- UK breeders scour ICARDA’s fava beans for better genes. What next? Chianti?
- Olive cultivation then and now. An archaeologist speaks.
- Entomophagy.
- Lager yeast origins.
- Salvia divinorum: underutilized no longer.
Nibbles: Poppies, Gardening, Milk, Grapes, Genebanks, Meat, Biotech, IK, Plant health
- Dropping the poppy.
- Gardening on windowsills and along roadsides.
- Cooling camel milk. Via.
- Fingerprinting grapes.
- “The seed banks that are run by agribusiness corporations would be a costly pursuit for the government and farmers.” Where to start responding to this? Thanks, Jeff.
- Further evidence of food price crisis.
- “What does biodiversity mean to Syngenta?“
- Traditional healer goes online. Via.
- Videos from Global Plant Clinic.
Nibbles: Small kine, Cedar, Coffee, Cows (again), Niger, Citrus disease
- Mini-cows: Cheaper by the pound, but more expensive by the head.
- Lebanese icon imperilled.
- Birds protect coffee from coffee berry borer.
- Cows (m)aligned. Via.
- Jessica discovers millet and a grain bank (food, not seed).
- A new disease threatens citrus in Florida. Yay!
Nibbles: Horse milk, GMOs
- Marketing Indonesian horse milk as a nutraceutical. Good luck with that.
- Nick Cohen on Prince Charles on GMOs: “Like Marie Antoinette, he sees the poor as happiest when they have their place in a natural order, with royalty at its head.”
Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures
- Catha edulis bad for Yemen economy. Having been waved a gun at by a qat-chewing Somali teenager, I can testify it’s bad for other things as well.
- Amy Goldman on the heirloom tomato.
- Biology Letters special feature on climate change and biodiversity.
- And more on climate change, this time its likely effect on livelihoods.
- All you ever wanted to know about plant genetic resources conservation in Germany.
- “Isn’t it crazy to think that everything we eat or use that comes from plants at one time grew completely wild?” Well, not so much.
- Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. (Watch out, very large file.)
- Another reason not to drink sugary soft drinks: gout. Coconut water anyone?
- Pre-Columbian Chilean chickens could have come from anywhere, not just Polynesia.
- Mapping diseases.
- A 12th century olive genebank in Morocco.
- Traditional Ethiopian barley/wheat mixtures (hanfets) have some advantages over pure stands.