Nibbles

Nibbles: Edibles books, Yam farmer, JL Hudson Seeds, Italian landraces, Native American maize

University of Chicago Press series on food & drink: Edibles.
An Indian farmer who’s really into tuber diversity is featured in The Hindu.
“We are a public access seed bank – not a commercial seed company. You will find that our presentation of information and how you access our seedbank is a bit different from ordering seeds from the usual on-line commercial enterprise.”
Italian university maps agrobiodiversity.
Maize data in USDA’s GRIN database includes Indigenous group.

The ancient, wild, Georgian roots of bread wheat gluten.
Wild relatives could help us save coffee. But we knew that. Right?
Photosynthesis in wild rices responds more quickly to light changes than in the crop, stomata not so much. Sometimes domestication giveth, sometimes it taketh away.
It gave us the Three Sisters for sure. With video goodness.
Honeybees have wild relatives too. Well, maybe.
But do the NDCs recognise any of the above?

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.

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.

There’s an FAO Global Conference on Green Development of Seed Industries this Thursday and Friday. Includes sessions on genebanks.
I hope it will cover the breeding of weird — and not-so-weird — vegetables as well as this Food Programme episode did.
And debate the issues as effectively as was done by Pat Mooney and Charles Godfray at this TABLE event.
Meanwhile, in Malawi and the Philippines…
All we are saying…