- The essential guide to the 10th Conference of the Parties to the convention on Biological Diversity. Unmissable.
- Popghum? What genius came up with that name? And now that it’s big in Virginia, can Africa and Latin America be far behind?
- Jeremy Bentham excoriates the Russian Federation on Pavlovsk. And gets it mostly right. Yes, that Jeremy Bentham.
- Apparently water diversity is also a good thing for food security.
- Climate change! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Huh!
- “Plumpy’Nut is not a miracle cure for global hunger or for global malnutrition.” Say it isn’t so!
- Never mind wheat, here’s the great buckwheat panic of 2010, kasha chaos.
Nibbles: School food, India, Orchids, Biocontrol, Breastfeeding, Conch, Africa
- Host a volunteer school food gardener (in the US).
- M.S. Swaminathan’s menu for food security in India. Burp.
- Purmina Menon’s menu for food security in India takes us beyond food. Pardon me.
- Anyone for edible orchids? Anissa Helou on salep.
- Wasp flies in hot pursuit of cassava mealybugs.
- Melinda ♡ breastfeeding. The basis for sound nutrition.
- Humped conch got bigger as a result of human activities — despite being hunted. Complex.
- “Africa to become world’s breadbasket.” Makes a change from being the world’s basketcase.
Nibbles: Sustainability, Market gardens, Tomato history, Millennium Seed Bank
- What’s behind “the environmentalist’s paradox“?
- Growing vegetables in the Sahel. What could possibly go wrong?
- And for the EurekAlert trifecta: the history of the pomodoro in Italy.
- Kew Magazine looks at seeds, big time.
Black rice or blueberries? No contest!
An intriguing press release from the American Chemical Society says that in some respects black rice is better than blueberries:
“Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants,” said Zhimin Xu, Associate Professor at the Department of Food Science at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge, La. … “If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical material to increase consumption of health promoting antioxidants.”
I like black rice, and I like blueberries, but berries have made all the running lately, what with Pavlovsk and everything, so I thought I would descend into genebank database hell in search of black rice. IRRI would be the obvious first stop in such a search, but I came up empty handed. ((External use of IRGCIS refused to load.)) Next stop, the new kid on the block, Genesys. Fun!
IRRI has not yet supplied Genesys with data on hull colour, but the USDA has, and there were more than 300 mapped varieties of black or purple rice. (Click the pic to embiggen.)
Dr Xu says he’d like to see Louisiana farmers growing black rice, and people in the US embrace its use. Well, as a service to them, either go to Genesys to find the variety information, or play with the Google Earth file directly.
Nibbles: Biotech to the rescue, Chinese horses, Soybean carotenoids, CropMobs, Nutrition, Coffee pests, Varroa, Berries, NUS
- Genejockeys say they have sorted that global food supply problem everybody’s been so antsy about lately. No, wait, maybe it’s this.
- China has 23 indigenous horse breeds. At least.
- Latest crop to get the orange treatment is soybean.
- Diverse ways of doing agriculture: Could CropMobs go global?
- Choose foods, not nutrients. Heck, yes.
- Globally warmed beetles threatening your coffee crops? Bring on biodiversity!
- Brit breeds bees for better grooming.
- How to get the most out of your wild blueberries. Maybe we should tell Medvedev?
- Emerging Crops is a new NUS project, and it has a website.