Nibbles: Quince, Coffee, Chocolate, Nutrition, Africa
- Speaking of Cinderella fruits, quince gets a good going over.
- Coffee prices and more — from the market marker’s mouth. h/t cas-ip.
- Some chocolate might help distressed coffee growers.
- IFPRI milking its Millions Fed. We highlight Improving diet quality and micronutrient nutrition and The mungbean transformation diversifying crops, defeating malnutrition.
- China gets cracking in Mozambique. Maybe they’ll be waking up exhausted seeds.
Diversity, nutrition and health
If you eat a variety of foods within and among groups – meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and grains – you don’t have to worry about nutritional details.
That’s the word from a self-styled “nutrition academic” and you might think, as I do, that that’s all you need to know. But if you’re interested in some of the details, Marion Nestle’s post Are vegetarian diets OK? is well worth spending time on. Far too sensible.
Nibbles: Edible terricolous insects, Interdependence, Spanish livestock, Milk for pastoralists, African Crop Science Society, Ethiopia CBD report, New Agriculturalist, Geo-referencing
- Cicadas are good, and good for you.
- Genes from “foreign” wheat played significant role in improving Chinese wheat.
- Spain publishes plan for the conservation, improvement and promotion of livestock breeds.
- Milk Matters. To Somali children in Ethiopia, in this case.
- Winners of ACSS awards for 2009 announced.
- “Conserving Ethiopia’s biodiversity far from adequate.” Or so says Ethiopia’s report to CBD. Some agrobiodiversity included.
- New Agriculturalist is out. Rejoice.
- Andy Jarvis on the value of geo-referencing.
Not just hungry, sick
While not strictly about agricultural biodiversity (although much more could be made of agrobiodiversity in this realm) Scidev.net draws attention to an editorial in The Lancet. ((Which requires free registration to read in its entirety.)) In the run up to (yet another) High Level Summit — this time on Food Security — next week, Scidev.net reports The Lancet’s view that:
Poor terminology adds to the problem — calling undernourished people ‘hungry’ is belittling. Even the term ‘undernourished’ can be confusing to policymakers, says the editorial.
Really? How easily confused those policymakers must be.
It adds that medicalising food — where undernutrition is the disease and food the treatment — could make ensuring food supplies a bigger priority for the global health sector.
Again, because the world has such a good record of delivering global health care to those who need it most?
Climate change gets a namecheck too, natch. And if I sound just a teeny bit cynical, maybe that’s a sickness too.