- 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.
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.
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.