- Bees under lots of “sub-lethal stresses.” I know how they feel.
- Hadzabe, who have been doing it for thousands of years, to be trained in honey production.
- Chinese farmers to be taught law of diminishing returns.
- “Workers at the Egyptian Desert Gene Bank in Cairo harvest and grow threatened desert species in its laboratory before replanting them to their native soils, hoping to revitalize threatened desert species.”
- Lao National Nutrition Policy puts nutrition at the centre of development.
- Economic botany and architectural fripperies.
- Got milk?
Nibbles: Hell, Honours, Pollution, Darwin, Genomes, Small companies, Tigernuts, Urine soft drink, Medicinal plants
- A way out of hell: workshop on Database Challenges in Biodiversity Informatics
- Potato man honoured.
- Farm diversity reduces nitrogen runoff.
- Darwin on the Farm, from our friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
- Yeast and wheat genome sequencing going gangbusters.
- Coffee!
- Fermented tigernuts more nutritious? No, they’re not from an endangered species. Via.
- Cow water!
- Lots of medicinal plants conservation projects going on in India.
Nibbles: Kenya vegetables, Diet diversity, Armyworms
- Slumdog Veggiegrower. Via.
- Australians contend diets need to be diverse. Another shrimp placed on barbie.
- Great summary of the Liberian “armyworm” situation from CABI. And they say taxonomy is boring.
Indigenous pasta sauces
I don’t think we nibbled it here, but I did post on Facebook a news story about how Italy is thinking of banning ethnic restaurants. This elicited more comments than I usually get. One friend said he’d send me a kebab in the mail. I politely declined, citing health concerns. Another suggested such a ban would be a good idea, as most ethnic restaurants in Italy are terrible, even when — or is it because — they absorb local ingredients and ways of doing things. ((As dissected so admirably for Chinese restaurants by the writer Jennifer 8. Lee (æŽç«¶) in a recent, wonderful, TED talk.)) My wife wondered whether the move might set off tit-for-tat bans on Italian restaurants — including pizzerias ((Talking about absorbing local ingredients, is there a more spongiferous food than the pizza?)) — around the world. And another commenter wondered what Italian cuisine would be like if pasta sauces featured only indigenous agrobiodiversity. That means no tomatoes. One sauce that I could think of that is composed solely of ingredients that could be said to be native to Italy — whatever that might mean — is pesto. Anyway, one thing is for certain, such a cuisine would probably drive me to kebabs.
Nibbles: Cheese, Seed squared, Nutrition journal, Wild boar, Bees, Local breeds, Pest, Wild goat
- Mozzarella madness.
- Homegrown Evolutionist spreads his seed.
- There’s an International Seed Swap Day of Action? And we missed it?
- The new AJFAND is out.
- Brits belatedly bring back boars, but bumble bee buggered.
- Improving local livestock breeds in Zambia: VOA tells us how and why.
- Not armyworm after all.
- Cloning the ibex: close, but no cigar.