Mainstream

May 17, 2011May 17, 2011

Nibbles, Menu edition: Garlic, Potatoes, Meat, Tomatoes, Ramps, Bananas, Chocolate, Coffee, Pepper breeding, Local cattle in RSA

Chicago, Chicago, it’s an edible town. Major urban centre named for edible wild species shock.
Drought-resistant potatoes! At least 1000 genes involved.
Test-tube burgers? ¹
Wild tomatoes and climate change. A meeting round-up from our chums at CIAT.
The appeal of fair trade bananas. A good read.
Technical Guidelines on the Safe Movement of Cacao Germplasm updated.
Coffee, please. A cup of your finest specialty variety.
Caribbean pepper breeders getting hot under the collar.
Gotta love the way Farm Radio Weekly not only has great stories about agrobiodiversity, but also handy background notes.

Well, that was fun.

May 16, 2011May 16, 2011

Nibbles: Hunger foods, Pollinators, Sacred Seeds, Neglected species, Grasses, Yields, Hawaiian History

Mining Mungo Park for info about famine foods. Bamboo seeds and, perhaps, baobab pods.
The big prerequisite for EU funding is a good acronym. STEP — status and trends of European pollinators — gets the go ahead.
Sacred Seeds project at Missouri Botanical Garden announces new partners in India.
New Bioversity project to extend importance of work on neglected species in India, Nepal and Bolivia.
How to manage diverse grasses.
More on climate change and maize yields. “[I]f anything heat tolerance is declining.”
Ancient agriculture in Hawaii.

May 15, 2011May 16, 2011

Nordic chefs exploring Nordic foods with Nordic genebank

I was intrigued by a reference to a genebank in a restaurant review in the Wall Street Journal. Not just any restaurant, but the best restaurant in the world, Noma in Copenhagen, which is “is best known for its fanatical approach to foraging.” Here’s the reference:

Noma helped found a Nordic Food Lab, which has a gene bank that is collating information about the wild products in the region.

Nordic Food Lab does indeed sound interesting (especially its fermentation trials):

Nordic Food Lab is a non-profit self-governed institution established by head chef of Noma, Rene Redzepi and gastronomic entrepreneur, Claus Meyer with the purpose of scientifically exploring the New Nordic Cuisine and disseminating results from this exploration.

But they’re not really establishing a genebank, as suggested by the WSJ piece.

We are collaborating with Nordgen, the amazing bank of genetic material, to evaluate the gastronomic potential of bygone varieties of Scandinavian produce. We will publish our sensory evaluations as they are completed. This promises to be an extremely interesting project; many modern species are produced on other merits besides flavor, and we expect intriguing findings.

Much more sensible.

nordgen — The entrance to NordGen (Nordic Genetic Resource Center) at Alnarp.

May 15, 2011May 15, 2011

Englishman saving potatoes in Ireland

So apparently…

David Langford has established the most comprehensive collection of heritage potatoes in Ireland over many years and we are very proud to have been chosen as the repository for this wonderful collection. There are now 180 varieties of potato growing at Lissadell dating from 1768 right up to 2004, including the Famine Lumper.

You can hear Mr Langford thanks to the consistently excellent Home Grown: Ireland from RTE. I hacked the photo from their Facebook page. Friend them!

Lissadell House looks wonderful, but it’s not clear to me how their potato collection relates to Ireland’s national plant genetic resources conservation efforts. Maybe Danny can tell us…

May 14, 2011

Nibbles: Nabhan, Tilapia, Crowdsourcing taxonomy, Drought, Bees

Gary Nabhan on the West Bank wall.
Tilapia not so bad after all?
Yet another example of crowdsourcing in science.
Yet another approach to breeding for (mild) drought tolerance.
Yet another reason why natural history collections are so important.