Category: Mainstream

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Potato salad

I don’t know if it’s because of the International Year of the Potato, but there’s been a fair amount on the spud in the news lately. I nibbled a few days ago news of a paper which will cause a major rethink on the worldwide spread of the potato. Virtually all modern potato varieties are derived from landraces from the lowlands of southern and central Chile. Why? Some people think it’s because those are the first ones that arrived in Europe. Others that there were also highland Andean varieties in Europe, but that they got wiped out by late blight. But analyzing DNA from old herbarium specimens shows that both types of potatoes were grown in Europe both before and after late blight hit. So a new theory is needed.

Then there was a short piece on the CIP collection in LatinAmericaPress. Note the cool picture of diversity in the colour of potato flesh. I’m not sure what prompted the article, but it may have been a CGIAR press release on how the international centres, including CIP, are sending germplasm for safety duplication in Svalbard in time for the opening in three weeks’ time.

CIP was also in the news with the announcement of the establishment of Red Latinpapa. That’s the Latin American Network for Innovation on Potato Improvement and Dissemination. Its “aim is to help poor potato farmers in Latin America improve their income and reduce costs by making it easier for them to access new technologies and varieties and getting their input into what traits are most useful.” Among other things, “Latinpapa will stimulate exchange and analysis of genetic material between researchers in the region.” A busy time ahead for the CIP genebank, and national genebanks around the region, I guess.

And finally, a bit of fun. Remember the picture of sliced potatoes in the LatinAmericaPress article showing lots of different colours and patterns? Of course, because of the relatively narrow base of modern potato varieties, as described in that USDA paper I started with, we don’t get potato chips (crisps for the Brits among us) in all these different colours. Bummer.

But maybe we will soon. Someone in Switzerland is indeed working on a blue chip. But in fact mixtures of blue and white chips are already commercially available in the US. Although they “have a weird flavor that is not quite potato.” Sounds intriguing…

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Vertemnus

I finally got online again at home last week, so I spent a lazy Sunday exploring podcasts and the like, and in the course of that I ran across a radio programme on BBC Radio 4 on the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II which sounded interesting. So I click on the appropriate link and on the programme’s webpage I find reproduced a detail of this painting:

vertemnu.jpg

Now, I knew this painting, but only insofar as it features on the front cover of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and indeed on its website. I suppose I should have known that it is by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, dates from 1591, and represents the said Rudolf II as the mythical Vertemnus, god of harvests and abundance. But I didn’t. I have admired it — and marvelled at how apposite it is as an illustration of the Seed Treaty, with all that agricultural biodiversity — many times, but never really thought about it further. Before now. Which is a pity, because if I had I would also have found out about the similar series of paintings Arcimboldo did on the seasons. And about the website Eat Online, devoted to representations of food and eating in the arts.

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African food online

Two Kenyan plant breeding students, Arthur Karugu and Felix Waweru, have a website ((According to a Nation article which seems to have disappeared.)) which “provides information on African foods, recipes, restaurants that sell them that and nutritional advice.” They are planning to develop it into an e-commerce platform for small farmers:

Farmers undergo many problems in marketing their products. They need a market link, and we are ready to facilitate that for them, says Waweru…

Best of luck to them. The website is called Try African Food, and it’s got a blog, a roundup of news etc. I’ve subscribed to their feed and will definitely keep and eye on it. Thanks to Kijo for the headsup.