A study just published in Nature and reported in The Times here identified the particular class of the polyphenols found in red wine which confers the greatest health advantage, by suppressing production of a protein which narrows blood vessels. There’s been lots recently in the press about the supposed health benefits of moderate consumption of wine, in particular red wine, as part of the “Mediterranean diet.” Known as polymeric procyanidins, these polyphenols turn out to be present in particularly high concentrations in some wines from Sardinia and the Pyrenees. This is due to both the wine-making technique (the compounds are released from the seeds after a long period of fermentation) and variety (the Tannat grape from SW France is rich in these chemicals). The Cannonau wine from Nuoro (Sardinia) and the Madiran from Gers (France) have the highest levels of procyanidins, and it turns out that people from those areas are also of above-average longevity, especially the men.
Perennial wheat on trial
Researchers in Texas have planted a trial of so-called perennial wheat, which lasts about five years. Normal wheat flowers and dies in less than a year. The wheat, they say, is being evaluated particularly in the context of dual purpose grain and grazing use. Many farmers in the US west sow wheat and allow cattle to graze the young growth. After a while the cattle are removed and the wheat allowed to mature and flower. The perennial wheats, which have emerged from crosses of wheat with wild wheat grass (Agropyron spp) made in search of insect resistance and drought tolerance, would reduce the costs of seed and annual sowing.
Fine and dandy, but sad to see no mention whatsoever of the pioneering work by Wes Jackson and the Land Institute on the whole subject of perennial polyculture. Sad, but not entirely surprising; the Land Institute’s web site is by no means the easiest to find one’s way around. I visited a few years ago, and have kept up with their slow but steady progress towards “growing our own granola” but the truth is that despite Jackson’s wonderful oratory, not enough people know what they are doing there to promote edible biodiversity for the prairies. Try here for their latest publication on perennial polyculture.
Rescuing food traditions around the world
Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) “is a coalition of seven of the most prominent non-profit food, agriculture, conservation, and educational organizations dedicated to rescuing America’s diverse foods and food traditions.” You can download here their great book explaining what these traditions are. There’s also a map of North America’s “totem foods.”
Same topic, different region: Dr Lois Englberger of the Island Food Community of Pohnpei (right, with some of her NGO’s information products) has made Pacific Magazine’s list of “293 Pacific Leaders You Need To Know” because of her efforts to promote local island foods, food crops and food traditions. Congratulations, Lois, and keep up the good work!
Cabbage capital
Here’s a candidate for “World Capital of Cabbage”: Bijeljina, in Bosnia.
Nutrition genes feed fantasy
Scientists in the US and Israel have discovered a gene that can boost the protein, iron and zinc levels of modern wheats. It is present in wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) but somewhere along the way to modern bread and pasta wheats became non-functional. Inserting the gene into modern wheat — by normal breeding, they hasten to say, not genetic engineering — raises the protein and minerals by about 10 to 15 per cent. Modern wheat does have genes that are similar to the “wild” gene, which has been called Gpc-B1 for its effect on grain protein content. Blocking the activity of those genes in modern wheats causes the plants to live longer, but depresses the amounts of protein, iron and zinc even further.
The science of the discovery is intriguing. At the simplest level, Gpc-B1 seems to control not only the time at which the flag leaf, the big leaf just below the ears of grain, dies, but also the movement of protein, iron and zinc from the flag leaf into the grain. The actual research paper, in the 24 November issue of Science, requires a subscription to read, but you can find more from the University of California Davis’ press release and some press reports.
To be honest, I had expected more press coverage, not least because this is the third report in a week or so that sheds light on genes and nutrition, but it may be early days yet. The first, genetically engineering cotton seeds to get rid of a harmful compound called gossypol (once considered a contender for a male contraceptive) did indeed get a massive amount of attention. The second, a technical tour-de-force that showed where seeds store iron and how more of it can be made available to the plant and to people who eat the plats (or possibly just the germinating seeds) more or less vanished without trace. But all the coverage I have seen stressed one thing: world hunger.
One in three children worldwide is underweight and malnourished, and “hunger claims the lives of 20,000 children a day”. Two billion people suffer micronutrient deficiencies. The idea that a gene, or genes, can solve these problems at a stroke, as it were, is appealing. Wheat supplies roughly a fifth of all the calories people eat. Boost the protein and mineral content just a little, the argument goes, and you go a long way to eradicating malnutrition. Fix the staple crops — usually by genetic engineering, but that’s irrelevant — and you fix the problem.
Personally, I think this misses the point completely.
So nu-food wheat boosts protein and iron by 10 to 15 per cent? A dish of pumpkin leaves, preferably cooked with a little oil, delivers much more iron and a healthy dose of protein, with roughly twice the daily requirement for vitamin A thrown in for good measure. And the pumpkins are already being grown in places where these deficiencies are acute. Millets not only deliver better nutrition than wheat, they also offer farmers a much greater income and do much less damage to the environment.
All around the world, there are diverse, often local, crops — fruits and vegetables, cereals, legumes, other grains — that offer a far better deal nutritionally and environmentally, but that have suffered under the hegemony of the big three; wheat, rice and maize. But the silver bullet approach continues to dominate so much agricultural research.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, gave US$ 7.5 million to develop a super-cassava. Cassava is a vitally important calorie crop in Africa, but it doesn’t contain much in the way of protein or micronutrients. It can be toxic. And it is susceptible to virus diseases. So the Gates Foundation asked scientists to fix those deficiences. And the scientists are only too happy to oblige. “Eventually, we’d like to bring all of these traits together into one variety of cassava,” Richard Sayre, the scientist leading the team, said.
Gates presumably gets the best advice money can buy, but this is woefully outmoded. Sayre is a plant breeder. Has he never heard of southern corn leaf blight, the disease that wiped out half the US maize harvest in 1970? How come? Because maize breeders had used a nifty little gene, called Texas male sterile, to ease the job of making hybrids. For years, schoolchildren and college kids in the midwestern states had made handy money in the summer wandering up and down rows of seed corn de-tasseling — castrating — the mother plants, so that only the pollen from the father plants went into the seeds. The male sterility gene did the job genetically, depriving those kids of an income but making maize-breeding more efficient. And making all the maize that contained the gene susceptible to southern corn leaf blight. Boom — an epidemic.
Genetic uniformity inevitably leads to increased vulnerability to pests and diseases. And genetic diversity, in and of itself, is an effective weapon against pests and diseases. This is not the place for an extended discussion of that basic premise. My intention is simply to point out that magic bullet solutions — for wheat, for cassava, for rice, for anything — contain the seeds of their own destruction. That is true of the whole of agricultural history. The first farmer to select an improved wheat from the wild emmer growing all around, for example, took the first step onto a treadmill. The thought of a single variety of Gates über-root over-running Africa conjures, for me, a vision of the Irish Potato Famine, in spades. Likewise, a nutritionally improved wonder wheat will do almost nothing sustainable to feed the rural poor.
Their salvation lies in diversity. Crop diversity. Species diversity. Nutritional diversity. One could do an awful lot in that direction with $7.5 million plus a bit of whatever else is going into making magic bullets.
To be fair, the scientists who discovered the grain protein content gene in wild wheat are very circumspect about the prospects. The gene, they say “may contribute” to the more efficient manipulation of senescence and nutrient remobilization in crops, and this may “translate into food with enhanced nutritional value”. But that modesty doesn’t last long. Nor, I suspect, will the improvements being sought.
Picture shows wild emmer wheat in its natural habitat north of the Sea of Galillee, Israel, courtesy of Zvi Peleg and Assaf Distelfeld.