Nutrition

February 12, 2020

Not that kind of flesh

Oh, Twitter, you’re such a tease.

Knowing that I am currently working on orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes, Luigi kindly sent me a link to a tweet. This one:

Tweet about orange-fleshed sweetpotato

That red ellipse? I’m drawing your attention to Twitter’s warning that seeing the images might bring on an attack of the vapours in highly-attuned personalities.

Is it just the word “fleshed”? I had to know.

Tweet about orange-fleshed sweetpotato with images

I dunno. “Filth,” they say, “is in the mind of the beholder” and I have to say, I’m not seeing it.

Orange-flesh, though. Where else have I seen that? Maybe that’s what Twitter is trying to warn me against.

No matter. Congratulations to @CIPotato and @RTB_CGIAR.

February 10, 2020February 12, 2020

Brainfood: Agrobiodiversity Index, Breeding strategy, Soybean breeding, Red Listing, Stunting, Planetary boundaries, ITPGRFA, Wheat domestication, Anthropogenic fire double, Japonica diversity, Rice landraces, Tepary breeding, Lupin genome, Hazelnut diversity, Lapita food

Text Mining National Commitments towards Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Use. Fancy maths cannot find evidence of country commitment to seed diversity.
Optimized breeding strategies to harness Genetic Resources with different performance levels. How a public breeding programme can help out private breeding programme.
Introgression of novel genetic diversity to improve soybean yield. Public breeding programme helps out private breeding programme. I suppose both got something out of it.
Rapid Least Concern: towards automating Red List assessments. Nifty web application takes all the fun out of red listing. We talked about this, people.
Mapping child growth failure across low- and middle-income countries. Even countries and regions that are generally doing well have stubborn hotspots.
Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Feeding, but not necessarily nourishing.
Genebank Operation in the Arena of Access and Benefit-Sharing Policies. Use the SMTA for everything.
Multiregional origins of the domesticated tetraploid wheats. Semi-domesticated in the southern Levant, then moved to the northern Fertile Crescent to be finished off. Compare and contrast with barley.
Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Native Americans didn’t manage woodland by controlled burning after all…
Global change impacts on forest and fire dynamics using paleoecology and tree census data for eastern North America. …Sure they did. Interesting discussion on this on Twitter.
Multiple streams of genetic diversity in Japonica rice. It’s basically a pan-genome.
Genomic analyses reveal selection footprints in rice landraces grown under on‐farm conservation conditions during a short‐term period of domestication. Some interesting genetic changes after 27 years of on-farm management, but no erosion.
Breeding tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius) for drought adaptation: A review. You need other species.
High-quality genome sequence of white lupin provides insight into soil exploration and seed quality. Winter and spring varieties are genetically distinct from each other, and from landraces.
Genetic diversity and domestication of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) in Turkey. Hardly domesticated at all.
Exploitation and utilization of tropical rainforests indicated in dental calculus of ancient Oceanic Lapita culture colonists. Including bananas.
Benchmarking genetic diversity in a third-generation breeding population of Melaleuca alternifolia. There’s still quite a bit of diversity around.

February 4, 2020February 11, 2020

Nibbles: Greek breads, Community seed saving double, Seed diversity, Domestication lecture, Food System Dashboard

How many different kinds of bread do you think there are ancient Greek words for?
“As phenomenally important as the USDA [seed banks] and the Svalbard [Global Seed Vault] are, they are repositories for biodiversity, not places we can call up to get seeds to plant five acres of corn.”
As above, but in India.
As above, but from a seed company.
Barbara Schaal on domestication. With video goodness.
A Food System Dashboard to rule them all: describe, diagnose, decide. Not there yet, but almost. It says here.

February 3, 2020February 4, 2020

Brainfood: Food sustainability, Phenotyping barriers, Andean agrobiodiversity, Mango diversity, Wild Brassica diversity, Domestication database, Future crops, Great Dying, Food supplies, Nutritious ag, Wild olives, Pink cassava, Landrace diversity

Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.

January 31, 2020

Find you way around another nutrition database

The Priority Food Tree and Crop Food Composition Database contains nutritional information of selected tree foods and crops, with geographical focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The current version (version 1) comprises 132 foods (out of 99 species) and 30 components. All component values are presented per 100 g edible portion on fresh weight basis (EP). In addition to actual food composition values, the database includes scores for all foods – “high source”, “source”, “present, but low source”, or “not a source” – of the selected micronutrients iron, vitamin A, folate and vitamin C. Searches can be done by food name, scientific name and by food group.

Pretty clear, no? Well, if not, there’s now a user guide.

Search the database here. And rank all the foods by their contents of iron, folate, vitamin A or vitamin C here.

But before you ask, no, there’s no variety-level information. Mango is mango, maize is maize. For that you have to go to other databases.