- Nepal’s malnutrition rate apparently the highest in world. But the Micronutrient Initiative is on it. But what about homegardens, I hear you ask. And rice biofortification?
- The advice I’ve been waiting for all my life: better nutrition through alcohol.
- The plight of Kenyan tea workers.
- Harlem church helps Ethiopian coffee farmers.
- Botanic gardens drop flowers, do food. About time too. And botanical art too.
- Jeremy’s farro photos.
- “Iconic” catfish in trouble due to Mekong dam. Everything is an icon these days. Something to do with post-modernism, I guess.
- Seedbomb something today. You’ll feel better.
- WTF is it with garlic in China?
- EMBRAPA reaches out to Africa.
- KARI scientists push Opuntia for livestock. Ok, but surely there are enough native desert plants in Kenya to be going on with? Well, maybe not.
- Zimbabwe market turns to sun-dried vegetables. Wish I knew what umfushwa was, though.
- The Rice-Ducks Integrated Farming System sounds like great fun.
- Why the salmon thrives in Oregon: “Tribal people have practiced a natural, sustained-yield conservation since time immemorial and are taught to plan seven generations ahead.”
Ripe breadfruit blown from a tree in a storm
The final paragraph of The Economist’s obituary of Mau Piailug, Pacific navigator and culture hero:
In 2007 the people of Hawaii gave him a present of a double-hulled canoe, the Alingano Maisu. Maisu means “ripe breadfruit blown from a tree in a storm”, which anyone may eat. The breadfruit was Mau’s favourite tree anyway: tall and light, with a twisty grain excellent for boat-building, sticky latex for caulking, and big starchy fruit which, fermented, made the ideal food for an ocean voyage. But maisu also referred to easy, communal sharing of something good: like the knowledge of how to sail for weeks out on the Pacific, without maps, going by the stars.
And like plant genetic resources, including breadfruit, perhaps. Anyway, a good word to know, maisu. Pacific people really take care of their breadfruit trees, incidentally. I took this photo in Kiribati a few years back.
Oyster day
“Are oysters the sort of elitist, anachronistic foodstuff that should be consigned to history?” That’s the provocative question posed by an article in The Guardian’s food section today, by way of introducing tomorrow’s Whitstable Oyster Festival (July 24-30). And serendipity decreed that the answer would come on the very same day from Banjul in the Gambia, where a group of “women rely on oysters for their livelihoods and contribute to food security in a country that is heavily dependent on seafood for protein.” The workers at Ameripure Oysters and in the fisheries of Kent can probably relate to that, and they were also in the news today. Anachronistic indeed.
Nibbles: Cassava virus, Peru’s Potato Park, Marula, Taimen, Meetings, Cornish fruits and veg
- New cassava varieties saving Zanzibar. Good to hear, though as ever one worries about what’s happened to the local landraces.
- Alder’s photos of the Potato Park. Do follow her travels around South America in search of agrobiodiversity.
- Namibia looks for other marula products.
- Saving the taimen in Mongolia. That would be a fish. A mighty fish.
- Interesting Indian symposia: wild fruits; “lifestyle floriculture.” Oh, to have more information.
- “Gariguette strawberries are an old variety and are non-licensed.” Crazy, eh?
Beer drinkers finally get recognition they deserve
We have been keeping an interested eye on the apparent resurgence of sorghum in some parts of Africa, driven by climate change, sure, but also by man’s (and woman’s) unquenchable thirst for beer. The latest story along those happy lines comes from Kenya. It might have remained a mere Nibble, but for the coincidental appearance of a study suggesting that “beer drinkers can serve as role models for the nation as it struggles to emerge from recession.” In Britain and, presumably, in Africa too.
LATER: Oh, and this just in too. A fine day for beer drinkers indeed.