Nutrition

January 11, 2018January 11, 2018

Photographing dietary quality

People in other cultures are often portrayed as scary or exotic. This has to change. We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels.

That’s Anna Rosling Rönnlund of Gapminder on Dollar Street.

Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling.

.@AnnaGapminder uses art and science to create an engaging portrait of how people live and help us make dollars and sense of a complicated world. pic.twitter.com/EeysLLpGjm

— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) January 11, 2018

There are photos of everything from toilets to pets. The food items included are “grains”

“vegetables”

and “spices.”

We know from recent work from our friends at Bioversity and their partners that number of species consumed is a good proxy for the nutritional quality of diets across countries and seasons. I wonder if such photographic documentation can be used to estimate dietary richness, and thus quality?

January 11, 2018January 11, 2018

Nibbles: Development egos, CGN, Fijian adaptation, Seedxit, Fancy coconuts, Seed dealers, Heritage rice, Rumsfeld & biodiversity, Grass-fed beef beef

Development thinkers pithily skewered.
CGN’s new brochure.
Fijian farmers dealing with climate change with diverse, triple-layered systems, and small, phased, staggered planting. Or, common sense.
Brexit will mean less choice of seeds for British farmers. Maybe.
£3 for a coconut? Nuts.
Dealing with seed dealers to speed up new rice variety delivery.
How about the heirlooms, though? Maybe they can take care of themselves.
The value of biodiversity is a known unknown.
Forage quality is known, and decreasing.

December 16, 2017December 15, 2017

Nibbles: Pacific foodways, Taro in Hawaii, Supply chains double, Millet year, Olam Prize, Cicer breeding, Polly the Pig, Virtual Horticultural Library

Food sovereignty — or lack of it — in the Pacific.
That should probably start with taro.
Could the banks help?
Or blockchain?
How about an international year?
And better seed laws?
Let’s change the subject…
ICARDA durum breeders run towards the problem, use wild relatives, win prize.
Wild relatives are good for chickpea improvement too.
Don’t worry, if we lose an animal breed, we can always get it back. Kinda sorta.
Source of information on heirloom varieties. Yes, there’s probably something similar for pigs.

December 11, 2017December 11, 2017

Nibbles: Problematic edition

That claim of Neolithic Georgian wine is, ahem, problematic.
Yam cultivation can be, ahem, problematic.
Neglecting women in breeding programmes can be, ahem, problematic.
Khat cultivation is, ahem, problematic.
Post-conquest depictions of the cacao plant were, ahem, problematic.
Imperial plant collecting was, ahem, problematic. But the BBC doesn’t care.
I find the claim that the potato saved Europe from war, ahem, problematic.
No problem at all about cooking taro.

December 11, 2017December 11, 2017

Brainfood: Wheat exudates, Conservation threats, Resilience, Dietary recommendations, Urban green spaces, Dog spread, Wild foods, Ethnic fish, Brazilian cattle, Nocturnal fixation, Agroforestry impacts

Evolution of the crop rhizosphere: impact of domestication on root exudates in tetraploid wheat (Triticum turgidum L.). Domestication and breeding have led to (probably adaptive) changes in root exudates.
Threats from urban expansion, agricultural transformation and forest loss on global conservation priority areas. Vertebrate Biodiversity Hotspots are most threatened by all three factors. Plants too?
Patterns and drivers of biodiversity–stability relationships under climate extremes. Species richness may not be enough to buffer ecosystems from extreme precipitations events. But a different metric would give a different result?
Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations. Adopting nationally recommended diets would help the environment.
On the Use of Hedonic Price Indices to Understand Ecosystem Service Provision from Urban Green Space in Five Latin American Megacities. There’s an overall strong positive correlation between urban greenery and house prices, but it’s context-specific.
Disease: A Hitherto Unexplored Constraint on the Spread of Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) in Pre-Columbian South America. Yes, why are there no dogs in the Amazon?
Children and Wild Foods in the Context of Deforestation in Rural Malawi. Fewer wild foods in more deforested sites, and fewer sold by children from better-off households. What of the nutrition outcomes, though?
Biodiversity defrosted: unveiling non-compliant fish trade in ethnic food stores. About 40% of samples in Liverpool and Manchester mislabelled.
Population viability analysis of the Crioula Lageano cattle. It’s going to be fine.
The Kalanchoë genome provides insights into convergent evolution and building blocks of crassulacean acid metabolism. Next stop, CAM rice.
Contribution of trees to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. It depends. But what would those kids in Malawi say?