- No bananas without soil nutrients.
- Perhaps the back story to the banana genome can fix that.
- Coupla big Moringa meets coming up in November.
- Britain goes for gold in the jumping-on-the-Olympic-bandwagon-to-solve-global-hunger event.
- And CEO of Cargill offers coaching: be flexible, try harder.
- Deforestation in Guatemala and Belize. I love it when I can see geopolitics from space.
- Help Kew digitise its diversity.
- FarmAfrica celebrates non-timber forest products in Tanzania.
- Which could be of interest to Tanzanian farmers who have experienced the future of climate change.
- Nepali farmers say they’ve been hit hard by climate change.
- But it is not the reason for the climb of the desert ceanothus.
- Americans about to embrace colourful potatoes. Aren’t they always?
- The 2013 Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships are now open. Apply here.
- Seth Roberts says “I want to take this! Harvard class on fermented food.” Me too.
Nibbles: Taxonomic search, Genebanks in China, USA, Nepal, Scaling up, Bison
- Discover taxonomic names in files, websites, etc…
- Chinese genebank collecting wild species in Tibet.
- Touring a non-government genebank. And running another one.
- Not a community one, though.
- Everybody talking about scaling up. Here’s how you do it. Probably need the media involved, right?
- Scaling up did for the bison.
Nibbles: Climate change data, Transcriptomics, Food industry trends, Gelato event
- Climate Adaptation Country Profiles from the World Bank. Better than you might think.
- You don’t need the whole genome, apparently. Now they tell us.
- Where the global food industry is going. Some opportunities there if you think agrodiversity is important, Shirley.
- Wait, there’s a 6-day international event on gelato?
Brainfood: Red meat, Chocolate quality, Shea and livelihoods, Modeling extinction, Living collections, Sorghum & millet breeding, Hotspots, Ancient sesame, Breeding lovefest
- Red meat in global nutrition. Not as bad as people say. But then the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Optimizing chocolate production through traceability: A review of the influence of farming practices on cocoa bean quality. Manufacturers really need data on how the crop was grown.
- Contribution of “Women’s Gold” to West African Livelihoods: The Case of Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) in Burkina Faso. It is high, especially for the poorest households, for women, and when other sources of income are scarce.
- Herbarium records do not predict rediscovery of presumed nationally extinct species. Fancy probabilistic models based on number of sightings in different time periods are pretty useless predictors of whether news of the demise of a species was exaggerated.
- The importance of living botanical collections for plant biology and the “next generation” of evo-devo research. “Next generation” sequencing pretty useless without the actual plants in “last generation” genebanks and “first generation” botanical gardens/arboreta. Don’t believe me? Here come the vignettes.
- Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Involve farmers, bank on diversity, support seed systems.
- Plant species richness: the world records. They’re only found in oligo- to meso-trophic, managed, semi-natural, temperate grasslands and tropical rain forests.
- Sesame Utilization in China: New Archaeobotanical Evidence from Xinjiang. 5kg of white sesame seeds in a nice jug at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes at Boziklik dating from ca. 700 years BP means the crop was, well, used at that time and place.
- The twenty-first century, the century of plant breeding. Accentuate the positive.
Wal-Mart and local food
There’s a “but” in a recent pean to the life locavore in the NY Times. “The future is local,” sure…
But the economic path for local food is still in many ways difficult.
Really? There may be some evidence that Wal-Mart for one doesn’t think so, though finding the odd local lettuce head at your nearest suburban mall might well all be…
…what one could call “local-washing,” nothing more than a marketing ploy that makes the megastore look like it gives a shit about the local economy/farmers.
Reservations about Wal-Mart’s sudden enthusiasm for local growers are not new. After all, of every dollar spent on food, “7 cents … goes to the producer and 73 cents goes just to distribution,” and you better believe that…
…once gas prices again begin an upward march, they’ll be faced with even greater reason to squeeze their suppliers.
Truth to tell, the reservations are not confined to Wal-Mart’s role, but are increasingly being extended to locavorism in general, often rather bluntly:
…the local food movement is built on a lie.
Cost may break down 7-73% between production and distribution, the argument goes, but the ratio is pretty much inverted when you look at emissions:
the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions associated with food occur during the production stage. …83 per cent of emissions are products of the production phase, while only 4 per cent can be directly tied to the transport of food products from producer to retailer.
I don’t know if Wal-Mart is local-washing, but if it is, “…treat[ing] people who buy their produce at Walmart with the same scorn we currently reserve for habitual smokers,” as some suspect is likely to become the norm among locavore evangelists, is probably not the way to get that changed.