China and EU agree on DOC. Someone mention zeitgeist?
Transhumance in central Italy
Another interesting thing about the Gran Sasso (pictured above in a photo I took a few days ago) that is related to agricultural biodiversity, apart from the famous lentil I talked about earlier ((And thanks to Lorenzo for adding some useful details to the post.)), is that its grazing lands are at one end of a famous transhumance route.
Transhumance is the seasonal movement of livestock in search of pasture. The route in question, the Royal Shepherd’s Track, has been proposed as a World Heritage Site. Its other end is at Capitanata, near Foggia, almost 300 km away to the southeast.
The Track may have been in use for a thousand years, but until recently the future of this way of life in Europe was bleak:
…though transhumance seemed doomed a few decades ago, all of a sudden — thanks to the commitment of a number of dedicated players as well as support from people in high places (the EU, Slow Food) — it looks like it’s due for a reprieve…
A key player in the transhumance revival is Roberto Rubino of Anfosc, ((Associazione nazionale formaggi sotto il cielo, or the National Association of Cheeses Under the Sky.)) an Italian organisation devoted to quality cheeses made from the milk of animals that live outdoors (‘sotto il cielo’) in ancient pastures rich with hundreds of different grasses, wild flowers and herbs instead of being shut up in stables and pumped with artificial food…
Patrick Fabre of the Maison de la Transhumance in St Martin de Crau, Provence, is singing from the same hymn sheet. Like Rubino, he notes that animals fed naturally and grazing out in the open are healthier, while the meat (and/or cheese) they produce is of superior quality and distinctive flavour. Some of these regional products (Sisteron lamb, fromage d’alpage) enjoy Label Rouge and/or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status, and command a corresponding premium.
The Ojibwa and wild rice
Smithsonian Magazine has a short article, photos and a video online about a Native American tribe called the Ojibwa, who live in northern Minnesota, and their close connection with wild rice, “manoomin,” or Zizania aquatica. ((Thanks to the Food Museum for pointing to the story.)) We talked about this before. Ricing is central to the Ojibwa’s founding story, and also a welcome source of income (unemployment is at 50%):
The White Earth Land Recovery Project, run by political activist and tribe member Winona LaDuke, was started 18 years ago to preserve the harvest and boost the tribe’s share of the proceeds. It operates a mill on the reservation and markets Native Harvest wild rice to specialty stores around the country (and through nativeharvest.com). Ojibwa wild rice is one of only five U.S. products supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, an international organization based in Italy that aims to preserve traditional or artisan foods.
I say kumato
The FreshPlaza piece on the kumato is not very long. But it does manage to squeeze in a lot of interesting information. The kumato is a tomato that ripens from green to dark brown. It is the result of a conventional breeding programme which involved a wild species. And it is just coming up to its first harvest in Australia. This definitely deserved more investigation.
There’s no doubt it looks pretty extraordinary. But the most intriguing thing about the kumato is that the wild species involved in its development may be from the Galapagos.
Now, Lycopersicon cheesmaniae from the Galapagos Islands has been used to breed dark orange tomatoes before, though it does not have a dark brown skin like the kumato. ((This species was actually published as L. cheesmanii, after Evelyn Cheesman, but that was incorrect, as the Latinists among us will know, as Ms Cheesman was a woman and the specific epithet therefore requires a feminine ending.)) Check out this excerpt from an article celebrating the late great tomato geneticist and explorer Prof. Charles M. Rick in 1997, five years before his death:
Rick’s research led him on 15 genetic scavenger hunts to Andean South America, the homeland of the tomato, where he hunted for wild tomato varieties carrying useful genes. Among his discoveries were wild tomatoes growing near the tidelands of the Galapagos Islands, despite salty sprays that would have stunted or killed a domestic tomato plant.
Or again:
An excellent lecturer, Rick was much sought after by universities who valued both his rigorous science and his humor and flair for storytelling. A perennial favorite involved his frustrations in trying to germinate wild tomato seeds collected from the Galapagos Islands. The emerging mystery of how the plants reproduce in the wild was only resolved after the seeds were “processed” by passing through the digestive track of a Galapagos tortoise, resulting in vigorous seedlings.
The kumato should actually be the Kumato©. It was bred by Syngenta, and first released in the UK in about 2004, I think. But the Roguelands Heirloom Vegetable Seeds Company also has 40 different dark brown to black-skinned varieties in its collection, and says black tomato varieties first appeared in the 19th century in Ukraine.
Sorghum is good for coeliacs
What I neglected to say in my earlier post about wheat, gluten and coeliac disease is of course that sufferers have a whole lot of other grains they can turn to, including some underused and neglected ones, like teff and quinoa.