Medicinal plants

Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag

China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
US doubles down on cover crops…
…and pulses. No word on ginger.
How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
A paean to the mango.
Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
It kind of already is in the Andes.

Europe gets a genetic resources strategy at last. Rejoice.
Book on how international organizations could, should, would transform agriculture.
Meanwhile, in Cali…
BBVA and El Celler de Can Roca collaborate on forgotten foods documentary, Seeds for the Future.
A novel about Vavilov? Well, why not.
Exhibition on pastoralism.
Visual essay on floods in South Sudan.
Why not throw money at food security though? I mean, just see above, right?
Beyond the EAT-Lancet diet. S. Sudan unavailable for comment.
The SPC genebank curator waxes lyrical.
Not far away, New Zealand cryopreserves some of its native plants.
The latest on the Four Corners potato. I hope it’s in cryo…
…and that it doesn’t go the way of the peyote.

Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.

Cologne has a mustard museum and I want to visit it.
Lecture on the role of sugar in supporting slavery and capitalism. Where is the sugar museum?Ah here it is.
The cassowary may have been domesticated in New Guinea ten thousand years ago (with sugarcane?). Deserves a museum.
Speaking of domestication, here is how that of citrus happened. There’s actually a number of different citrus museums out there.
Nice PhD opportunity Sweden studying beans in Rwanda. There are museums in both places, I’m pretty sure.

Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
(Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.