- 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.
Brainfood: RICA, AEGIS, CWR, Agrosavia, DSI, CRISPR, Tradition, SNS, Stability, Birds, Sparing, Genetic erosion
- RICA: A rice crop calendar for Asia based on MODIS multi year data. RiceAtlas validated. Still trying to figure out how to mash it up with genebank accession locality data though. Any GIS geniuses out there to help me?
- AEGIS, the Virtual European Genebank: Why It Is Such a Good Idea, Why It Is Not Working and How It Could Be Improved. Certify genebanks, that’s how.
- Reap the crop wild relatives for breeding future crops. Needs good data and certified genebanks. Plus gene editing.
- Opportunities and Challenges to Improve a Public Research Program in Plant Breeding and Enhance Underutilized Plant Genetic Resources in the Tropics. Needs better social networking. Plus better data and certified genebanks, presumably.
- From seed to sequence: Dematerialization and the battle to (re)define genetic resources. Ah yes, data.
- Current Advancements and Limitations of Gene Editing in Orphan Crops. Ah yes, gene editing.
- Revitalizing Traditional Agricultural Practices: Conscious Efforts to Create a More Satisfying Culture. Meanwhile, in Sweden…
- Sacred natural sites and biodiversity conservation: a systematic review. Of course sacred sites are good for biodiversity. But it’s always good to have the data.
- Global relationships between crop diversity and nutritional stability. Sacred sites are not enough, alas.
- Preserving local biodiversity through crop diversification. Crop diversity is even good for birds…
- Concentrating vs. spreading our footprint: how to meet humanity’s needs at least cost to nature. …but, overall intensification of agriculture coupled with sparing land for conservation (maybe even in sacred sites) is the best approach for wildlife. And humanity, for that matter. So, back to needing better data from certified genebanks, so we can get that intensification done, right?
- Quantifying the scale of genetic diversity extinction in the Anthropocene. Right!