Nibbles: Artisanal bread, Phenotyping, Maris Piper, Algae, Superfood debunk, Banana 101, Indian millets, Wheat seed photosynthesis, Chili evolution
- Nice tweeting about bread and other Central Asian food over past few days.
- Rothamsted’s “Scanalyzer“.
- The genebank origin of the UK’s premier potato, Maris Piper.
- Seaweed in South America.
- Repeat after me: superfoods are a scam.
- Third and final instalment in The Plate’s history of the banana.
- India going on a millet kick.
- The wheat seed is C4? Totally crazy.
- The evolution of Capsicum in half a page. Which is both too much and not enough.
Nibbles: Saffron startup, Genebank software, Teff redux, Heirloom fruit & veg
- Counting on saffron in Afghanistan.
- Counting on GRIN-Global in genebanks.
- Counting on teff as the new super grain.
- Counting on heirlooms.
Nibbles: New grape variety, Irish food, LegumeCHOICE, Arabica diversity, Breadfruit summit
- Bronx Seedless finally hits the shops.
- The Irish Iron Age Diet.
- Choosing the right legume. But where’s the tool?
- The answer to better coffee is Ethiopia.
- Pacific Global Breadfruit Summit honours Diane Ragone. In other news, there’s a breadfruit summit.
Finger on the pulse in Rio
My latest from the work blog:
There seems to be a bit of an issue over at the Olympics with fast food marketing, but if athletes in Rio, or indeed spectators, want a simple, cheap meal that’s also healthy, and hopefully sourced more sustainably, they could do a lot worse than tucking into the Brazilian staple of rice and beans (but don’t forget the vegetables and the tropical fruit juice). This is such an established part of Brazilian life that EMBRAPA, the country’s agricultural research organization, has a whole research unit called Arroz e Feijão – Rice & Beans.
Unfortunately, the level of attention beans get in Brazil is not typical around the world, even in other places that eat a lot of them, and the situation is even worse for other pulses – the general term often used to refer to the dry seeds of members of the plant family Leguminosae (technically, it’s now called the Fabaceae, but life is too short as it is), crops like chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, cowpeas and a host of others. That, at least, is the contention of a paper just published in Nature Plants 1, which also sets out to show that this relative neglect has been bad for global food and nutritional security.
Table 1 from the paper, which I discuss in the post, is also available as a website listing various resources for each pulse species.