All you ever wanted to know about maca (Lepidium meyenii)?
World diet photos
“One picture is worth a thousand words” department: The Time feature I linked to in an earlier post has a fascinating photo essay associated with it, showing the weekly food consumption of 16 families around the world. I hadn’t noticed it until Jeremy pointed it out to me. Seems to me that if you’re trying to stay away from processed foods and have a nice, healthy, balanced diet you’re best off living in Sicily, Egypt, Mexico or Bhutan. Would be great to do something similar at the variety level, for example looking at the diversity within potatoes or wheat used by different families around the world.
Agave paper
There’s a paper out on the diversity of Agave in Mexico, the source of tequila.
Sweetleaf hits India
I’m always somewhat ambivalent about the kind of story I saw today on Kangla Online about how some farmers in Senaputi district in north-eastern India are taking up the cultivation of Stevia. This is a South American herb in the Asteraceae which is widely cultivated around the world as the source of an alternative to artificial sweeteners.
On the one hand, it is always good to see farmers diversifying and experimenting, including with exotic crops. On the other, you wonder whether there isn’t a local – and locally used – species that might have been promoted and commercialized in this way. And will the money farmers raise from Stevia be sufficient to buy them and their families the nutritious food they will no longer be growing on their land?
African hope
It is all too easy to concentrate on the bad news out of Africa, so for a change on Biodiversity Day I’d like to point to three feel-good stories about how Africans are using biodiversity to make better lives for themselves. Via Timbuktu Chronicles come pieces on traditional medicine in Mali and local leafy greens in Kenya and Tanzania. And there’s also a World Vision report out today on how farmers in Tanzania are turning to an unusual crop.