…there is no African cuisine.
What? Hang on, take it easy, don’t jump to conclusions, read the rest of the post at BetumiBlog.
Unripe for plucking
Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”
“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:
One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.
But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?
Nibbles: Byssus, Crops for the Future, African horticulture, Swine, Seeds, Soils, Phosphorus
- Jeremy gets all etymological about fibres. I guess he got fed up of experimenting with fermentation. And with questioning the Wisdom of the Sachs.
- Did we mention Crops for the Future has a cool new website? Subscribe!
- “Inside Africa’s First Global Horticulture Congress“
- We missed the 5th World Congress of Dry-cured Hams. Who knew? Time did.
- In Hawaii? Got seeds to swap? Go to the Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Captain Cook.
- In Australia? Want better soil? Listen to Maarten Stapper. Via.
- Phosphorus redux. You pays your money …
Go Local recognized by CDC
We’ve often referred here to the sterling efforts of Lois Englberger and the Go Local team in Pohnpei in promoting agrobiodiversity-based solutions to the many, grave health and nutrition problems afflicting Pacific Islanders. The karat banana story is only one example.
Now we hear that the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) and Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have listed the Go Local campaign as one of their success stories in reducing the burden of chronic disease across the U.S. The full list is online. Look under Federated States on Micronesia (p.29). Congratulations to the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the NGO behind Go Local. Some of the other success stories also look interesting.
Climate change to devastate crops, promote livestock
[B]y 2050, hotter conditions, coupled with shifting rainfall patterns, could make anywhere from 500,000 to one million square kilometers of marginal African farmland no longer able to support even a subsistence level of food crops. However, the land, on which some 20 to 35 million people currently live, may still support livestock.
Boosting livestock production could be an attractive alternative for millions of poor farmers across Africa who, in the coming decades, could find that climate change has rendered their lands unsuitable for crop cultivation yet still viable for raising animals, according to the study that appears this week in a special edition of the journal Environmental Science and Policy.
That’s from a press release put out by ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute. The paper is from a special issue of Environmental Science and Policy on Food Security and Environmental Change, Food Security and Environmental Change: Linking Science, Development and Policy for Adaptation. Just skimming the contents gives me the willies.
By the way, Wikipedia says sub-Saharan Africa covers an area of 24.3 million square kilometers. It doesn’t say how much of that supports a subsistence level of food crops. So it is hard to know how much difference this prediction will really make.