- There’s a national chickpea championship, but in Spain.
- Senegal is getting its rice back. No word on any championship.
- The Great Plains are not coming back, alas. Spoiler alert: rice and chickpeas are not to blame.
- Cheddar is trying to get its cheese back, though, and has a chance.
- Cool book on the fruits of Brazil. I bet some would go great with cheddar.
- Review of what seems a cool book on the history of food in Europe. I wonder if it explains the whole cheese-with-fruit thing.
Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms
- Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
- Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
- I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
- Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
- Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
- Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
- The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
- Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
- They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.
Brainfood: Healthy diets, Healthy foods, Nature dependence, Farm size, Climate-smart ag, Monitoring diversity, Pollinators double, Intensification, WTP, Mexican booze
- Actions in global nutrition initiatives to promote sustainable healthy diets. Focus more on food choice.
- Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods. I suppose this might help with making good choices. Maybe.
- Nature-dependent people: Mapping human direct use of nature for basic needs across the tropics. 1.2 billion people in tropical countries are kinda forced to choose nature.
- Small farms and development in sub-Saharan Africa: Farming for food, for income or for lack of better options? Not really a choice: it depends on population density, farm size, market access and agroecological potential.
- The future of farming: Who will produce our food? Whoever chooses to run small, diverse farms. Maybe.
- Building a framework towards climate-smart agriculture in the Yangambi landscape, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Not much choice for these farmers.
- Varietal Threat Index for Monitoring Crop Diversity on Farms in Five Agro-Ecological Regions in India. How to measure the diversity farmers choose to grow, and lose.
- Widespread vulnerability of flowering plant seed production to pollinator declines. A third of flowering plants have no choice and would not set seeds without pollinators…
- Honeybee pollination benefits could inform solar park business cases, planning decisions and environmental sustainability targets. …so choose to put beehives in solar parks.
- Agricultural intensification erodes taxonomic and functional diversity in Mediterranean olive groves by filtering out rare species. Choose management practices wisely to maintain biodiversity in olive groves.
- Policy implications of willingness to pay for sustainable development of a world agricultural heritage site: The role of stakeholders’ sustainable intelligence, support, and behavioral intention. Why people might choose to pay for biodiversity-friendly management practices and crop diversity.
- Traditional Fermented Beverages of Mexico: A Biocultural Unseen Foodscape. So much choice…
Nibbles: Green FAO, Veggie breeding, TABLE debate, Better seeds
- There’s an FAO Global Conference on Green Development of Seed Industries this Thursday and Friday. Includes sessions on genebanks.
- I hope it will cover the breeding of weird — and not-so-weird — vegetables as well as this Food Programme episode did.
- And debate the issues as effectively as was done by Pat Mooney and Charles Godfray at this TABLE event.
- Meanwhile, in Malawi and the Philippines…
- All we are saying…
Brainfood: Archaeological edition
- Do Pharaohs’ cattle still graze the Nile Valley? Genetic characterization of the Egyptian Baladi cattle breed. Maybe.
- Lessons on textile history and fibre durability from a 4,000-year-old Egyptian flax yarn. Pharaohs’ flax still being woven though.
- Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture. Which made it easier to adopt cultigens when farmers arrived.
- The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Horses from the lower Volga-Don spread all over Eurasia starting around 2000 BC along with equestrian material culture.
- The Japanese wolf is most closely related to modern dogs and its ancestral genome has been widely inherited by dogs throughout East Eurasia. Kinda too bad it’s extinct, but maybe it can be reconstructed?
- Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites in the montane forests of New Guinea yield early record of cassowary hunting and egg harvesting. Amazing. From looking at eggshells.
- Hallstatt miners consumed blue cheese and beer during the Iron Age and retained a non-Westernized gut microbiome until the Baroque period. Amazing. From looking at, well, there’s no easy way of saying it, paleofeces.