Cheshire is a veritable hotbed of gooseberry growing.
High Plains Drifting
Wheat being nudged and prodded into perenniality, and local perennials the other way ((That’s the Land Institute stuff we’ve blogged about before.)); cows managed like bison, and bison managed like cows (including by media moguls turned restauranteurs); reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand, and Indian retirees going home to the reservation; farmers paid to retire some of their acres so grasslands can make a comeback, and high-tech plants turning corn into diapers. There sure is some funny stuff going on in the Great Plains, that sixth of the continental US between the foothills of the Rockies and the 98th (or possibly the 100th) parallel. Read all about it in National Geographic’s Change of Heartland. The feature is from a couple of years ago, but still well worth checking out, if only for the photos. And thanks to Kem and her friend for pointing it out to me.
Interacting nutrients
We’re always saying how agrobiodiversity includes all kinds of different things — crops, livestock, wild relatives, pollinators, microbes — which interact in often complex ways. Mess with one part, and you often unintentionally affect another.
Well, it looks like those interactions continue once the products of agrobiodiversity are harvested and eaten. A review described in ScienceDaily today says that people should worry less about individual nutrients and
shift the focus toward the benefits of entire food products and food patterns in order to better understand nutrition in regard to a healthy human body.
For example, there is little evidence, according to the researchers, of long-term health benefits from taking isolated supplements of beta-carotene and B-vitamins, or from reducing total fats.
In contrast, myriad observations have been made of improved long-term health for foods and food patterns that incorporate these same nutrients naturally occurring in food.
So it’s the foodway as a whole, rather than intake of individual nutrients, that needs to be optimized. Which I guess should give pause to those — like me! — who hope that, for example, things like deep yellow sweet potatoes or bananas will solve the problem of vitamin A deficiency.
Walnuts in Wisconsin
Running a walnut farm is hard work.
Eat more crap!
It’s a little too preciously written for my taste, but the article at SFGate.com a couple of days back says some sensible things about bugs. Basically, its message is not to be so scared of bacteria on food. They’re agricultural biodiversity too, and can be good for us, essential even. Unfortunately,
the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.
Hence the exhortation in my title, which I’ve nicked from the text of the article. Thanks, Ruthie.