Nibbles

Nibbles: Food residues, Medieval wine, Phoenician wine

Useful roundup of the application of modern analytical techniques to archaeological food residues.
Medieval “greek wine” was not greek wine. No modern analytical techniques used.
Phoenicians traded wine. Some modern analytical techniques used.

Safety duplicating a chickpea collection.
Tunisia’s genebank in the news.
Ghana’s genebank trying to save taro.
Using a genebank to improve Elephant grass.
On-farm conservation of rice in Goa.
Molecular tools show that a couple of varieties account for about half the wheat acreage in Bangladesh and Nepal. Hope all the landraces are in genebanks, and safety duplicated.
Celebrating Peruvian pepper diversity.
Peru’s cacao diversity doesn’t need help, apparently.
However, the Amazon’s wild-extracted fruits (including cacao and a wild relative) could be in trouble. Hope they’re in genebanks, just in case.
How the date came to the US. Including its genebanks.
India had a precursor of the Green Wall of Africa but nobody remembers it. Glad it wasn’t used as a genebank of sorts.
Conservation genetics (i.e., most of the above) explained in 48 slides.

Jeremy’s latest newsletter covers in more depth things we just Nibbled here, including perry and ancient bananas, plus much other stuff. We talked about “wild rice” here a couple of times.
As for actual rice, the controversy between India and Pakistan about the origin of Basmati just got a bit more complicated. Could it in fact have come from Afghanistan?
Maybe everyone should listen to Dr Amber Scholz’s ideas about ABS.
Meanwhile, India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources regional centre in Kumaon has been busy collecting germplasm. No word on whether that includes rice, Basmati or otherwise.
Pretty cool way of presenting accession data, courtesy of Mystery Haze. I wonder where that’s from originally.

Missouri has been important to wine. Very important.
And China to beer.
7 things that are important for future food systems. Spoiler alert: diversity underpins all 7.
Why biodiversity is important to diets. And vice versa.
Why biodiversity is important to agriculture. And vice versa.
No worries, now anyone can have a genebank.

New institute to restore ecosystems, including agricultural ones, gets money.
Some olive-based ecosystems certainly need restoration, good thing there are genebanks.
Sometimes, restoring ecosystems means digging up old grapevines and moving them down the road.