- Orwell summarizes; ownership, ploughing, crop diversity, livestock.
- Broad spectrum immunisation for plants.
- Turkish agriculture blog.
Nibbles: Anthrax, Sheep
- The perils of working with agrobiodiversity products.
- “The Nejdi sheep of today are much more beautiful than those of 10 years ago.”
Assyrian food culture in the Old and New Worlds
The BBC has an interesting photo essay on wine-making’s struggle for survival in Turkey among Assyrian Christians. Interestingly, a scion of the Assyrian community is something of a food guru in the Bay Area. Expatriates again…
Nibbles: Wild food, Sisal, Cucurbits, Carnival, Rice blight
- Zimbabwean take to wild foods, and not in a good way.
- “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see my sisal flooring.”
- Gourds+Halloween=Jawdropping Creativity.
- Tangled Bank 117.
- “Terror agent” listing for Xanthomanas oryzae blights US rice research.
Warm welcome for finger millet porridge
Whenever I hear people talking about reviving food traditions, I always want to ask them what they’re doing with expatriates. They are often the people who are most attached to traditional foods and assorted agrobiodiversity from back home. Take my wife. No sooner did our visitor fly in from Nairobi, laden with uji mix,
that she had the stuff boiling away on the stove as if she hadn’t tasted porridge in years. ((Which come to think of it she probably hasn’t.))
Now, I’m not saying that Kenyans abroad are going to save finger millet cultivation in the Nandi Hills or whatever. But they might be a good place to start.