Category: Mainstream

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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?

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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.

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Shepherds and their flocks trek through Europe

Evelyn Mathias of the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development just posted an interesting piece on DAD-Net. Unfortunately I was not able to find a web page to link to, so I take the liberty of reproducing the post in full here.

They are good-natured, produce tasty meat, and their wool gets turned into sweaters. Everyone knows so much about sheep. But few people know about the benefits that sheep provide through grazing. As they move from place to place, mobile flocks maintain the ecology, so conserving many threatened plants, animals and insects. The landscapes they create enhance the quality of life for local people and tourists alike.

Grassland that has been extensively grazed in a controlled way is an excellent water filter. It protects the soil from wind and water erosion, stores a huge amount of carbon, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen in winter when trees no longer have leaves.

But grassland must be maintained through grazing – otherwise it will be overrun with brambles and scrub, which lack many of the advantages of grasses. Mobile flocks of sheep are an important way to conserve these landscapes.

To raise awareness of the advantages of mobile livestock production, Europe’s shepherds have organized a sheep trek across Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands during the summer of 2010. The trek aims to draw attention to the contribution that mobile herding makes.

“Shepherds all over the world face similar problems”, says Günther Czerkus, spokesman for the German shepherds association. “Too much bureaucracy, and an increasing number of restrictions that make it more and more difficult to maintain a mobile herd.”

Shepherds in Europe also find it difficult to market their products. Wool prices are so low that it is not profitable to shear the sheep. And the market for meat is dominated by imports from New Zealand. Czerkus hopes that the trek will encourage consumers to buy home-grown lamb.

The trek will start in Berlin on 5 June and end at the “Green Land Day” (Grünlandtag) in Trier on 16-17 October. The trek will be a kind of a relay walk, with each flock and shepherd covering a certain distance and then handing over to another flock for the next stage. Accompanying vehicles will manage traffic and distribute information materials.

Special events in Paderborn (1 August), Duisburg (21 August), Brussels (16 September) and Trier (17 October) will highlight the contributions of sheep. Other events may be organized through hout the trek. The trek will provide excellent opportunities for school classes to learn about agriculture and ecology in general, and mobile herding in particular.

A similar but smaller trek took place in Belgium in 2008. The webpage from this earlier trek gives an idea of what a trek might look like.

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Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest