Our follower and occasional contributor André kindly alerted us to what he calls a European Union mega-conference on biodiversity, going on all this week in Brussels. There may be some agricultural biodiversity in there somewhere. The whole thing is being streamed. And next week Michael Pollan is at the RSA, and you can listen to a feed of that too. I know which one I’ll be following.
Nibbles: Agrobiodiversity, Mexican food, Benin chickens, Tylosema chemistry, Wild coffee
- Do my eyes deceive me? Exhortation not to forget farms during biodiversity festivities.
- Edible Geography does Mexico City. Oh to be in DF on the 9th.
- What do Benin farmers want out of their chickens? Clue: it wont be easy.
- Is marama bean the next big thing? Probably not, but check it out anyway.
- New Biosphere Reserve protects wild coffee.
- Uber-blogger Tom Barnett tackles sweet potato breeding. Sweet potato wins.
Nibbles: Roses, Stripe Rust, Cuba, Carnival, India, GCARD, Urban ag, Genetic diversity and herbivory, Biocultural diversity
- The wages of Kenyan rose growers increase 22% — to $59 a month. Sinful.
- Wheat stripe rust uses sex to break down barriers.
- Q&A with Cuban whiz Humberto Ríos.
- Latest Carnival of Evolution is up; we’re the only ag, alas.
- Proposed agricultural biodiversity heritage sites in India. (Is this new?)
- Investing in Underutilised Crops to Achieve Food Security. A report from the CGARD conference in March.
- The Hanging Gardens of Kenya.
- Living in genetic mixtures helps plants against herbivores. No, really.
- “Restoring human cultures to the web of life.”
Why good food is good for you
I don’t know about you, but I do sometimes wonder why (or do I mean how?) good foods are good for you. I know that they contain more things like anti-oxidants and vitamin precursors and vitamins and minerals, but I don’t have a very clear idea of how those things work their magic, if indeed they do. And then I was watching a Tedtalk by a chap called William Li, a doctor with a special interest in cancer.
He was talking about blood vessels and the extremely delicate balance that regulates the life and death of blood vessels in the body, and I realized that I could remember almost nothing about angiogenesis and the hormones that control it. Once I did. Then Li slipped into cancers, and showed that tumours depend for their survival on their blood supply. Cut it off, and tumours shrink. In fact, he said, we probably have loads of mini tumours popping up all the time, less than the size of the tip of a ball-point pen, but in the absence of a blood supply, they just wither and die. Fascinating, so there are fancy drugs that block the growth of blood vessels — antiangiogenesis drugs — and that offer a new approach to treating cancer. And those same drugs can treat obesity in mice genetically predisposed to eat until they become, in Li’s words, “furry tennis balls”.
And then he moved smoothly into diet. And lo, there were lots of foods, many of them them fruits and vegetables, that seemed to have potent anti-angiogenic activity in lab tests. Some of them, combined, are more potent than either on its own or both together. He listed a bunch of foods, and then something that made me perk up even more.
“For each food type, we believe there is different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you’re eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that’s most potent for preventing cancer?”
Wow. A man who starts from the assumption that not all varieties are equal. While I am not too happy with the continuing medicalization of nutrition and diet, treating good food as no more than a series of active ingredients, I am glad that at least someone in the medical establishment is taking agricultural biodiversity seriously. Li’s bottom line:
Everyone could benefit from a diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.
Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest
- Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
- An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
- Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
- African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
- Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
- You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
- So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
- Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.