Category: Nibbles

Little bits of link goodness not worth a whole post

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Nibbles: Wild wheat, Saving coffee, Wild rice, 3 Sisters video, Blenheim honeybees, NDCs

  1. The ancient, wild, Georgian roots of bread wheat gluten.
  2. Wild relatives could help us save coffee. But we knew that. Right?
  3. 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.
  4. It gave us the Three Sisters for sure. With video goodness.
  5. Honeybees have wild relatives too. Well, maybe.
  6. But do the NDCs recognise any of the above?
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Nibbles: Cheddar cheese, Chickpea festival, Senegal rice, Great Plains, Brazilian fruit, Hungry Eye

  1. There’s a national chickpea championship, but in Spain.
  2. Senegal is getting its rice back. No word on any championship.
  3. The Great Plains are not coming back, alas. Spoiler alert: rice and chickpeas are not to blame.
  4. Cheddar is trying to get its cheese back, though, and has a chance.
  5. Cool book on the fruits of Brazil. I bet some would go great with cheddar.
  6. 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.
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Nibbles: Mesopotamian ag & gardens, Old dogs, Ethiopian church groves, High Desert Seed, Australian Rubus, Fuggle hop, New sweet potato, Naming organisms

  1. Jeremy’s newsletter deals with Sumerian grains, among other things.
  2. Which may have been grown in the gardens of Uruk.
  3. I suppose the Sumerians must have had weird dogs frolicking around their gardens?
  4. Maybe they even thought of their gardens as sacred places. You know, like in Ethiopia.
  5. Seeds for a desert half a world away from Sumeria.
  6. Meanwhile, half a world away in the other direction, a thornless raspberry takes a bow.
  7. The Sumerians had beer, right? Not with this hop though. Or any hops, actually.
  8. Pretty sure they didn’t have sweet potatoes either. Of any colour.
  9. They had names for whatever they grew of course. And such vernacular names can be a pain in the ass, but also kinda fun.
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Nibbles: Green FAO, Veggie breeding, TABLE debate, Better seeds

  1. There’s an FAO Global Conference on Green Development of Seed Industries this Thursday and Friday. Includes sessions on genebanks.
  2. I hope it will cover the breeding of weird — and not-so-weird — vegetables as well as this Food Programme episode did.
  3. And debate the issues as effectively as was done by Pat Mooney and Charles Godfray at this TABLE event.
  4. Meanwhile, in Malawi and the Philippines…
  5. All we are saying…
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Nibbles: Crop change, Chinese chocolate, Food system, Eating local, Heritage wheat, NTFPs, Distinguished ethnobotanist, Pumpkins, Garum recipe, Fermentation, Archaea, NBPGR interview

  1. IFAD says farmers might need to change crops. Farmers unavailable for comment as presumably they’re too busy changing crops.
  2. Case in point: China moves into cacao.
  3. 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.
  4. And neither will watching those food miles, alas.
  5. Example of a farmer changing crops, watching food miles and diversifying the food system.
  6. I suppose we could also just eat more trees?
  7. We’ll need ethnobotanists for that.
  8. And there’s clearly plenty of pumpkins out there.
  9. Maybe garum would go well with some of those NTFPs, and pumpkins.
  10. Do they teach garum at Fermentation School?
  11. Whoa, I did not realize archaea in the vertebrate gut feed on bacterial fermentation products.
  12. 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.