Category: Markets

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Strawberry Wars forever

You know how the strawberry breeders who left the UC Davis programme a couple of years ago and set up a private company sued the university for access to the material they developed? Well, it turns out the university is now counter-suing them. I like this bit especially from the SFGate piece which brings us up to date on the Strawberry Wars:

A federal judge recently scolded both the researchers and the university for their behavior and said that each side can expect to be held financially liable at trial.

Stay tuned.

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Vegetables, joy and justice

A long(ish) Edible Manhattan piece by Rachel Nuwer on the movement to breed crops for flavour, rather than only productivity or shelf-life, very nice in its own right, also gives me the excuse to link to Jeremy’s interview on Eat This Podcast with Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network. Here’s Nuwer’s sign-off as an amuse-bouche. She first points out that production of the much un-loved kale has seen quite a jump lately in the US. Why not the Habanada pepper, the honeynut squash, or “a subtly flavored cucumber with a white rind”?

A similar renaissance could happen for these new ingredients, too — if only we demand it through our dining habits and grocery store purchases. As Swegarden points out, “Everything that happens upstream in the food system is dictated by the consumer.” Should a flavor-forward movement take hold, it has the possibility of changing the food system, including potentially creating more jobs for farmers and strengthening the shift toward local, seasonal and minimally-processed and -doused ingredients. Selman also anticipates that greater availability of delicious, affordable produce would translate into greater consumption of fruits, veggies and grains—and thus hopefully to a healthier general public. “I don’t do this because I want to hang out with high-end chefs,” she says. “It’s about joy and justice.”

Indeed it is.

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Foraging not scavenging

I have to say that I was a bit annoyed by this tweet from Bread for the World.

It’s not the promotion of gardening, of course. I’m all for gardening. It’s that word “scavenging,” with its negative connotations of rummaging through garbage. What’s so wrong about collecting edible plants from wild or semi-wild habitats? California’s native peoples used to do it, albeit as part of a very complex strategy of natural resources use and management.

Europeans viewed California Indians as having no concept of property, but they did recognize ownership based on usufruct of some resources, while setting others aside for communal purposes. Perhaps most important, as ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and Native Californians themselves remind us, they shaped the landscapes in which they lived through their extensive environmental knowledge, equivalent to our botany, ecology, ornithology, entomology, and more.

Chinese villagers in the Upper Yangtze still do it, and are saving the panda at the same time because of it.

“Wild harvesters are often some of the poorest people, because they don’t have access to land to farm,” says Natsya Timoshyna, the medicinal plants program leader at TRAFFIC, an anti-wildlife-trafficking organization that helped create FairWild.

Instead, these gatherers, like the villagers in China’s Upper Yangtze, are quietly responsible for maintaining the world’s supply of wild plants, a supply that provides medicine — as well as food — for up to 80 percent of the developing world.

And that’s just what has come through my feeds this week. Why not just use the term “foraging“? Am I missing something? Is support for wild-collected food seen as retrograde or imperialist or patriarchal?

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Nibbles: Aeroponic yams, Ancient crops, Kumara, Informal food vendors, Foxy, Salumi, Corn whiskey, Doomed cassava

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Everything about size

Whizz-bang websites in support of data-dense papers seem to be all the rage.

Remember “Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis,” published in the inaugural The Lancet Planetary Health a couple of weeks back? We included it in Brainfood, and linked to an article by Jess Fanzo which summarizes the main findings. This is probably the money quote:

Both small and large farms play important roles in ensuring we have enough food that is diverse and nutrient-rich. While industrialised agriculture suggests domination of food systems, smallholder farms play a substantial role in maintaining the genetic diversity of our food supply, which results in both benefits and risk reductions against nutritional deficiencies, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. Herrero and colleagues argue that if we want to ensure that the global food supply remains diverse and generates a rich array of nutrients for human health, farm landscapes must also be diverse and serve multiple purposes.

Well, there’s also a graphics-rich website now, “Small Farms: Stewards of Global Nutrition?” The infographic at the left here puts it in the proverbial nutshell (click to embiggen).

But what you really want to know is on what kinds of farms are grown those Canadian and Indian peas we talked about yesterday in connection with other fancy websites. Well, unfortunately, the data are only available for “pulses” here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, those are grown mainly on large(ish) farms (blue) in North America, and small(ish) farms (orange) in South Asia. Each square is 1% of global production.

You can get similar breakdowns for different food groups (cereals, oils, etc.), and for a bunch of different nutrients: Calcium, Calories, Folate, Iron, Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, and Zinc. For all of these last you can also see global maps of nutritional yields, or “the number of people who can meet their nutritional needs from all of the crops, livestock, and fish grown in an area.” Here’s the one for Vitamin A.

Which I’m sure will be of use in targeting the promotion of homegardening, say, or the roll-out of things like orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. There is Biofortification Priority Index already, but only at a fairly coarse, country level. As far as I know, anyway.

Of course, those countries could always import sweet potatoes…