I really like the conceit behind Antonio Briceño’s photographs of conservation in Rwanda. The missing piece, as so often, is people.
Nibbles: Agricultural landscapes, Seed banks, Maize genetics, Food diversity, Ancient food, Micronutrients status report, Seed systems, Punjab Agricultural University, Arable land, Dutch elm disease
- “Priortizing restoration across agricultural landscapes.” Nothing to do with agriculture, though.
- “Gene banks to rescue local crops.” Nothing to do with genebanks, though.
- “‘Psychedelic’ maize may help increase crop and biofuel yields.” Nothing to do with LSD, though.
- Scotland gets a national genebank. Well, not really, but anyway.
- Malawi schoolchildren sing about food diversity. No, really.
- Homo erectus ate fish as part of a pretty diverse diet. Had to wait about 2 million years for chips.
- Report for 10-Year Strategy for Reduction of Vitamin & Mineral Deficiencies. “…activities to enhance dietary diversification are an attractive option for improving micronutrient status, but these have proved difficult to evaluate.” Ouch.
- “Integrating Genetic Resource Conservation and Sustainable Development into Strategies to Increase the Robustness of Seed Systems.” You’ll need to pay to find out how, though. I’ll try to get a pdf, some of the authors are friends.
- The role of Punjab Agricultural University in the Green Revolution. And in genetic erosion?
- Enough arable land to feed world, says new French study. But not here, say Indians.
- Reviving the elm in Britain one sapling at a time. How long till the next disaster, though, with such a narrow genetic base?
Ancient candy bars waiting to be rediscovered
It was something of a throw-away comment in the paper on the Kibale protected area in Uganda which I blogged about recently:
Tribes knew of coffee’s stimulant properties and mixed crushed coffee beans with animal fat to create “iron rations” used by warriors and travelers on long journeys (McCoy & Walker 1991). 1 In the KNP region, coffee beans were used in blood rituals and in the ceremonies of Toro kings.
It piqued my interest, but I did nothing about it. But then, as often happens, I came across a slew of similar things, such as this write-up for a “new” kind of candy bar. And then a reference in a discussion about how cacao was consumed by the Maya:
Sometimes the Maya mixed the cacao with cornmeal to create a tightly packed material, almost like a hockey puck, that was more transportable. That’s how they stored it. There are texts that say it ended up being stolen by enemies since it was very highly valued. It was also taken by the warriors when they went to their next job, if you will. When they were on the go, they’d just take these things out of their pockets and eat some. They were like early energy bars!
Now there’s a topic for someone’s dissertation. Are there also examples of ancient energy bars using tea, qat, or coca, for example?
Nibbles: Ecosystem vulnerability, Mayan chocolate, Natural dyes, Japanese art
- 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. 2 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.