Nibbles

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.

Parasites of oil palm monocultures as avatars of hope and justice.
30 ways to leave your monoculture.
French take on investing in natural capital. Hopefully not oil palm monocultures though.

Apps: how not to solve the problem of kids’ nutrition.
Giant pumpkins: solving a problem that doesn’t really exist.
UNFSS: a waste of time or a first, necessary step in solving the problem of our age?
Museums: if in doubt about a problem, build one.

Cologne has a mustard museum and I want to visit it.
Lecture on the role of sugar in supporting slavery and capitalism. Where is the sugar museum?Ah here it is.
The cassowary may have been domesticated in New Guinea ten thousand years ago (with sugarcane?). Deserves a museum.
Speaking of domestication, here is how that of citrus happened. There’s actually a number of different citrus museums out there.
Nice PhD opportunity Sweden studying beans in Rwanda. There are museums in both places, I’m pretty sure.

Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
(Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.