Nibbles

Nibbles: Deforestation, Grizzly genetics, Animal domestication, Wheat drones, Okra experiments, Millet survey, The Common Table

26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
Drones and wheat breeding.
Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.

If you’re into quinoa, you’re probably going to need this directory.
Hybrid rye is becoming a useful participant in maize-soybean rotations in the Corn Belt where giant ragweed is a problem.
New insect-trapping wild tobacco species described from Australia.
Biotechnologist and social scientist in conversation about genetic modification and gene editing.

Crawford Fund training materials for high schools include discussion of genebanks.
And that would go quite well with this graphic novel on natural selection in Mimulus from Health in Our Hands.
There’s a Global Tree Knowledge Platform from ICRAF…
…which could probably be usefully mashed up with the restoration platform Restor.
The Sumatran striped rabbit makes a rare appearance. On Facebook.
The World Bank makes the economic case for all of the above. Well, maybe except the Sumatran rabbit.

Just back from a nice holiday, and greeted by Jeremy’s latest newsletter, which includes, among many delights, a post from Old European Culture on black sheep in the Balkans.
Traditional salt-tolerant rice varieties making a comeback in India.
Traditional melon varieties exhibited by genebank in Spain.
Trying to make the most of traditional olive varieties.
Traditional foods are depicted in stone on Seville’s cathedral.
And more recent attempts to celebrate biodiversity in art.
I guess one could call traditional these old peaches that used to be grown by the Navajo. Have blogged about them before, check it out.
No doubt that amaranth is a traditional crop in Central America. I doubt that it will “feed the world,” but it can certainly feed a whole bunch more people. Thanks to people like Roxanne Swentzell.
There’s nothing more traditional than yams in Papua New Guinea. For 50,000 years.
How to remix a traditional food like stuffed avocado.
How many of the traditional recipes in these Abbasid and later Arab cookbooks have been remixed, I wonder?

Well of course there’s a hedge collection.
Downloadable UNAM volume of the origin and diversification of maize (in Spanish).
Catalog of the native potatoes curated by Indigenous communities in a region of Peru.
I’m all for protein diversification, but what exactly is it?