- Nice tweeting about bread and other Central Asian food over past few days.
- Rothamsted’s “Scanalyzer“.
- The genebank origin of the UK’s premier potato, Maris Piper.
- Seaweed in South America.
- Repeat after me: superfoods are a scam.
- Third and final instalment in The Plate’s history of the banana.
- India going on a millet kick.
- The wheat seed is C4? Totally crazy.
- The evolution of Capsicum in half a page. Which is both too much and not enough.
Brainfood: African rice, Soybean resistance, Peruvian cuisine, Aromatic rice, Cowpea diversity, Wild barley diversity, High throughput phenotyping, Cacao core, Niche foods, Tajik wheat breeding
- Domestication history and geographical adaptation inferred from a SNP map of African rice. Evidence of strong selection for salt tolerance over protracted domestication period.
- Genome-Wide Association Study of Resistance to Soybean Cyst Nematode (Heterodera glycines) HG Type 2.5.7 in Wild Soybean (Glycine soja). 43 resistant accessions out of 235.
- Food incursions into global heritage: Peruvian cuisine’s slippery road to UNESCO. How the 1% eat.
- Differentiation and description of aromatic short grain rice landraces of eastern Indian state of Odisha based on qualitative phenotypic descriptors. There’s morphological diversity within aromatic types.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp). 768 cultivated types from 56 countries in the USDA collection fall out into 3 genetic groups, but no obvious geographical structure.
- Geography of Genetic Structure in Barley Wild Relative Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum in Jordan. 3 genetic groups again, and no geographic or climatic structure, again.
- Utilization of a high-throughput shoot imaging system to examine the dynamic phenotypic responses of a C4 cereal crop plant to nitrogen and water deficiency over time. Who needs morphological descriptors?
- Establishment of a Core Collection of Traditional Cuban Theobroma cacao Plants for Conservation and Utilization Purposes. 185 out of 537 hardly seems worth it.
- Promotion and Utilization of Niche Foods for Food and Nutrition Security. Termites with your spider plants, madam?
- The History of Wheat Breeding in Tajikistan. Seems, according to the authors, to have been a waste of time.
Nibbles: Saffron startup, Genebank software, Teff redux, Heirloom fruit & veg
- Counting on saffron in Afghanistan.
- Counting on GRIN-Global in genebanks.
- Counting on teff as the new super grain.
- Counting on heirlooms.
Nibbles: New grape variety, Irish food, LegumeCHOICE, Arabica diversity, Breadfruit summit
- Bronx Seedless finally hits the shops.
- The Irish Iron Age Diet.
- Choosing the right legume. But where’s the tool?
- The answer to better coffee is Ethiopia.
- Pacific Global Breadfruit Summit honours Diane Ragone. In other news, there’s a breadfruit summit.
Finger on the pulse in Rio
My latest from the work blog:
There seems to be a bit of an issue over at the Olympics with fast food marketing, but if athletes in Rio, or indeed spectators, want a simple, cheap meal that’s also healthy, and hopefully sourced more sustainably, they could do a lot worse than tucking into the Brazilian staple of rice and beans (but don’t forget the vegetables and the tropical fruit juice). This is such an established part of Brazilian life that EMBRAPA, the country’s agricultural research organization, has a whole research unit called Arroz e Feijão – Rice & Beans.
Unfortunately, the level of attention beans get in Brazil is not typical around the world, even in other places that eat a lot of them, and the situation is even worse for other pulses – the general term often used to refer to the dry seeds of members of the plant family Leguminosae (technically, it’s now called the Fabaceae, but life is too short as it is), crops like chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, cowpeas and a host of others. That, at least, is the contention of a paper just published in Nature Plants ((Christine H. Foyer et al. (2016). Neglecting legumes has compromised human health and sustainable food production. Nature Plants, 2 (16112) : 10.1038/nplants.2016.112)), which also sets out to show that this relative neglect has been bad for global food and nutritional security.
Table 1 from the paper, which I discuss in the post, is also available as a website listing various resources for each pulse species.