- Did you know the Encyclopedia of Life does crop wild relatives?
- Smallholders with mixed crop and livestock systems are the key to it all. My mother-in-law says: I agree.
- Deforestation is bad for the health.
- 2010 Biodiversity Indicator Partnership launches National Biodiversity Indicators Portal.
- Aussies trial a new, secret orange spud. Yeah I can really see that being a huge success.
- The McItaly kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like your stomach after you’ve eaten one.
- The “rewilding” kerfuffle rumbles on. Much like those herds of wildebeest roaming majestically across the Great Plains.
- Rewilding an ancient pre-Hispanic drink. Ooops, I guess that should be reviving.
Diversity, diversity everywhere
Food-based strategies are essential to tackle malnutrition and help vulnerable populations cope with environmental change. Genetic modification, crop diversification and soil management can improve access to vital micronutrients.
More research is needed to identify nutritious crop varieties and analyse indigenous and wild species for their nutritional content. In particular, maintaining genetic diversity within home gardens and local agroecosystems can help improve nutrition.
Music to our ears, of course, but the tune goes back to 2002. Odd — and slightly disappointing — that SciDev.Net could find nothing more up to date on this subject for their recent nutrition blitz. Anyway, good to have the agrobiodiversity song played, however old.
Another piece in the SciDev.Net feature looks at the human genetics dimension of the problem. We’ve talked about that here before. You don’t just need to understand how micronutrient content, say, varies among crops and crop varieties, but, as if that wasn’t enough, also how people vary in their ability to make use of these compounds.
Nibbles: Rum, Gluten, Nepal, Fruit
- A rum story from Haiti. And another, though a different sort of rum.
- Quinoa and buckwheat best for coeliacs.
- Video of food crisis in Nepal. In other news, there’s a food crisis in Nepal.
- Forest fruits need markets too.
The cultural significance of corn colour
MAT’s post on the cultural consequences of corn colour, which we nibbled earlier today, has been brought to my attention. Immodesty forces me to note that we have explored similar byways here ourselves. Luigi experienced first hand contempt for yellow corn among a small sample of ethnic Africans. MAT’s assertion that “corn meal in the United States is yellow,” is undone by the clear north-south divide in preferences, noted here. 1 The whole business of yellow foods’ nutritional value is touched on in many places, not least here. And, of course, there’s the whole orange-fleshed sweet potato saga. Somehow, these “soft” ideas about culture seldom get the respect they deserve when talk turns to improving staple crops.
Mapping the fast food culture
Amid all the hype about Michelle Obama’s blitz on child obesity, USDA has come out with an interactive Food Environment Atlas, which has been much commented on in the blogosphere. Here’s what the distribution of fast food restaurants in the US looks like:
Coincidentally, Pete at PeteSearch has mined Facebook profile data and come up with this visualization of the connections among users:
Is it me, or there a coincidence between the maps? Here’s one of the things Pete says about the Nomadic West:
Starbucks is almost always the top fan page, maybe to help people stay awake on all those long car trips they must be making?
Geography is destiny?