Category: Mainstream

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The humble spuds gets its 15 minutes of fame

I’m just back from a few weeks’ break in Kenya, where the big news was that over the holidays KFC ran out out chips (French fries). It was not a question of inadequate production, though. There are plenty of potatoes in Kenya.

The problem, apparently, was that potential local suppliers had not gone through KFC’s quality assurance process that makes sure “our food is safe for consumption by our customers”, the company’s East Africa chief executive Jacques Theunissen told the Standard newspaper.

So KFC ended up importing potatoes from Egypt, and ran into supply chain snarl-ups.

Makes you think. What’s the point of fancy breeding projects to boost local production, including by the likes of the International Potato Centre, based on decades of research, and using genetic resources painstakingly collected all over the Andes over many years, if in the end local growers get screwed over standards they don’t even know about?

Anyway, let me say a few words about what exactly it is I linked to above about potato collecting, because it really is worth having a look at.

Professor Jack Hawkes was a world-renowned potato and genetic resources expert who spent much of his professional life at the University of Birmingham. He made his first trip to South America in 1939 to collect wild and cultivated species of potato. And on this expedition and others that followed he made several 16 mm films, which have recently been converted to digital format, and become available to view more widely for the first time.

Dr Mike Jackson, no slouch at collecting potatoes himself, put the website together with help from Dr Abigail Amey, who wrote the narrative to accompany the films.

Happy new year.

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Nibbles: Seed saving, Ulu, Diet diversity, Azeri fruit/veg, Tomato breeding, Indigenous farming, AGRA-ecology

  1. Food security through seed saving in the African diaspora.
  2. Food security through breadfruit in Hawaii.
  3. Food security through the dietary diversity of women.
  4. Food security through preserving fruits and veggies in Azerbaijan.
  5. Food security through tomato wild relatives.
  6. Food security through Native American farming practices.
  7. Food security through agroecology.
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The poetry of genebanks

This is definitely a new one for me. A genebanker and a poet have collaborated, and the result is Parchment Scalpel Rock: What’s Up, Doc?, a digital exhibition from Coventry Creates. Here’s a taste:

…genebanks are magicians’ hats from which all researchers
can magic the whole genepool’s variation when they need…

The genebanker is Charlotte Allender of the UK Vegetable Genebank:

I have never worked with a poet so I was excited to be paired with George and we had some really enjoyable discussions about carrots and the various drivers which underpin the current production systems which supply UK supermarkets. I was fascinated by George’s approach, where I had some input into the curation of his verse and the selection of pairs of lines for the final booklet.

And the poet is George Ttoouli:

Bringing Charlotte in to help me edit and curate the lines felt necessary, collaborative. I’m interested in decentering authorship, my own and that of others, through processes. With a little more time, I would have loved to devise a project to allow the rabbits (and hares) at Charlotte’s research centre to curate their own sequence of the poems I produced.

See what you think, and provide feedback on the Coventry Creates website.

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Brainfood: Genetic diversity, Pointy maize, Diversification, Hybrid yeast, African yam bean, Urbanization, Wild tomato ecogeography, Wild banana seeds, Seed systems, Phytosanitary, Rematriation, Cowpea development, ABS

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Nibbles: GenResBridge, Food for All, CIAT genebank, Seed for the Future, Vavilov book, Seeing Pastoralism, S Sudan floods, Sustainable diets, Elon Musk, CePaCT, NZ genebank, Wild potato, Peyote

  1. Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
  2. Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
  3. Meanwhile, in Cali…
  4. BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
  5. A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
  6. Exhibition on pastoralism.
  7. Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
  8. Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
  9. Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
  10. The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
  11. Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
  12. The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
  13. …and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.