- And…we’re back!
- Nice new infographics derived from that classic paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
- Video on a millet community seedbank in India.
- I hope all these healthy Indian rices are in seedbanks somewhere, community or otherwise.
- Kazakhstan is getting a new genebank, and I don’t mean a community one.
- yeah but genebanks are not enough: enter INCREASE.
- Wait, there’s a World Localization Day?
- Looks like white sage might need less localization and more seedbanks.
- I see your Mexican white sage and raise you the Calabrian white olive.
- The Telangana equivalent of white sage is probably safe, though, if this collecting programme is anything to go by.
- IFAD pushes nature-based farmers. White sage unavailable for comment.
- The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
- Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
- Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
- All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
- Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.
Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture
- Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
- Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
- There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
- Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
- The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
- Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
- Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
- Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
- Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…
Brainfood: Indigenous crops, Indian vegetables, Local breeds, Wheat identity, Date names, Food security & heritage, Peruvian cuisine, Food sovereignty, Palestinian seeds, Tea culture, Sacred groves, Food system transformation, Diverse landscapes
- Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
- Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these Indian vegetables are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
- Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
- Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
- What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
- Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
- Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
- Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
- Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
- Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
- Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
- The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
- Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?
Nibbles: GRIN-U, Canadian seeds, Jordan genebank, Green genebank, Millets everywhere, Saving livestock diversity, Sustainable smallholders, Uli Westphal, Eat This Tomato
- Lots of new stuff on GRIN-U. Check out the genebank success stories in particular. How many of the things below will be successes? Lots of luck to all of them…
- Showcasing seeds in Canada.
- Setting up a new genebank in Jordan.
- Let’s hope it will be eco-efficient like CIAT’s. Other GROW webinars here. Yes, they’ve started up again.
- Embracing millets in southern Africa and India.
- Why livestock should not follow the example of Charles II of Spain.
- Supporting traditional sustainable farming in Central America.
- More on Uli Westphal‘s cool illustrations of crop diversity.
- Which include tomatoes. Don’t forget to subscribe to Jeremy’s pod.
- And subscribe to the GRIN-U newsletter too while you’re at it!
Nibbles: New cassava, Community seedbank double, Rwandan beans, Knotweed et al., Seed systems, Adam Alexander, Uruguay genebank, Kelp biobank
- There’s a new cassava in town in Kenya.
- I wonder if it will end up in a community “seed” bank.
- …because they swear by them in Zimbabwe.
- Cassava is not the only American crops that’s important in parts of Africa: the cultural appropriation of beans in Rwanda.
- Some American crops didn’t make it very far out of America.
- Be it beans, cassava or sump/knotweed, what’s needed is a Quality-Declared Seed (QDS) system. Right?
- Well you also need someone to go around collecting the stuff in the first place.
- But don’t forget to back everything up in Svalbard, like Uruguay is doing.
- Well maybe not everything.