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Nibbles: Medieval Iceland, Lebanese wine, Yemeni coffee, Ghana cowpea, SeedShare, Roman hamburger

Ag diversification was a thing even in medieval Iceland.
Not to mention contemporary Lebanon.
Dumping qat for coffee is the good news we all wanted to hear. Jeremy provides the context.
Ghana gets some new cowpeas. I just think it’s cool that they made the news.
The joys of seed saving: the backstory of SeedShare.
Procuring a hamburger in ancient Rome. This is a great sub-Reddit, BTW.

Getting trade to contribute to nutrition. Hard row to hoe.
Elegiac introduction & postscript by Robert Macfarlane to a fabulous pean to wild Kazakhstan apples by the late, great Roger Deakin called East to Eden.
And the connection between the above and “wild” apples in Scotland.
An expensive poster showing how domesticated apple varieties relate to each other. I have to say I’m sorely tempted.
Sorely tempted by this documentary on some cidermakers’ trip to Kazakhstan too.
Nice to see my map of barley genebank accessions used in a blog post about mapping human DNA phylogenies.
Your regular reminder that “PCLG is an international network of organisations coordinated by IIED that promotes learning on the linkages between people and biodiversity conservation” and that their newsletter is well worth subscribing too.
And here are IIED’s best publications of 2019, including “Biodiversity loss is a development issue,” which is one of the great titles of our time, and not a bad paper either.

How many different kinds of bread do you think there are ancient Greek words for?
“As phenomenally important as the USDA [seed banks] and the Svalbard [Global Seed Vault] are, they are repositories for biodiversity, not places we can call up to get seeds to plant five acres of corn.”
As above, but in India.
As above, but from a seed company.
Barbara Schaal on domestication. With video goodness.
A Food System Dashboard to rule them all: describe, diagnose, decide. Not there yet, but almost. It says here.

How nature-related risks matter to business.
Exhibit A: beer.
Exhibit B: wine and wine.
Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
And then there are nature-based solutions…
Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
And sometimes it just takes family.
“Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
Some tips on how to communicate all the above.

Murex from Meninx.
Breeding a better bee.
Menswear retailer to dabble in sustainable livestock.
There was a fourth sister.
A world olive collection in Spain.
“If we can assume the fire pattern is as bad as the stuff we see on TV, I reckon at this very moment there is a goodly sized handful of species that are technically extinct right now.” At least in the wild.
Cambodia’s world-beating peppercorn makes a post-post-colonial comeback.