- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.
Nibbles: Food, Potatoes, Medicine, Bees, Beer, Food miles, Fungi, Fruits cubed
- “Food is the most cost-effective intervention.”
- Peru promotes potatoes.
- The Importance of Biodiversity to Medicine. Anyone got access? Any mention of nutrition?
- EU Says bees should rest. Problem solved.
- Extreme beer. All problems solved.
- Eat local? I don’t think so.
- Itchy Italian gourmands gutted over climate change-caused truffle troubles.
- Mulberry trees pay the price for immodesty.
- While fig trees planted by Jesuits survive. It’s a funny old world. Fruit tree trifecta in play.
- And it comes in! Today’s saving-the-frigging-English-apple story comes to you from The Guardian. Enough already, the English apple is going to be fine.
Nibbles: Origins, Fungi, Animal welfare, Climate & history, Salmon, Butter
- A shaman’s grave from the verge of agriculture.
- Mushroom improves violin’s sound.
- Good news for California’s livestock.
- Linking climate and the rise and fall of China’s dynasties.
- I love pictures of gigantic fish, don’t you? Not farmed, thankfully.
- Making butter.
Nibbles: Cacao, Pamphlets, Breadfruit, Goats, Milk, Economic drivers, Truffles
- Cacao comes in 10 “flavours”, not just 3.
- PDFs of pamphlets on different aspects of agricultural biodiversity from FAO.
- Diane Ragone interviewed on breadfruit.
- Something for the weekend, Mr Goat?
- Got yak milk?
- High livestock prices mean lots of livestock on the land means low biodiversity on farmland. Here comes the science.
- NatGeo video on the trouble with truffles.
Nibbles: Fungi, Early warming, Food banks, High concept, Russia, Wine, Apples, China, Sustainable ag
- Vesicular arbuscular mychorriza help improve fallows.
- Google.org has a Predict and Prevent Initiative to catch outbreaks of human diseases before they happen. Would be nice to have something similar for threats of erosion of agrobiodiversity.
- Niger’s soudure food banks: could they act as village-level genebanks?
- You might call it meta-farming—the quasi-philosophical approach to raising crops and livestock that proceeds not from necessity or commercial aims but a concept.
- Farming in Russia: a slide show with narration.
- Army worm wine. WTF? Via. (They’re caterpillars.)
- A Kazak apple a day keeps the blue mold away.
- Neolithic China: not just rice.
- The oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world.