The First Global Conference on Biofortification is off and running in Washington, DC. You can follow proceedings on the blog and on Twitter. Not enough? There’s Facebook too.
Kebab and apple strudel
A speaker at the International Scientific Symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets alerted me to the existence of the EuroFIR (European Food Information Resource) project.
EuroFIR aims to provide the first comprehensive pan-European food information resource, using state-of-the-art database linking, to allow effective management, updating, extending and comparability.
Sounds pretty dry, but the stuff on traditional and ethnic foods is actually rather fun.
Nutrition shindig on the internet
The International Scientific Symposium Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets: United Against Hunger, on until tomorrow at FAO in Rome, is streaming live. Mainly in English. Read a precis of yesterday’s session over at Bioversity.
Nibbles: Livestock system resilience, Nepal genebank, Salicornia, GMO risk
- ILRI slideshow on adapting South Asian livestock systems to climate change. And some background.
- Latest on Nepal’s new genebank.
- Salicornia 101.
- GENERA: a database of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are related to the risks and safety of genetic engineering in agriculture. Courtesy of Biofortified.
Nutrition and the naming of plants
Just in time for the big meeting on Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets, opening today at FAO in Rome and part organized by our pal Jess, comes shocking news:
Of 502 sample plants, only 36 followed best practice for plant identification, and 37 followed best practice for plant nomenclature. Overall, 27% of sample plants were listed with names that are not in current use, or are incorrectly spelt, or both. Only 159 sample plants would have been found from a database search of citations and abstracts. Considering the need for food composition data from wild and locally cultivated food species, and the cost of analysis, researchers must identify, name and publish species correctly. Drawing on the fields of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, comprehensive recommendations are given for best practice.
Mark Nesbitt and his colleagues analyzed the quality of botanical information in published papers about the nutritional value of plant foods. ((Nesbitt, M., McBurney, R., Broin, M., & Beentje, H. (2010). Linking biodiversity, food and nutrition: The importance of plant identification and nomenclature Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 23 (6), 486-498 DOI: 10.1016/j.jfca.2009.03.001)) What they discovered was that in many cases, if you relied on the botanical names as given in the papers, you would be hard put to identify the species concerned accurately enough to use automated searches of databases. And that could be a real problem as researchers seek to build a case for the value of lesser-known wild and cultivated species in building sustainable and nutritious diets.
There are, of course, recommendations to remedy the problem: “best practice”. Whether they’ll be widely adopted is anyone’s guess.