- Climate change affecting ecosystems. Well I never. Mashup with crop wild relative distributions needed!
- Hershey scientist studies ancient chocolate.
- Natural dyes in Indonesia. Temptation to pun successfully resisted for once.
- Agrobiodiversity in art: The Old Plum.
Sweet potato fries brains?
It is actually hard to know whether Tom Barnett’s tongue was in his cheek when he gave a recent piece this headline: The sweet potato silver-bullet?. In fact, in light of his article and its source, the headline makes no sense at all, except that it did persuade me to sit up and take notice.
The thrust of Tom’s piece is a report in the Wall Street Journal about industrial food giant ConAgra trying to create a sweet potato ideal for frying. 1 The WSJ’s botany is not all that sparkling, referring to the sweet potato as the “step-brother” of the “ordinary” potato. That suggests to me that they share one recent parent. And how about this:
Sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant.
But I digress. The WSJ’s beat is business, not botany, and it reports in wonderful detail on ConAgra’s goal, to create the raw material suitable for an industrial business process: uniform shape, size, colour and sweetness.
[T]hree years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.
“We’re wanting to deliver to [ConAgra’s] factory something that looks like a brick,” says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. “We don’t want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store.”
Read on, for an insight into how the food industry views its raw materials and its final products. There are, of course, other approaches. A chum of Luigi’s reports that in Taiwan in the 1980s “SP fries were the standard in local fast food. It was changed to potato fries when the giant international chains entered.” The same chum is working on sweet potato leaves as a vegetable green, not an entirely new idea. Well, they’re a huge component of livestock feed; how nice to reverse the normal pattern of animals eating our food. And apparently sweet potato leaves might do well in space.
One of the commenters at Tom’s blog asks why people don’t just “eat a baked sweet potato, all funky shaped”. He clearly doesn’t understand the business of food production.
And frankly, neither do I.
Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest
- Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
- An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
- Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
- African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
- Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
- You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
- So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
- Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.
Nibbles: Potato chemistry, Millennium Seed Bank, Sacred sites, Japanese festivals
- Measuring micronutrients and stuff in potatoes.
- Kew wants you to adopt a seed, save a species. Easy as that.
- Maybe religion can do some good in the world after all? Allow me to be skeptical.
- Wait, can I change my mind? The wonderfulness that is Japanese penis festivals. Well, they mainly take place in the spring. Agrobiodiversity mainly grows in the spring. There is a connection, surely.
Diversity and adversity in Yunnan, China
It can be a bit frustrating banging on about the importance of agricultural biodiversity when almost everybody else seems to be focused on simplistic solutions to complex problems. Frustrating, and tiring. So I’ll just point you to two items you can read for yourself and decide whether we are truly nuts. First, Nature’s report from Yunnan in China about the drought there. Secondly, a paper by Professor Yy Zhu and his colleagues, Crop Diversity for Yield Increase. Anyone should be able to join the dots.