Category: Nutrition

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Canadian peas in India

Speaking of nifty websites, I’ve just come across resourcetrade.earth, from Chatham House, which enables

…users to explore the fast-evolving dynamics of international trade in natural resources, the sustainability implications of such trade, and the related interdependencies that emerge between importing and exporting countries and regions.

That of course includes agricultural trade, with the data coming mainly from FAO and USDA. Which means you can do interesting mash-ups with the global diets data we blogged about a couple of days back.

For example, here on the left are the data on the contribution of pulses to total food weight in the Indian diet, courtesy of that fabulous CIAT website. Note the steady increase in pea consumption over the past 30 years or so (click on the image to make it bigger, it’s the plot in the bottom right hand corner).

A lot of those peas, it turns out, now come from abroad, Canada mostly (as you can see on the map below). It’s a $500 million market, up from $30 million in 2000.

Now, I don’t know what proportion of Indian pea consumption is down to Canadian imports, but it should be possible to figure it out. I’m betting a fair bit of the aloo mutter you have in Amritsar is made in Canada.

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Exploring global diets

You may remember the paper Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security, which we blogged about a couple of times when it first came out in 2014. National Geographic did a pretty good job of visualizing some of the data online, but CIAT have blown them out of the water now with a fabulous interactive website.

You can listen to Colin Khoury, the brains behind the whole thing, on Jeremy’s latest Eat This Podcast. And you can read about the most surprising results on CIAT’s blog. Spoiler alert:

1. Almost everybody eats a lot more food than their grandparents did. And it’s more diverse.
2. African, Asian, and small island countries have the world’s most diverse food supplies. Also the least.
3. Crop immigrants are the key to dietary diversity.
4. The world’s average diet means eating like people do in Cape Verde, Colombia, and Peru.
5. Political unrest can lead to greater diversity in people’s diets, or less.

There’s also a companion piece by Colin on the Global Plant Council website. And this is what Colin says on his Facebook page:

We built a big data website! When we published our findings of increasing homogeneity in global food supplies, we hadn’t yet found a good way to make the underlying national-level data readily visible to interested readers. This is why I’m tremendously excited to announce the publication of our new Changing Global Diet website, which provides interactive visuals for 152 countries over 50 years of change. We that hope you will enjoy your own investigations of dietary change over time. Perhaps you can tell us where you think the changing global diet is headed.

If you do play around with the website, you can share any interesting stuff you find using the hashtag #changingglobaldiet on Twitter. Me, I’m going to have a bandeja paisa and feel like a proud citizen of nowhere.

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Brainfood: Tomato chemicals, Photoperiod, Grain phenotyping, Hawaiian ag, Domestication primer, Symbionts, Turkish wheat, Yam bean diversity, Crop health, Walnut diversity, Agrobiodiversity theorising, Sea pigs, NERICA impacts, Nutrient production

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Brainfood: Insurance value, Forages/invasives, Chenopod crops, Non-descript goats, Holy grapes, Black maize, Wild rice diversity, Cassava seedlings, Knotweed domestication syndrome, Wild potato use, Farmers/researchers, Winged yam diversity, Genes to ecosystems, Wild carrots

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Nibbles: Celebrity chef, Brazilian meeting & dessert, Citizen experiment, Phenotyping course, Fonio, Milpa, Broccoli nutrients, Biodiversity $$, Soybean history

  • Alexis Soyer was apparently the first celebrity chef.
  • EMBRAPA gets to grips with crop wild relatives, with a little help from their friends.
  • Did they serve brigaidero, though?
  • Take part in a crowd-sourced experiment on plant adaptation.
  • And then go and find out how the experts do it.
  • Will fonio‘s day ever come?
  • Celebrating the milpa.
  • Gotta eat your broccoli fresh for the full nutrient monty.
  • Putting (yet another) value on biodiversity. This one by adding or subtracting a species to a grassland plot and seeing what happens to C sequestration.
  • What price soybeans?