- A distinctly US flavour to Nibbles today, for some reason.
- A map of every goat in the US. Texas is the goat hotspot.
- Not there with dogs yet, but at least we now know when they arrived.
- How about sheep, though?
- Interestingly, there are more wineries than breweries in Texas.
- Saving the winegrape, molecule by molecule. Including in Texas?
- Saving Southern cooking, seed by seed. You remember that peanut thing from yesterday?
- But Pennsylvania cooking?
- How about Cherokee cooking?
The tempting value of Andean roots and tubers
Following a NY Times expose, here’s been much ado in the twittersphere about maca. But that’s not the only Andean tuber with a smuggling problem. Including to Italy, though?
Nibbles: R&D, Cheese double, Cali candied yams, Sustainable joe, Soy & deforestation, Cereals in Sudan, Big Ag, History of breeding
- ASTI says agricultural research investment in Africa is bearing fruit and needs to double.
- There’s a cheese revolution going on in America’s heartland.
- Meanwhile, the UK is worried about fake goat cheese.
- “Apparently, Californians like well-tanned sweetpotatoes.” Well of course they do.
- Good coffee AND conservation? I’ll take it.
- Soy AND conservation in Brazil? Well, not quite, but good news nonetheless.
- Cereal cultivation in Sudan pushed back several hundred years.
- What are the conditions for success in large-scale agricultural initiatives? You tell them.
- The history of crop improvement 101.
Nibbles: Hunger Games, Nutritious markets, Plant secrets, Nutrition soundbites, Buckwheat panic, Olive oil panic, Cannabis breeding, Wild turkey genetics, Quinoa wars, Domestication infographics, Howard-Yana Shapiro
- Do they know it’s Christmas? Stocking-filling books for do-gooders.
- Wonder if any of them talk about using markets to deliver nutritious food.
- The surprising secrets of baobabs, among other plants. I thought we knew all there was to know about baobabs, what with all those factsheets.
- The Global Nutrition Report in 12 sound-bites. No sign of baobabs.
- Russians in a tizzy about their buckwheat. If only they’d had a factsheet.
- Everybody in a tizzy about European olive oil. Maybe they should try the American stuff?
- “When skunk was created the people doing it had no idea they were altering the ratios of CBD and THC — they just kept breeding the plants that gave the strongest high and threw the rest away.” Ouch. But fear not, help is at hand.
- Restoring wild turkey populations is screwing up its subspecific structure, pissing off taxonomists no end.
- Bolivians do not appreciate cheap Peruvian quinoa. Hipsters unavailable for comment.
- No, LA’s wild quinoa is not going to put too much of a dent in global food shortages, nor interest many hipsters, but it’s a fun story. Too bad wasn’t mashed up with the US crop wild relatives prize-winning paper.
- Cool crop domestication infographics.
- Plant geneticists are from Mars.
Nibbles: Farmers’ markets, Pacific news, Solanaceae news, Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, Tibetan barley, Rice roundup, David Lobell interview, Native American crops, Mesopotamian recipe, Insectophagy, Cities, Land purchases, Dormancy in evolution, Bad news from some crops, Good news from others, Creative Commons at Gates
- Hell of a week in the office again, so catching up on accumulated Nibbles on a Sunday. Because we’re here to serve.
- Cynical, funny take on farmers’ markets: “No, I don’t save seeds. That’s time-consuming nonsense for backyard gardeners. Yes, I’ve heard of Monsanto. I’m a farmer. I know about goddamn Monsanto.”
- Uncynical double from the Pacific: Samoa’s agricultural show and more detail on the aroid breeding work.
- High tech breeding of solanaceous crops. Nothing like this for aroids yet, alas. Yeah, but first you have to collect the little blighters.
- On the other hand, you also need an awareness of the past. Ask the Tibetans.
- And here’s kind of an example of that involving rice in India. Compare with that first Nibble: seed saving not just for backyard gardeners after all? Convinced? Go do it, no, really. Or read Bob Zeigler; you can listen to him too. We could go back and forward on this forever. I know: let’s get some data.
- And another example involving wild not-rice in the US and Canada. Though there are some things that haven’t survived quite as well among Native Americans as those wild rice recipes.
- And speaking of ancient recipes, here’s one from another wetland, far far away from the above.
- Yeah but not all ancient recipes are so resilient, take beetles for example.
- Urban farming is big, needs to be bigger.
- Meanwhile, agricultural land is being bought up all over the place, for what it’s worth, so maybe cities will be all we have to grow stuff.
- International Cocoa Organization calls bullshit on all those chocolate-is-running-out stories.
- Maybe we should chill about wine too? I dunno, I think I’d prefer to play it safe with both. Or get help from above. Or from the Fascists.
- The banana was going extinct too, wasn’t it?
- British apples (and other trees, to be sure) are of course perennially in trouble, but help is on the way, courtesy of Kew. And not just British or apples that get help from that quarter.
- “The potato will not only survive climate change, it will help us to survive it as well.” Good news at last.
- Mapping cassava, all of a sudden an exciting new crop, if you can believe it. No stopping it now that Bill Gates has called it the world’s most interesting vegetable.
- Incidentally, he’s also decided to go totally CC-BY.
- And that’s all she wrote. For now.