- Role of indigenous foods in addressing malnutrition and diet-related diseases in Africa: a systematic review. Traditional foods contribute to dietary diversity, micronutrient intake and food security. Nutrition policy should pay more attention to what people used to eat.
- Regenerative agriculture for dietary diversity and food security in Zambia. Soil-focused regenerative practices are associated with more diverse diets, through a mixture of production, income and market effects. Soil health has a dietary dimension.
- The Relationship among Food Environment Types, Diet, and Nutrition Outcomes in Women, Children, and Adolescents from Low- and Lower-Middle Income Countries. What surrounds people matters as much as what they grow: food environments influence dietary diversity and nutrition in complicated ways, but access to wild foods is usually a good thing.
- Allele-specific expression reveals complex regulatory divergence underlying fruit phenotypic differences between cultivated and wild tomato species. Wild tomato relatives harbour genetic variation for sugars, volatiles and other flavour traits that domestication left behind. A reminder that “improvement” can be a process of subtraction. Not nutrition you say? I bet flavour is connected with nutrition — in complicated ways.
- Large-scale phenotyping and multi-trait selection identify low-methane Napier grass accessions under contrasting environmental conditions. Napier grass accessions differ substantially in methane yield, digestibility and other traits. Feed diversity could help reduce livestock emissions without sacrificing everything else. Cows need better nutrition too.
Joining the dots on food plant diversity
We have access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly changing world, an unusually broad review by Colin Khoury (very much friend of the blog) and colleagues. It has all the latest data, but it also does several other things that make it more than a conventional state-of-the-art paper.
For one, it brings together diversity at several levels that are too often discussed separately: species, varieties and genes, of course, but also the diversity of diets, farming systems, foodways and the knowledge associated with them. It traces the movement of cultivated food plants over the past 12,000 years alongside the much more recent trend towards homogenisation. The result is the weird world we live in today: more kinds of crops available globally, but less difference between what people in different places eat.
Colin and friends also take a hard look at what we don’t know. We have surprisingly little evidence for how much food-plant diversity has actually been lost, how vulnerable today’s production systems are because of increasing uniformity, or what is happening to less visible forms of diversity, such as nutritional and chemical variation. The authors call for better monitoring, including an early-warning system for crop vulnerability. Now where have I heard that before?
And the paper connects the dots between conservation approaches that all too often live in isolation: genebanks, botanic gardens, community seed banks, on-farm initiatives, protected areas, breeding programmes and markets. Genebanks are all well and good, but diversity also needs to keep going in fields, landscapes, cuisines and communities. Again, not particularly new, but it’s good to have it repeated, brought up to date, and placed in the broadest possible context.
A couple of those dots are discussed in more detail in a companion opinion paper, Enhance food plant diversity conservation and use through greater coordination between genebanks and botanic gardens, which asks what might become possible if two of the world’s major plant conservation communities worked a bit more closely together. Which must be possible because they are nicely complementary, so neither should fear the other as a competitor.
The review paper maps the problem. The opinion piece explores a possible route towards a more joined-up conservation system. Which leaves us with its own small paradox: conserving food plant diversity requires flattening some of the differences within a remarkably diverse conservation community. Happy Crop Diversity Day 2026.
Where have all the nutrients gone?
The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long.
Back in 2009, Jeremy looked at evidence that older crop varieties could contain more minerals, protein and other nutrients than newer ones, and discussed various possible reasons, including the intriguing possibility of a “genetic dilution” effect as breeders selected for yield.
By 2012, we were stressing that the evidence was more complicated than the headlines suggested, and in 2019 we linked to the latest critical review of the evidence by Robin Marles of the Bureau of Nutritional Sciences in Canada.
Now the latest episode of the BBC’s indispensable More or Less podcast asks again whether carrots are becoming less nutritious, prompted by a listener who clearly hasn’t been following our blog, and turns to Dr Marles, now retired, for the answer. Which hasn’t really changed much.
The bottom line is that breeding for yield and other commercially important traits can change the balance of what ends up in the harvest, and that we have historically been much better at measuring tonnes per hectare than what is actually in those tonnes.
Brainfood: Opportunity crops, meet your constraints
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There’s a wave of groundwork being laid — genomic, cultural, and geospatial — for opportunity crops, but the governance, disease-pressure, market and environmental constraints that marginalized them in the first place are still very much active, and in some cases actively winning.
- Constraints on crop diversification under drought: Multi-scale evidence from California’s San Joaquin Valley. Consolidation, land tenure and water access limits farmers’ ability to switch crops.
- Fragmented urban food governance and impacts on the marginalisation of indigenous crops in Ghana. City plans sideline indigenous crops, and communities pay the price.
- Full Genome Characterization of the Causal Virus of Yellow Mosaic Disease in Mungbean Minicore Accessions. Technical barriers block the path from potential to harvest.
- Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, domestication, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean crop. Genomic evidence reveals substantial diversity in this overlooked Andean pepper but also major conservation gaps, particularly in Bolivia, highlighting opportunities for both crop improvement and biocultural conservation.
- Bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia (L.) Willd.): current research advances and future perspectives for a neglected legume crop. It was dropped because of anti-nutritional quirks, but should, and could, return for marginal lands.
- Genetic characterization of a global collection of common buckwheat to harness genetic resources for agricultural diversity. Hidden diversity is still out there.
- Genotype-by-sequencing of global hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) collections provides genomic resources for crop conservation and improvement. Diversity survives in farmer fields and genebanks.
- Wild Edible Greens Heritage in Western Crete and Its Resilience Across Greek Islands: The Role of Small-Scale Farming, Biodiversity, and Isolation. Small-scale farming sustains knowledge of wild edible greens across Greek islands, showing that opportunity crops depend on living farming cultures.
- African Crop Calendar: A geo-referenced dataset of crop growing seasons across diverse agro-ecological regions. Where (or should that be when) alternative crops might fit within agricultural systems.
Nibbles: Frafra, Seed multiplication, Quality seeds, Balearic genebank, Indigenous trees double, Bruno cart, Belgian wild yeast
- Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
- Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
- Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
- Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
- Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
- Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
- And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
- Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.