Find Your Feet is a UK charity that works with families in rural India and Malawi “to build a future free from hunger, poverty and discrimination”. They have a blog too, which I found by running down some of the ideas about Malawi’s success — or otherwise — in boosting agricultural production. I’m adding it to our list of links.
Agrobiodiversity everywhere, if you look
My weekend reading included two pieces that I felt sure would prove well written and engaging, but which I frankly did not think would yield much in the way of agrobiodiversity fodder. Turns out I was wrong, at least on the latter point.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s review of the Encyclopedia of Exploration 1850 to 1940 by Raymond John Howgego is indeed a model of its type: informative, stimulating and charming. It also includes a reference to the late nineteenth-century Swiss ethnobotanist of Paraguay Moisés Bertoni, who described Stevia rebaudiana, a controversial sugar substitute. And another to the Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimatation, which had a famous birthday boy as a loyal member in its early days. 1 A Colonel Henry Wayne apparently won the society’s gold medal for his efforts to introduce camels to the US.
The second piece that intrigued me over the weekend was an article by Matt Jenkins in the Smithsonian Magazine about the elite pilots who guide ships through the treacherous, sand-barred mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon. What’s the agrobiodiversity angle? Well, Portland and other upriver ports are the the main gateway in the US for its wheat and barley exports. The river pilots can shut down the entrance to the river if conditions are too bad, but, to quote one of them:
“When we shut down the bar for two days, trains are backed up all the way into the Midwest. And just like a traffic jam on the freeway, once you clear the wreck, it takes a long time for it to smooth out again.”
It’s a great image. The world’s interdependence for agricultural products 2 resting on the judgement of a dozen or so salty sea dogs in the Pacific Northwest.
Seek alternatives to maize, Kenyans told
Maybe, just maybe, the tide is beginning to turn away from derivative monocultures in countries where those crops are risky. That seems to be the case in Kenya, where the Daily Nation reports that farmers are being urged to plant other crops that are less risky. David Nyameino, chief executive of the Cereal Growers Association, says Kenya needs a commitment by the government to promote such foods.
Non-maize crops are viewed with a degree of suspicion by Kenyans, to the extent that farmers would rather gamble with the chance of good rains rather than plant them. …
“The government should emphasis on demand for other forms of food beside maize such as sweet potatoes, cassava, beans and peas,†Mr Nyameino told the Sunday Nation. “By this we are not taking away the demand for maize but are creating demand for other foods such as sorghum and millet.â€
Will government, and farmers, heed the message?
Corn thoughts
The idea that maize and man co-opted one another in pursuit of world domination is not as new as some people seem to think. I’m reading “Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance” by Arturo Warman, translated by Nancy Westrate. The original Spanish edition dates to 1988 and the translation to 2003, and although some bits have undoubtedly been updated the one over-riding impression I have so far is that all indicators of corn’s global dominance are probably now even greater than they are in the book. But that’s not why I am blogging.
Rather, I am puzzled by a reference on page 7 to a crop of American origin called sesame. That brought me up short. Sesame, Sesamum indicum, is almost certainly Indian in origin. Fortunately, Warman, or Westrate, gives a Latin name, Amaranthus cruentus, and says that it is known as Alegria, or “joy”. That makes more sense. A. cruentus is one of the three amaranth species grown for its grain, which admittedly does look a little like sesame seed. And it is the one often known in English as red amaranth, for the flower (and flour?) colour of a group of varieties that was, apparently, used as an element of ritual throughout the Americas. It represented blood, and that may have been the reason colonial religious nuts attempted to ban its cultivation and use. 3
Is there, then, some reason why Warman and Westrate refer to it as sesame? A Spanish word, perhaps?
All this is especially interesting in view of later paragraphs dedicated to the original domestication site of corn, Old World or New. 4 Part of the evidence that scholars adduced in support of an Old World origin was linguistic, names such as Egyptian sorghum, Syrian grain, grain from Mecca, Indian wheat, Spanish wheat, Portuguese grain and, here in Italy, Gran Turco. What all of these have in common is the notion that maize comes from somewhere else, often self-contradictory, but that was enough to send Old World supporters into a frenzy. They simply could not bring themselves to believe that such a wonderful plant had been domesticated by the lowly creatures of the Americas.
And speaking of names, it came as another shock to learn that Teosinte, the ancestor of maize, gets its name from a Nahuatl word for “corn of the gods”. How many other foods of the gods are there, I wonder?
Indigenous pasta sauces
I don’t think we nibbled it here, but I did post on Facebook a news story about how Italy is thinking of banning ethnic restaurants. This elicited more comments than I usually get. One friend said he’d send me a kebab in the mail. I politely declined, citing health concerns. Another suggested such a ban would be a good idea, as most ethnic restaurants in Italy are terrible, even when — or is it because — they absorb local ingredients and ways of doing things. 5 My wife wondered whether the move might set off tit-for-tat bans on Italian restaurants — including pizzerias 6 — around the world. And another commenter wondered what Italian cuisine would be like if pasta sauces featured only indigenous agrobiodiversity. That means no tomatoes. One sauce that I could think of that is composed solely of ingredients that could be said to be native to Italy — whatever that might mean — is pesto. Anyway, one thing is for certain, such a cuisine would probably drive me to kebabs.