- Remember the book on ancient Mesopotamian cookery in the last Nibbles? Ok well here’s a website on Vegetable Oils And Animal Fats In Early Urban Societies Of Syro-Mesopotamia. Esoteric? Moi?
- To come back down to earth, you could always read this hot take on the AGRA rebranding.
- Couldn’t be more down to earth than community seedbanks, aka seed libraries.
- The seeds of Dipteryx odorata will make your head float.
- The latest news from the Musa Germplasm Information System may float your boat. It did mine. But I’m into esoterica, didn’t you know?
- Nothing esoteric about wild peanuts any more.
Brainfood: Indigenous crops, Indian vegetables, Local breeds, Wheat identity, Date names, Food security & heritage, Peruvian cuisine, Food sovereignty, Palestinian seeds, Tea culture, Sacred groves, Food system transformation, Diverse landscapes
- Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
- Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these Indian vegetables are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
- Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
- Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
- What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
- Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
- Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
- Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
- Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
- Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
- Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
- The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
- Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?
Nibbles: Tree planting, Restoration genebanks, Breadfruit Summit, Rice diversity demand, Irish Seed Savers, Jordan bread, Peanut recipes
- Rules for tree planting.
- Where those trees will have to come from: thousands of seed banks.
- Not if the tree is breadfruit, but that’s ok, there’s other ways to conserve the stuff.
- The impact of a single seed bank on rice improvement measured.
- The impact of Irish seed banks recognized.
- No need for genebanks to save heirloom wheats in Jordan.
- Lost opportunity to mention peanut genebanks, but that’s ok there’s other ways to conserve the stuff.
Brainfood: Opuntia breeding, Teosinte genes, Sugarcane breeding, Proso diversity, Watermelon diversity, Wheat pre-breeding, Sorghum wild relatives, Grasspea evaluation, Banana domestication, Pea pan-genome, Bambara diversity
- Needs and strategies for breeding and sustainable use of genetic resources in Opuntia. Surely there are molecular markers for spinelessness by now?
- Teosinte confers specific alleles and yield potential to maize improvement. There are 71 QTLs associated with 24 differential traits between maize and teosinte.
- A short review on sugarcane: its domestication, molecular manipulations and future perspectives. Forget sugar or fuel, the future is vaccine production.
- SNP discovery in proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) using low-pass genome sequencing. Ok, but why are the South Asian accessions so different from everything else?
- Meta-analysis of qualitative and quantitative trait variation in sweet watermelon and citron watermelon genetic resources. Rob citron to pay sweet watermelon.
- Genomics-informed prebreeding unlocks the diversity in genebanks for wheat improvement. How I learned to stop worrying and love non-adapted germplasm.
- Wild Sorghum as a Promising Resource for Crop Improvement. Oooh, I like the idea of de novo domestication of Australian wild sorghum species.
- Disentangling the Genetic Diversity of Grass Pea Germplasm Grown under Lowland and Highland Conditions. Always good to have multi-locational trial data, even when n=2.
- Hybridization, missing wild ancestors and the domestication of cultivated diploid bananas. Let the search for the 3 unknown wild ancestors begin!
- Improved pea reference genome and pan-genome highlight genomic features and evolutionary characteristics. If only Mendel had worked on wild peas too.
- Genetic diversity and population structure analyses of South African Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea [L.] Verdc) collections using SNP markers. Two heterotic groups to play around with.
Nibbles: GRIN-U, Canadian seeds, Jordan genebank, Green genebank, Millets everywhere, Saving livestock diversity, Sustainable smallholders, Uli Westphal, Eat This Tomato
- Lots of new stuff on GRIN-U. Check out the genebank success stories in particular. How many of the things below will be successes? Lots of luck to all of them…
- Showcasing seeds in Canada.
- Setting up a new genebank in Jordan.
- Let’s hope it will be eco-efficient like CIAT’s. Other GROW webinars here. Yes, they’ve started up again.
- Embracing millets in southern Africa and India.
- Why livestock should not follow the example of Charles II of Spain.
- Supporting traditional sustainable farming in Central America.
- More on Uli Westphal‘s cool illustrations of crop diversity.
- Which include tomatoes. Don’t forget to subscribe to Jeremy’s pod.
- And subscribe to the GRIN-U newsletter too while you’re at it!