- Youth compiles list of rare and extinct rice varieties of Assam. Maybe he should look at weedy rice too?
- Meanwhile, American farmers are learning to grow quinoa, probably including some rare varieties.
- The smelliest fish in the world. No traceability needed for that one, I guess.
- Cropland getting mapped. Presumably including the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Help needed by both, by the way.
- Follow the forest discussions at COP18. High on the agenda: what is a landscape? It’s what you study when you’re being holistic, no? Anyway, there’s got to be a connection to the previous links.
- Boffins find a genetic marker for old seed. Will need to Brainfood this one.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison breaks down superdomestication for you.
- SRI gets a scaling up. What could possibly go wrong?
Nibbles: Agriculture and climate change and GM and nutrition
- Farmers are “the canaries in the mine when it comes to climate change,” says The Financial Times. Get the whole report as a PDF.
- Bioversity says it has climate change covered with a new Seeds for Needs project. Is there an echo in here?
- Farming First covers climate change in an infographic.
- Avenue of the Baobabs in Madagascar burnt down. Better edit those factsheets.
- Heirloom maize farmers talk sense on GM corn shock …
- … but Punjab doesn’t care. Invites Monsanto “To put agriculture diversification on the fast track”.
- Jessica Fanzo wins the Carasso Prize for her great research on nutrition. Proud to call her a friend.
- There was a roundtable associated with the Carasso Prize. Lawrence Haddad blogs about it.
- Pity that roundtable clashed with Workshop: ‘Adding Value to Local Foods for Food and Nutrition Security: Myth or Strategic Option’ in the Caribbean.
- Will the Caribbean warm to finger millet? Zester Daily just wants to share the gluten-free goodness.
- Bere whisky. No, you read that right. Bere as in barley, not as in beer. But then, barley is in beer. Where’s an etymologist when you need one?
And we’ve got nutrition in spades:
Nibbles: Vegetables, UK funding, Oz funding, Oz genebank, Jefferson, Hawaiian food, Markets, Tree seeds, NUS journal, Geographic targeting, ITPGRFA, Arabica and climate, Protected areas, European farmland biodiversity, Sustainable use, Ethiopian seed video
- Palestinian rooftop gardens. Including crucifers, no doubt.
- Brits support work with rice and wheat wild relatives. Among other things. They’ll probably use some of these genomics things.
- Aussies support sweet potatoes. HarvestPlus rejoices.
- That new Australian genebank. Will it have any sweet potatoes?
- The agricultural legacy of Thomas Jefferson. It doesn’t say here, but I bet he was into sweet potato.
- Hawaiian menus. What, no sweet potato?
- Forget biotech, the road to sexy agriculture is via the supermarket. Where you can buy sweet potato. Maybe even of the organic persuasion.
- Or maybe better tree seeds. Even in the Nordic countries. Or the US. Is cacao a tree?
- Plans for special edition of Sustainability on neglected crops. Like amaranth?
- Geographic targeting reaches roots/tubers. Using this newfangled atlas? Or no?
- Treaty and Consortium love-in filmed. Thanks for sharing. It’s all part of this CGIAR perestroika thing, no doubt.
- What that Kew coffee extinction paper really said.
- Protected areas need work. Especially for coffee (see above).
- Yeah but protected areas is not the only way to go, and Europe now has a bunch of biodiversity indicators for farmland. I guess it’s all part of some big plan.
- Policy brief on sustainable use of PGR. Or, as we used to call it, on farm conservation.
- Which you can kind of see happening here.
Nibbles: SOWF, Pollinators, Bamboo, Policy, Cupuaçu, Salak, Pomegranate
- State of the World’s Forests 2012 is out. Save some trees by downloading the PDFs.
- More from FAO: Potential Effects of Climate Change on Crop Pollination. Stick that in your crop model.
- And then there’s climate change and bamboos — of interest to more than pandas?
- Bioversity policy wonks call for New strategies and partnerships for the sustainable use of plant genetic resources. What was wrong with the old ones?
- Kew says The taste of the Amazon is Cupuaçu. A name I recognized only because I recently spent half a lifetime on Wikipedia’s entry for Theobroma.
- Smithsonian says The taste of Indonesia is salak, a name I didn’t recognise even when told it is snakefruit. Or Salacca zalacca, a name to really conjure with.
- Cynthia says, the taste of love is pomegranate. Let us go to the vineyards to see …
Taro in the Levant
I was reminded during a recent trip back to Cyprus (my first visit in 20 years after living there for quite a while) of the curious fact that taro is a staple of traditional Cypriot cuisine, something of an outlier in the Mediterranean. Called kolokassi, the tuber is prepared in a number of ways, and the young offshoots, or suckers, are also taken fried. You can see these in the photo, labelled “poulles.”. Peter J. Matthews has this to say in his “Genetic Diversity in Taro, and the Preservation of Culinary Knowledge“:
In Cyprus only one cultivar of taro is grown, but there are at least nine distinct ways of preparing taro (skhara, vrasto, souppa skourdalia, tiganites, kappamas, yiakhni, psito, moussakas, Matthews 1998a) (Figure 4). The fermentation of taro starch, and the edibility of leaves (petioles and blades) are not known in Cyprus. All the methods recorded use heat to reduce acridity — by simmering, boiling, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling, and baking (steaming was not reported). For each named dish, the details of preparation varied from person to person and village to village. The range of dishes is not large, compared to the range in Japan (Matthews 1995), but does involve a greater range of methods for applying heat.
You can find out more in the book “The Global Diversity of Taro: Ethnobotany and Conservation,” in which Dr Matthews has also had a hand. Poulles are not mentioned, which makes me think their consumption may be a relatively recent innovation.
It’s not clear where that one Cypriot cultivar may have come from, though Matthews says that the crop “is likely to have reached Cyprus in ancient times from India or Africa, via the Levant or Egypt.” That makes sense, but will be difficult to verify, as there is precious little in the way of germplasm collections in the region between Europe and India. I would imagine Egypt in particular would be fertile territory for a bit of collecting. I wasn’t able to find any ancient Egyptians representations of the plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they exist.