- If you’re here from Tangled Bank 102, welcome. Go vote, please. If you’re here anyway, go read Tangled Bank.
- Bleeding canker threatens British horse chestnuts.
- Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, fertilizers threaten the Drumstick Truffleclub.
- Michael Pollan welcomes higher food prices. And more on his new book on “nutritionism”: eat food (not individual nutrients); mostly plant-derived; in reasonable amounts.
- Breadfruit balls anyone? Try charging more for that delicacy, Michael!
- Or, indeed, this. Or any of these for that matter.
- The weird food stuff just keeps on coming. Now there’s buzz about camel cheese. And a Peanut Lolita to help it down?
- Horizon scanning spots 25 novel threats to biodiversity in UK. Agrobiodiversity apparently totally safe. Phew.
More spud news than anyone needs
Today’s crop of heartwarming potato stories come to you from Peru, the Philippines and India. First, Living in Peru has a fluff piece about how Peruvians are not eating enough potatoes, and that something must be done about it. It also says that “Peru has 2,800 of the 3,900 varieties of potatoes that exist in the world today.” I have no idea where they got those figures, whether they are close to the truth, or whether we even know the truth. But I’ll try to dig a little deeper and report back.
Then comes the Philippines Information Authority with news that a new potato variety is to be released in that country, bearing the name of the president. How sweet. The article says that the “original planting material was sourced” from the International Potato Centre (CIP), and previously had the codename “13.1.1”. The variety is blight-resistant and high in solids, and is supposed to be good for organic conditions. Now, it would have been interesting to know a little more about 13.1.1, but some rapid checking revealed nothing. Again, I will dig further.
And finally, news from India that a local farmer’s son, who went to the US for training in plant physiology and pathology, has now come back and set up a tissue culture lab on the family farm. Now that’s what I call technology transfer. But you wonder what kind of a farmer the father is. Not your typical Indian farmer, I’ll wager.
Nibbles: golden rice, nutrition, organics, feral livestock
- Pro golden rice PDF, via Eldis.
- How to devise food-based dietary guidelines.
- Is organic any better for you?
- They shoot wild burros, don’t they?
Nibbles: Genebanks, organic, fair, chocolate
- American farming family gets tour of organic research farm and genebank in India, is impressed.
- The International Agricultural Show is on, just outside Paris. Pres. Sarkozy available for comment.
- A rapid run-through the history of chocolate, courtesy of Smithsonian.
Why organic tomatoes are good for you
I’ve been meaning to blog this for almost a month. R. Ford Denison (a name to reckon with) blogged about some of his own research that summarizes 10 years of research into the flavonoid content of tomatoes grown conventionally and organically. Bottom line is that the organic tomatoes contained almost double the flavonoids of conventionals. I’m not going to go into whether that’s a good thing or not. Instead, I’ll stress the point that Denison himself makes, about Darwinian agriculture.
Why do the organic tomatoes contain more flavonoids? Maybe because flavonoids play a part in combatting herbivory. And they are often produced in response to pest attacks, rather than all the time. So one reason that organic tomatoes contain more of these compounds — which are believed to be good for human health — is precisely because on an organic farm there are a few pests that attack the plants. No pests, no need for defense, no benefits for human health.
This is just one aspect of what Denison calls Darwinian agriculture, a fascinating approach to the whole question of just what is being selected. There is, as someone else wrote, grandeur in this view of life …