- Bhogpur farmer Subash Chander Misra gets Plant Genome Savior Farmer award 2012 for pear conservation.
- While a whole farming system gets protected in Kerala.
- Hope it doesn’t go the way of protected areas in Guatemala. Maybe they need old mobile phones. Or a better roads or urban expansion dataset. Or maybe just their own maps.
- UK government puts money where mouth is with grant to HarvestPlus. For things like this from ICRISAT. And have you seen the BBC slideshow?
- Funnily enough, nobody talking about guinea pigs as a solution for malnutrition.
- How Australian agriculture improved its water use efficiency. Clue: it’s not one thing. Good to be reminded, yet again, that’s it’s not necessarily always and only about the diversity. Keeps us centred.
- Bees get a bank?
- The de-extinction debate rumbles on. Centred, did someone say?
Hedges, pledges and edges
Everybody’s calling the Nutrition4Growth at the weekend a great success, perhaps a game-changer.
The EC, The Gates Foundation, and the World Bank committed leverage the billions that are already spend on agriculture to impact on nutrition. These pledges are impressive — not least the eye popping $4bn from the EC.
Even, though with various caveats, the ever-cynical Laurence Haddad, from whose reality-checking post our title is nicked. Fingers crossed.
LATER: And here’s the CGIAR’s take on it all.
Nibbles: Pretty, Peak soil, Wine history, Ancient foodways, Offal, Durian, Exotic plant foods, Cassava, Mozzarella, Nutrition report, Superfoods
- Jules Pretty meditates on the impermanence of things.
- Like soil. And bumblebees.
- Ah, well, let’s not get maudlin. Pass the bottle. Well looky here. The French got wine from the Italians. I feel better already.
- And Canadians had clam gardens a thousand years ago. Probably still do, actually.
- Along with offal, no doubt. Which did not, however, seem to play any role in a recent Mesolithic dinner. Though French wine did. Which is weird.
- The best fruit in the world gets the Kew treatment.
- And is included in a weird list of the 100 weirdest food plants.
- Cassava‘s pretty weird too.
- The best cheese in the world is not French either.
- All of which foods no doubt feature in FAO’s new report on nutrition. Which is really important, so don’t let the flippancy fool ya. The Lancet agrees. And you can do your bit too.
- Ah, but does quinoa feature in that FAO report? The backlash continues…
You are what you eat: junk food edition
An article in last weekend’s New York Times Sunday Review has been getting a lot of traction. Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food by one Jo Robinson complains that nutrition has been going downhill ever since farming began. Not, she says, merely with the advent of modern varieties.
Wow! I mean, that’s quite a claim. So I took a serious look.
I guess my main beef with the piece is that it still presents a thoroughly medical view of nutrition and diet. I guess the de rigeur hat-tip to Hippocrates should have tipped me off. “Let food be thy medicine” is not in fact a prescription for specific active ingredients to combat specific ailments. And to switch, as Robinson does, between active ingredients and some vague notion of phytonutrients, confuses me at least. There’s also the vaguely disquieting idea that if a phytonutrient is good, more is better. It ain’t necessarily so. ((Of course, a carrot overdose might not be a problem for Jo Robinson, as she advocates a return to wild-type plants, which I guess would mean a weedy, woody, pale white unimproved carrot root.))
Actually, there’s a lot more in the piece that made my blood boil. Most trivially, having said that our nutritional downfall is the result of preferring more sugar and less bitter, how can this be good advice:
Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.
Because blue corn contains anthocyanins, obviously.
More worrying is Ms Robinson’s deep misunderstanding of the nature of selection, at least as she describes the domestication of teosinte. To imagine that “nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn” from the first cultivation of maize until the 19th century, when “farmers began to play a more active role” is nothing short of scandalous. Not unlike people who think Columbus discovered America.
Better yet, in hammering on about modern maize and how sweet it is, we are treated to a description of the discovery and commercialisation of supersweet corn. The first release of a commercial supersweet corn took place in 1961, of which Robinson says:
This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention.
If you think supersweet corn is genetically modified, I’d love to know what you think of the changes that turned teosinte into maize.
I was also intrigued by a little “correction” the NYT yesterday slipped in at the bottom of the piece.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the origins of supersweet corn. The corn was the result of a natural, spontaneous mutation, not one artificially induced through radiation.
I’m sure the whole thing was equally well researched. Because …
Jo Robinson is a bestselling, investigative journalist who has spent the past 15 years scouring research journals for information on how we can restore vital nutrients to our fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products.
The book will probably be a runaway success.
Nibbles: Kenyan water, Peruvian diets, Kazakh horse meat, Orchard diversity, Rubus ID, Baltimore
- Kenya goes gung-ho for agrobiodiversity to make better use of scarce water.
- Peru enacts Law for the Promotion of Healthy Eating by Boys, Girls, and Adolescents to a mixed reception.
- Sent to Kazakhstan, a food writer thrills to dietary diversity in Almaty (without once mentioning apples).
- Holistic orchard conversion. “Turning an orchard from a lawn with fruit & nut trees in it into a purpose-built meadow with fruit & nut trees in it.”
- “Preservation of cultivar purity is a particular challenge for plants that are self-incompatible, and have easily germinating seeds and vigorously spreading rhizomes.” Amen.
- You’ve seen The Wire? Now read about The Duncan Street Miracle Garden.