- Early Peruvians didn’t brush their teeth. On the plus side, they had a tasty, varied diet.
- Mangrove rice farming in West Africa: The Book.
- “Could it be that vegetables are the new meat?“
- Wild relative rescues barleys threatened by Russian pests.
- Gates supports McKnight supports poor farmers.
- Vavilov does Formosa.
- Ethiopian Commodity Exchange gets to grips with coffee. Starbucks unavailable for comment.
Nibbles: Beans, Forests
- Fagioli in Italian cooking.
- Most valuable forests for C and biodiversity mapped.
- Guard animals.
Gourmet agrobiodiversity
Remember the cacao trifecta from a couple of days ago? Well, the run continues! We heard about this from the horse’s mouth some time ago, of course. But well worth repeating.
Nibbles: Wikiforéts, Super-rape, Gut microbiome, Soybeans, Golf courses, Chestnuts, Rice, Yeast
- Wiki for African forest information. Go, make it multilingual, fill in the gaps, use it.
- Canola (rape) desalinates, gives fuel and enriched fodder. Jeremy comments: “I’m a tad skeptical.”
- Diversity of intestinal flora good for your figure. Or the other way around.
- Edamame bean comes to Britain. Why, one wonders.
- Golf courses good for salamanders. I wonder if anyone’s looked at how many CWRs they support.
- Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
- Rice domestication unpacked.
- More extreme beer. Oh, and the phylogeny of yeast.
Cocoa from tree to cup
News from both ends of the cacao value chain today. At the upstream end, new molecular marker work on over a thousand genebank accessions reveals that the species is divided into no less than 10 genetic clusters, rather than the conventionally recognized two. These show a clear geographic pattern: they are strung out along an east-west axis in the Amazon, probably reflecting, according to the authors, the location of ancient ridges (“palaeoarches”), which were barriers to dispersal not only for Theobroma but also for various fish groups. Meanwhile, at the downstream end, there’s an account of a visit to a “chocoholic mecca” in Santa Fe.
LATER. And, for the trifecta, news from somewhere around the middle of the value chain.
LATER STILL. What comes after trifecta?