- IFAD paean to neglected crops.
- BBC tribute to enset.
- Threnody to unsustainable kava.
- Hymn to a pot of ancient maize.
- Toast to a new museum of food in the UK.
- Jeremy’s duet with June Hersh on yoghurt.
- Scientific American epic on the European Neolithic.
- Rhapsody on saving wheat from climate change.
- Collection of important tree species from ICRAF.
- Panegyric to a clove tree.
- A eulogy for monoculture?
Nibbles: Ginger, Cover crops, Pulses, Campbell Soup, NASA, OWD, Göbekli Tepe, Sydney herbarium, Bourdeix museum, Mezcal folk vocabulary, Mango love, Probiotic ag, Andean ag
- China and Pakistan to collaborate on ginger. Including exchange of germplasm, apparently.
- US doubles down on cover crops…
- …and pulses. No word on ginger.
- How Campbell’s doubled down on tomato breeding. But never released the seeds.
- Mapping farmland changes in Egypt. From space. Still waiting for that genetic erosion early warning system though…
- Our World in Data does global food. Genetic erosion next? Yeah, just dreaming here.
- Cool free book on Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe.
- Digitizing a million herbarium specimens in Australia. How many crop wild relatives, I wonder?
- A coconut museum, but on Facebook. And a sort of museum of the plants themselves in India
- How to talk about mezcal using all the right words.
- A paean to the mango.
- Agriculture should be more “probiotic.” Mezcal, coconuts and mangoes would probably help.
- It kind of already is in the Andes.
Another career in crop diversity
Dr Mike Jackson is retired now, after a long and very impactful career in plant genetic resources conservation. But he writes about that career, and a lot more besides, on his blog. And now there’s also a nice conversation with him on the Plant Breeding Stories podcast, focusing on his work on potato and rice.
Feed on a better food system
I missed WWF’s report Bending the Curve: The Restorative Power of Planet-Based Diets when it came out in October last year, but the interview with one of the authors, Brent Loken, on the Feed podcast was an excellent way to catch up.
Well worth listening to the whole thing, and indeed reading the report. I really like it when complexity and nuance are embraced, and silver bullets eschewed. Here’s a few take-aways to whet your, ahem, appetite:
- Shift diets: it’s not that hard. Start by de-centering beef.
- Reform national dietary guidelines.
- Regulate marketing food to kids.
- And, speaking of marketing, learn how to make healthy food sexier.
- Cut waste.
Nibbles: Real farming, Ancient farming, Organic farming, Open farming, Innovative farming, African maize farming
- Colin Tudge and Jeremy rethink agriculture.
- Wait, so it’s not about producing an energy surplus?
- Maybe the rethink can include Seed Ambassadors?
- Seeds4All is quite the thought.
- Who needs a rethink when there’s a whole book on how plant breeding can contribute to sustainable agriculture?
- Well, it can certainly pay off, at least money-wise. But does that need a rethink?