- Italians rescue forgotten grape varieties for new varietals. Diciamo “cin cin”.
- Eat up all your beets.
- LEISA magazine tells us about making soils better.
- Maps of malnutrition in Ecuador. Where are the agrobiodiversity maps to mash with them, Andy?
- “If we were to look at improving the height of children, rather than the weight, we might be able to improve this situation.”
- NatGeo video on coca marketing in Bolivia.
Nibbles: BGR, Sugarcane, Cannabis, Domestication
- Berry-go-Round 6, a plant-based blog carnival, is up. Jeremy says: “Taxonomy! Yay!“
- US uproots sugarcane, Kenya plants it. “Deciding who is right is difficult.” Er, you betcha.
- California’s largest cash crop can be an environmental disaster.
- Cassava not as nasty as its wild relatives.
Beer news
In Uganda, the Finance Ministry recently cut the tax on beers made from local ingredients. Nile Breweries responded by dropping the price of its Eagle and Eagle Extra beers, made from local sorghum.
Mr Onapito-Ekomoloit said the company was taking the move in the “interest of strengthening Uganda’s agricultural base through sorghum farmer development.â€
Win-win-win. I’ll drink to that.
Meanwhile, on another continent, a newly-brewed sorghum beer suffers “a pervasive taste of iron. Not like sucking on a rusty nail but its definitely there”.
Smell this
Will perfume smell more delicious if the labdanum in it has been scraped off the beards of Cretan goats?
Ah, how I love to meander the byways of economic biology. Who knew that Cretan rock roses (Cistus creticus) produce a resin called labdanum? That labdanum, among many other uses, is a base note in perfume not unlike the fabled ambergris? Or that the best quality labdanum is gathered adventitiously, as it were, by goats grazing on Cretan herbage (rather like that civet-cat coffee)?
I didn’t either. But now you can too, thanks to the Human Flower Project.
Nibbles: Agave, Fruits, Rotation, Potato, Dogs, Banana, Egypt, Sagittaria latifolia, Cooking
- Tequila!
- Fruitipedia.
- Rotation rediscovered.
- Japan potatoes diversify.
- The genetics of dog behaviour.
- Freakonomist pleads for information. Is the banana doomed, or what?
- Ancient Egyptians stored grain and wine.
- 3,600 year old wapato tubers found in Canada. Wawhat?
- Sarko wants UNESCO to protect French cuisine. Yeah because on its own it just doesn’t have a chance.