Nutrition

April 9, 2013

Food composition training materials planned

Are you working in a university which includes or is intending to include a course on food composition in its curriculum? well, if so, you might be interested in this recent announcement from INFOODS coordinator Ruth Charrondiere on FAO’s nutrition listserv.

I am pleased to announce that FAO/INFOODS is developing an e-learning course on food composition which is intended mainly for universities to easily incorporate food composition into their curricula. It will also be useful for self-learners and food composition courses. The e-learning course will supplement the FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Study Guide and its accompanying 12 PowerPoint Presentations (see http://www.fao.org/infoods/infoods/training/en/). It will be available in English. You will be able to download it free-of-charge from the INFOODS website and receive it on CD. We intend to launch it at the 10th IFDC in Granada.

So now you have no excuse for not documenting food composition data at the crop variety level.

April 9, 2013April 9, 2013

Nibbles: Cook with chia, Tacos

Slim-pickings edition.

Five recipes for today’s new superfood, chia (aka Salvia hispanica).
Ok, so maybe there’s also this: way more than five recipes for tacos, the breakfast of champions.

April 8, 2013April 8, 2013

Nibbles: Botanic gardens & forest foods, Militants against IRRI, Modern ancient farm, Conservation software, Urban mowing sheep, Agro-ecology, Beans, Value of genebanks, Seed savers, Video

Botanic gardens get into the restoration business. So that people can again eat nutritious forest foods. No, really, even the BBC says so.
Militant Filipino NGOs target IRRI. Not for the first time. And probably not the last.
Anyone planning to go to the Beltain at Butser Ancient Farm? Only a month to go…
You are probably already using at least one of these.
Paris looking to go all sheepish.
I don’t know about you, but I immediately turn off when somebody says that X is the only answer to Y. Even when the X is agro-ecology.
Même s’ils le disent en français.
Chinese “board beans” are actually lablab shock.
You going to spend an evening at The Genome Analysis Centre discussing the value of genebanks? Tell us about it!
Dutch seed savers looking to get organized.
New York times goes overboard for Digital Green participatory video.

April 8, 2013April 8, 2013

Folivory dissected

The greens tree: phylogenetic relationships among species whose leaves we eat. Taxon branches are shaded according to taxonomic order. Thanks to The Botanist in the Kitchen

Another tour de force from The Botanist in the Kitchen: why we eat the leaves that we do.

There’s a bunch of good stuff in this post with which to regale fellow diners, should you be that sort of dining companion, and lots with which to take issue too, if you’re feeling argumentative. Despite all the caveats, most of which she anticipates, Jeanne manages a rather startling bottom line:

At the family level, we see that the greens tree has 15 families, but that most of the greens regularly consumed in the Western world are from only five of the 415+ families of seed plants currently recognized: Amaranthaceae (goosefoot family), Apiaceae (the carrot family), Asteraceae (the sunflower family), Lamiaceae (the mints) and Brassicaceae (the mustard family).

How different is it for foodways not contaminated by Meditearranean ancestry?

April 5, 2013

Nibbles: Pigs, Wheat, Urban agriculture, Nutrition, Sago cakes

A heart-warming tale of raising pigs the right way.
Another heart-warming tale of breeding better wheat in Colorado.
Urban agriculture goes intensive and corporate. Not very heart warming.
Cornell students to solve nutrition problems in Ghana after 10-day visit. Is that heart warming? I have my doubts.
Alfred Russel Wallace’s very own sago cakes preserved at Kew. If that isn’t heart warming, I don’t know what is.