- Great photos of swimming pigs.
- Great photos of Indian spice market.
- British agriculture to go Mediterranean.
Nibbles: Chilli, Extension, Africa, Genebank, Potatoes, War, Angora
- Cool new use for hot peppers: fungicides, for agriculture and human health.
- Community Knowledge Workers transformed into “Mobile Banana Disease Monitors”.
- Grain “call[s] on African peasants to resist and protect their agriculture, as they have always done”.
- Near Corvallis, Ore, USA? Wanna tour the genebank? Wanna write it up for us?
- New World Catalogue of Potato Varieties. A pedant asks: “Any Old World varieties in there?”
- Germany is said to be demanding entire Rumanian wheat crop, also part of what is left over from 1938 crop. Orwell’s approaching war.
- Saving the Angora goat in the US.
Nibbles: Traditional knowledge, Opium poppy, Fish, Bees, Earthworms, Wild horses, Camel, Fearl rabbits, Guinea savannah, Kava
- “In the face of climate change, keeping diverse, resilient ecosystems is one of the strongest tools for adaptation.”
- Getting high in Eden.
- Chinese ate freshwater fish 40,000 years ago.
- British MPs finish cleaning their moats, decide to save the honeybee.
- Worm power!
- LEISA 25:2 is out.
- Przewalski’s horse gets first ever reverse vasectomy.
- Early farmers used camel-drawn carts.
- Using Google Earth to map bunnies in Australia. And then kill them.
- Farming the savannah. What could go wrong?
- Stressed out? Try kava. With audio goodness.
In the soup
It seems only fair to point out that last week’s Economist column poking fun at certain menu items aroused the ire of certain readers. Do we care if they can’t take a joke? Of course not. But in trying to rub healing balm on aggrieved hearts, the writer accidentally, I am sure, touched a fire in ours. He loved sea buckthorn!
Even more striking was the dessert, concocted out of the lurid and astringent juice of the sea-buckthorn berry. This costly and vitamin-packed elixir was mixed before our eyes with liquid nitrogen, creating an instant sorbet with explosive effects on the tongue. Did someone say that east European food was boring?
Not boring, and not merely striking either, but good for you, as we’ve said more than once.
Nibbles: Poisonous cassava, Methane, Beer
- Tragic. But was cassava really to blame?
- Breeding the wind out of cows.
- “I just got back from Italy, where there are now 250 breweries. A few years ago, there were only 20 or 30. They’re on the verge of an explosion of beer culture…” Really? I do hope so.