Category: Neglected species

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Too delicious

Q: When is potato diversity not potato diversity?
A: When it is in the hands of assorted experts.

Potato-Close-Up I hate to be pedantic here. (Actually, that’s a terrible lie; I love to be pedantic, especially about crops and food.) But if you look closely at the photograph, and you know your tubers, you’ll know that those aren’t potatoes in the picture. They are oca and mashua. Andean tubers, to be sure, but not potatoes. So who made this elemental error? None other than the good folks at the International Year of the Potato.

Worse, it’s on the page specifically addressed “Hey, kids!” (Lord how I love that exciting exclamation mark.) One could, of course, argue that the caption just happens to be underneath a photo of other Andean tubers. But that won’t wash. What we have here is a total and abject failure to know anything whatsoever about potatoes. How can kids! trust anything else on the page?

I’m sure that the International Year of the Potato will be a good thing, just as the International Year of Rice was a good thing. I’m equally sure someone will eventually detect this egregious and appalling error. In the meantime, just to be on the safe side, I snapped the page and am preserving it here for posterity.

And hey, potato people, my rates remain reasonable.

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Wild food plants of Zimbabwe

According to this article in the Harare Herald, the Kellogg Foundation will be supporting research by University of Zimbabwe scientists into “wild and famine plant foods, their preparation and preservation (and) nutrient analysis … to enhance livelihood security.”

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Latin cooking

This piece on the polyphenolic content of yearba mate (llex paraguariensis), a tea-like drink traditionally consumed in South America by pouring boiling water onto leaves held in a seasoned gourd, led me to this interesting-sounding book on Hispanic foods in general. Polyphenols are antioxidants and the food industry wants to add them to juices and teas.

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Singular stories

We get used to reading about massive great projects involving loads of stakeholders with mountains of milestones. And we get jaded. But sometimes solutions are much smaller and with them comes a sense of uplift and possibilities. I got that when I found a post from a woman called Juliana, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. Her big push is for a millet grinding machine. Here’s why:

This machine grounds the millet the women spend so long to pound everyday. It can also ground peanuts into peanut butter and shea nuts to extract their oil. Mali is one of the leading producers of Shea butter so I’d like to help contribute to it’s production in my village.

If I get this machine it will allow the women much needed free time to do other things during the day. Plus one part of getting the machine is the ‘alphabetisation’ of the women. They need to learn how to read and write so that they can keep proper records for the machine. An NGO will take part in helping to provide the education for the women and the training for record keeping. It’s a good way of introducing literacy into a small village.

And she writes about trialling different kinds of millet in the village.

Bioversity International (my day job) has helped to introduce millet mini-mills in India, and the positive repercussions have been phenomenal. Not to blow my own horn too loudly, but you can hear about the mini-mill here, and there’s an accompanying article in New Agriculturalist.

So, Juliana, if you’re reading this, go for it, and let us know how you get on.