after a fashion.
Traditional potatoes in fancy Lima restaurants. Maybe with pork or fish?

System of Rice Intensification increases yields, not incomes, because it takes time away from other jobs. Caveats apply.
Which does not deter Rajendra Uprety, an SRI activist, in Nepal, where rice farmers “hydridize technology”.
In reviewing the global march of GMOs, a plea for policies to promote “much more crop diversity”. Well of course we agree.
US food company executives fear “weather extremes” more than anything else in 2013.
The same fears may have driven Chinese people to food processing 23,000 years ago. A grind not being able to access the PNAS paper.

Nature “celebrates” 30 years of GMOs.
African pastoralists know how not to destroy their livelihoods shock.
African urban dwellers keep livestock shock.
Vegetables can be perennial too. Oh yes indeedy. Not bitter gourd though, alas. Nor cucumber. And in other news, there’s a Bitter Melon Council. And also a campaign to promote zucchini in Iowa.
Climate change reaches farmers in the Pacific NW. Can their Sri Lankan colleagues be far behind?
Always good to have a beer story. Well, maybe not.
Speaking of fermentation, this WSJ piece looks interesting, from the two sentences of it I can read. No, wait. Oh crap, try this.
A hummus dip goes really nicely with beer. Is this the quinoa story again?
A yam conference for the ages. Will they discuss the new trait ontology?
Botanic gardens reach out. Genebanks next? Maybe not.
You mean like the European ones, perhaps?
That US CWR paper from the horse’s mouth. And a similar thing from Benin. But where does all that data come from?
Baobab notes to go with all those factsheets.
The Saharan olive needs a factsheet too. IRD obliges.
Cool set of agriculture photos.
A couple of different views of Indian food. Thanks to Cara de Silva and Diana Buja.

Chickpea harvest more than doubled last year – in the US. Whatever happened to garbanzos?
Introduction to cassava and cyanide.
Conserving maize diversity in Guatemala.
And potato diversity in Peru.
Historical insights into Kew’s museum display of an economically important palm.
Mainstream media still confused about Svalbard and all that.
Asparagus is topologically artichoke. The Botanist in the Kitchen continues her exploration of bracts.
Linguist ramps up his knowledge of the Alliums. (See what I did there? Nothing remarkable, almost everyone else succumbs too.)
It takes real research to grow food locally, ask the scientists in Arkansas. And their supporters.