- Zimbabwean take to wild foods, and not in a good way.
- “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see my sisal flooring.”
- Gourds+Halloween=Jawdropping Creativity.
- Tangled Bank 117.
- “Terror agent” listing for Xanthomanas oryzae blights US rice research.
Warm welcome for finger millet porridge
Whenever I hear people talking about reviving food traditions, I always want to ask them what they’re doing with expatriates. They are often the people who are most attached to traditional foods and assorted agrobiodiversity from back home. Take my wife. No sooner did our visitor fly in from Nairobi, laden with uji mix,
that she had the stuff boiling away on the stove as if she hadn’t tasted porridge in years. 1
Now, I’m not saying that Kenyans abroad are going to save finger millet cultivation in the Nandi Hills or whatever. But they might be a good place to start.
Underutilized species given undivided attention
It seems that two key organizations dealing with underutilized crops — the Sri Lanka-based International Centre for Under-utilised Crops (ICUC) and the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilised Species (GFU), based at Bioversity International in Rome — are merging and establishing a new entity. It will be called Crops for the Future (CroFu) and will be based in Malaysia. Best wishes for the future to CroFu.
Nibbles: Poland, Aguaje, Climate Change, Seed Law, Apples, Seed Secretariat
- Growing a new agriculture in Poland.
- After açai? Aguaje!
- Hector Mongi is heading to a CTA seminar on Implications of Climate Change for Sustainable Agriculture. Hope he blogs it.
- “Anti-farmer” seed law in Pakistan.
- “Look,” he says. “This was an orchard.”
- Wonderful photos of autumn; agricultural biodiversity prominent.
- Afghanistan’s National Seed Secretariat opens, re-opens hornets’ nest?
Nibbles: Tamarind, Fire, Aquaculture
- A single tree that is also a genebank? Holy tamarind.
- Looking to kangaroo bones for evidence of Aboriginal terraforming.
- African fish farming links. Via.