- There’s a national chickpea championship, but in Spain.
- Senegal is getting its rice back. No word on any championship.
- The Great Plains are not coming back, alas. Spoiler alert: rice and chickpeas are not to blame.
- Cheddar is trying to get its cheese back, though, and has a chance.
- Cool book on the fruits of Brazil. I bet some would go great with cheddar.
- Review of what seems a cool book on the history of food in Europe. I wonder if it explains the whole cheese-with-fruit thing.
Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms
- Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
- Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
- I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
- Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
- Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
- Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
- The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
- Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
- They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.
I say millets, you say mijo, mijo
Dr Don Osborn is a “specialist in rural development with expertise in natural resource management, agriculture, African languages, and localization of information technology.” Very active on Twitter, he had an interesting thread over there a few days ago on the International Year of Millets.
Translation issues ahead of #InternationalYearofMillets?
1. French version of the @UN General Assembly resolution uses singular rather than plural:
FR: Année internationale du mil instead of Année internationale des milsFor access to all translations: https://t.co/Eco66Pwuju
— Don Osborn (@donosborn) October 30, 2021
It seems the singular version of the word “millets” is used in the official documentation in some of the official UN languages. It may well be that “mijo” in Spanish, for example, is a generic term covering all the various species involved that doesn’t easily take a plural, but I do hope this doesn’t detract from the focus on diversity.
Brainfood: Archaeological edition
- Do Pharaohs’ cattle still graze the Nile Valley? Genetic characterization of the Egyptian Baladi cattle breed. Maybe.
- Lessons on textile history and fibre durability from a 4,000-year-old Egyptian flax yarn. Pharaohs’ flax still being woven though.
- Wild cereal grain consumption among Early Holocene foragers of the Balkans predates the arrival of agriculture. Which made it easier to adopt cultigens when farmers arrived.
- The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Horses from the lower Volga-Don spread all over Eurasia starting around 2000 BC along with equestrian material culture.
- The Japanese wolf is most closely related to modern dogs and its ancestral genome has been widely inherited by dogs throughout East Eurasia. Kinda too bad it’s extinct, but maybe it can be reconstructed?
- Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites in the montane forests of New Guinea yield early record of cassowary hunting and egg harvesting. Amazing. From looking at eggshells.
- Hallstatt miners consumed blue cheese and beer during the Iron Age and retained a non-Westernized gut microbiome until the Baroque period. Amazing. From looking at, well, there’s no easy way of saying it, paleofeces.
Nibbles: Crop change, Chinese chocolate, Food system, Eating local, Heritage wheat, NTFPs, Distinguished ethnobotanist, Pumpkins, Garum recipe, Fermentation, Archaea, NBPGR interview
- IFAD says farmers might need to change crops. Farmers unavailable for comment as presumably they’re too busy changing crops.
- Case in point: China moves into cacao.
- The food system is at the centre of all our ills. But I’m not sure switching from maize to sorghum is going to cut it.
- And neither will watching those food miles, alas.
- Example of a farmer changing crops, watching food miles and diversifying the food system.
- I suppose we could also just eat more trees?
- We’ll need ethnobotanists for that.
- And there’s clearly plenty of pumpkins out there.
- Maybe garum would go well with some of those NTFPs, and pumpkins.
- Do they teach garum at Fermentation School?
- Whoa, I did not realize archaea in the vertebrate gut feed on bacterial fermentation products.
- And let’s not forget to put everything in genebanks before it’s too late so we have a chance to do all of the above.