- Potato fest at the Vavilov Institute next week. Report for us!
- Gary Nabhan on tortillas made of “mesquite pods, the flour of ground, popped amaranth seeds, wheat flour and olive oil.”
- EU to fund promotion of agricultural products, including information campaigns on the EU system of PDO, PGI, TSG, QWPSR et al. Via.
- Diversity good even within individuals.
- Engaging children in Sahelian agriculture and agrobiodiversity.
Forays in fermentation
There’s a couple of interesting articles about cereal fermentation in the latest Food Microbiology. Both basically say that fermentation is a useful way of getting more nutrition out of your staples. Rob Nout ((Nout, M. (2009). Rich nutrition from the poorest – cereal fermentations in Africa and Asia Food Microbiology DOI: 10.1016/j.fm.2009.07.002)) describes how various traditional fermented dishes are made in Africa and Asia, ranging from kenkey in Ghana to idli in Sri Lanka. The former is made from maize, the latter from rice. Here’s the part of the paper’s Table 1 which lists fermented foods made from maize and sorghum (pearl millet, finger millet and rice are also considered):
It can get complicated. Here’s how they make jnard in India (I’ve removed the references to ease the flow), for example:
Jnard is an opaque beer made from finger millet (Eleusine coracana). Although – judging by its description – it would seem similar to Tchoukoutou, its mode of processing is fundamentally different. Whereas Tchoukoutou is brewed from sorghum malt, Jnard is saccharified by the action of an indigenous amylolytic starter (Murcha) on previously soaked and cooked fingermillet paste. Murcha is a rice-based dried tablet containing a mixed microflora of filamentous fungi, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria, and differs from koji which is a concentrate of fungal conidia of e.g. Aspergillus oryzae, used in the preparation of soya sauce and similar products. The process of preparing Jnard includes an overnight soak of finger millet seeds to soften them, grinding to obtain a crushed mass which is cooked and cooled to about 30ºC. Then, pulverized Murcha is sprinkled in the cooked mass and during a 1-3 day incubation, saccharification, lactic fermentation and alcoholic fermentation take place simultaneously. Functional microorganisms of Murcha and similar Asian amylolytic starters are filamentous fungi (Amylomyces rouxii, Rhizopus oryzae, etc.) which produce a range of enzymes including glucoamylase that degrades starch directly into glucose; yeasts (Endomycopsis fibuligera, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, etc.) which ferment part of the glucose produced; and lactic acid bacteria (Enterococcus faecalis, Pediococcus pentosaceus and others) growing together with the yeasts. LAB are able to co-exist with yeasts in a protocooperative manner.
Drink a beer, save a forest
A piece in Timber Industry Magazine picked up by the ever-excellent NWFP Digest alerts us to the first beer to carry the PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) seal of approval.
Brewer Gino Perisutti’s Blonde PEFC Mountain Pale Lager contains spruce bark, mountain pine buds and Scots pine needles from PEFC-certified forests.
I’m trying to obtain a sample for review.
Nibbles: Pigs, Spices, Climate change in Britain
- Great photos of swimming pigs.
- Great photos of Indian spice market.
- British agriculture to go Mediterranean.
Agricultural biodiversity and its perception, then and now
Hanging around the library today, I happened to pick up the March 2009 issue of Economic Botany, and was rewarded with a couple of really interesting papers on people’s perceptions of agrobiodiversity, and how it can be different to what you might think.
The first paper looked at knowledge of apple diversity among cider-makers in the United Kingdom and the United States. ((David Reedy, Will McClatchey, Clifford Smith, Y. Lau & K. Bridges (2009) A Mouthful of Diversity: Knowledge of Cider Apple Cultivars in the United Kingdom and Northwest United States. Economic Botany 63(1):2-15.)) The working hypothesis was that cider makers with a long history in the business would know more apple variety names that comparative neophytes. The results of semi-structured interviews with about 30 informants in Washington State, England, Wales and Northern Ireland suggested that this was not in fact the case. Experienced cider makers do indeed know more apple varieties, but not necessarily by name. They keep track of diversity in other ways, by taste, smell and ecology. The art of cider making lies in the blending, so the maker needs to know what each apple tastes like, on its own and in combination.
Cider makers who have a sense of rootedness to their land often know intricate details about trees in their orchards. They may know the rate at which they bloom, which trees do better in which conditions, or what the sugar levels of fruits will be on a given year. With all this knowledge, why would names have significance?
This would seem to contradict the findings of other studies which suggested that there’s a high degree of correspondence between number of local names and genetic diversity. Names might be lost, but the knowledge of diversity — and, at least for now, the diversity itself — is still there.
The second paper looks at how diversity in grapevines was perceived in the past. ((P. Gago, J. L. Santiago, S. Boso, V. Alonso-Villaverde & M. C. Martinez (2009) Grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.): Old Varieties are Reflected in Works of Art. Economic Botany 63(1):67-77. 10.1007/s12231-008-9059-y.)) Its subject is the Baroque altarpieces in Galicia, and in particular the twisted columns known as Solomonic. These often feature grapevine leaves, and the authors measured various morphometric variables on these representations, as well as on the real leaves of numerous varieties maintained in a local genebank. You know the kind of thing. The angle between this and that vein. The depth of the nth lobe.
They found that the representations were often very faithful, and could be used to identify specific local varieties. With a more extensive dataset (that is, more characters, and more altarpieces), it might be possible to reconstruct the history of cultivation of various now rare or extinct local cultivars. Another example of the imaginative sources of data people are looking at to get a handle on genetic erosion.