- Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
- An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
- Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
- African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
- Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
- You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
- So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
- Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.
Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk
- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
Mango madness
What is it with mangoes? One glorious post about the mother of all mangoes and suddenly they’re everywhere. Case in point. Visiting friends kindly brought me a jar of mango chutney. Fair enough, and much appreciated. But look closely at the label.
How many shoppers at Sainsbury are even aware that there are different varieties of mango? And do they, like me, rush to the interwebs to discover, for example, that Malda comes from around Malda in West Bengal, and that just last week there were further reports of urban development cutting into Malda mango plantations in Digha.? Search for Totapuri mango, by contrast, and you get lots of listings of people who want to sell you processed pulp. ((Could it be something to do with the Totapuri who “taught Ramakrishna that the sole reality of the impersonal Absolute could only be realized in a state of consciousness devoid of all conceptual forms”? there is at least a physical resemblance.)) I’m betting, then, that Sainsbury’s finest is mostly Totapuri with a smidgen of Malda thrown in. But I’m willing to be corrected. Not that there’s much real estate left on the label to do so.
Nibbles: Meat, GMOs, Fungi, Africa, Aid, Artichon, IYB, Rare onion, Hummus, Fig
- Professor said meat should be properly priced to avoid disaster. Why just meat?
- “The Seed Makers Who Don’t Pray for Rain.” Slick, but do they actually pray for drought?
- Found the above here, but is GMO drought resistance really “very important stuff to making farming sustainable”?
- Kenyan farmers grow mushrooms. Fun, guys.
- Does Africa need better product branding?
- Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development. I confess, I didn’t understand most of it.
- Rhizowen invents the artichon. Who says there’s no new food to be discovered?
- Kew celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Pollinators get a look-in.
- Rome celebrates International Year of Biodiversity. Agriculture prominent.
- IUCN celebrates Allium pskemense: edible, medicinal, a crop wild relative, and threatened.
- World record plate of hummus, 10,452 kg of tasty serotonin.
- Local man sends USDA a fig they didn’t have in their genebank.
Nibbles: Mpingo, Chickpea, Oak, Amaranth
- At last, sustainable clarinets!
- Hummus war gets serious. All that seratonin not helping?
- “Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men.” Simon Schama on Quercus robur. Note to BBC: learn how to write species names.
- Pop quiz: Some 20,000 tons of this seed were delivered by Aztec farmers in annual tribute to their emperor, Montezuma. Now big in the US, according to NYTimes piece. From 1984.