Nutrition

Nibbles: Fungi, Pumpkin, Genebank training, Pastures, Red rice, Yam strategy, AusBank, School meals, Seedy weirdness

We missed the first UK fungus day yesterday.
And the new world record pumpkin. Love that wide-angle lens, BTW.
And a training course on plant genetic resources and genebank management.
But not plant biodiversity to regenerate more productive pastures.
Nor efforts to conserve navara red rice.
Kudos to Ghana, the first country with a national yam strategy.
And to Australia, for muddying the linguistic waters with something called a PlantBank.
Local farmers supply the food for school meals in Africa.
By far the strangest thing I’ve seen since a seed exploded a spliff some while ago.

Yet another blog post about heirloom apples. Why not heirloom, I don’t know, grains?
Yet another genebank opens.
On the other hand, can never have too many agrobiodiversity songs.
Banks? someone mention banks? Biodiversity hotspots are like (some) banks. Too big to fail.
Even crop wild relative hotspots?
1491: Amazon.
1493: New England. Hope Charles Mann won’t mind me borrowing his tropes.
Interesting use of technology to deliver interesting presentation on mainstreaming of nutrition in agricultural development. Anyone know how it was done?

The Guide for the Perplexed Entering the Maze of Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. Great title.
IRRI DG blogs about Golden Rice on World Sight Day. In other news, there’s a World Sight Day.
Indian farmers ever more marginal.
If they were in Africa, they’d be producing nutritious school meals.
Book on camel biodiversity.
Turns out Jeremy is part of a movement that he apparently didn’t even know existed.
Are you involved in the UNFCCC agriculture negotiations? You’ll need this handy communications tool-kit. Agricultural biodiversity is in there somewhere.
Not sure that eels are, but maybe they should be.

The Committee on World Food Security is meeting in Rome. If that’s the kind of thing that whets your appetite, follow #cfs40 on Twitter.
Where, if it’s not too late, you’ll find me offering mouth-watering nutritional advice.
Up a gum tree; ICRAF clones puffpo piece. Whatever happened to added value?
GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — has a new portal. But is it a better portal?
And you can watch GBIF’s Science Symposium 2013 live in just under 85 minutes, and counting.

Enjoying a mango, lychee or cashew? Thank the Eocene-Oligocene glaciation.
A grand tasting of Korean kimchi, in New York next week. #wishiwerethere.
The “Methuselah date” continues to thrive. How soon before we have a comparative sequence? (We missed an earlier report.)
You know what else is thriving? The Crops For The Future Research Centre, that’s what.
The home state of US winemaking? You’ll never guess.
Fishing myths busted. No, not the one about giving someone a fish vs providing capacity building in a piscatorial framework. Carpe carpam!
Kew builds a pyramid! Of pumpkins, settle down.
A well-aged wine to go with those cucurbits? How about this 6000 year-old Greek number? I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.
Nice enough story of cassava improvement from CIAT, except that it is missing the beginning (the genebank?) and the end (blindness prevented).