- Nice video celebrating seeds.
- Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
- Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
- Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
- Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
- New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
- Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
- Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
- Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
- Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
- Garlic 101.
Brainfood: Food shift, Food footprint, Periodic Table of Food, Nutritious food, Diverse food, Food seed kits, Food meta-metrics
- Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Go flexitarian.
- Biodiversity footprints of 151 popular dishes from around the world. Go flexitarian?
- Periodic Table of Food Initiative for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible biodiversity. Unclear if flexitarians have the best molecules.
- Environmentally protective diets may come with trade-offs for micronutrient adequacy. More sustainable may mean less nutritious. Flexitarians unavailable for comment.
- Market engagement, crop diversity, dietary diversity, and food security: evidence from small-scale agricultural households in Uganda. Market access and crop diversification are both good for dietary diversity and food security. The ultimate flexitarianism.
- Sustainability of one-time seed distributions: a long-term follow-up of vegetable seed kits in Tanzania. Now watch flexitarians demand an even playing field.
- Developing holistic assessments of food and agricultural systems: A meta‑framework for metrics users. One framework to rule all of the above.
Nibbles: Arboreta, IPES-Food, CGN, China genebank, Banana diversity, British hops, Coffee & deforestation
- Arboreta have a community. And a newsletter. And a paper.
- IPES-Food has a new website.
- The Dutch genebank describes its users.
- China has a back-up genebank.
- Dan Saladino has a new article out, and it’s bananas.
- The Brits freak out about their beer. As usual. And with limited justification.
- The EU gets tough on coffee.
Nibbles: VACS, FAO forgotten foods, African roots, Hopi corn, Adivasis rice, Sustainable farming, Llama history, Vicuña sweaters, Portuguese cattle, Mexico genebank, NZ genebank, Bat pollination, Eat This Newsletter, WEF
- More on the US push for opportunity crops.
- Oh look there’s a whole compendium on African opportunity crops from FAO.
- Many of them are roots and tubers.
- For the Hopi, maize is an opportunity crop.
- For the Adivasis, it’s rice.
- And more along the same lines from Odisha.
- Llamas were an opportunity for lots of people down the ages.
- …and still are, for some.
- Portugal eschews llamas for an ancient cattle breed.
- I bet Mexico’s genebank offers some amazing opportunities.
- And New Zealand’s too.
- Let’s not forget bats. Yes, bats.
- Jeremy’s latest newsletter tackles turmeric, pepper and sweet potatoes, among other things.
- And the best way to frame all of the above is that the World Economic Forum wants governments to ban people from growing their own food because that causes climate change.
Brainfood: Wild melon dispersal, Fertile Crescent domestications, Angiosperm threats, Wild rice alliance, Wild potato leaves, Brassica oleracea pangenome, Wild Vigna nutrients
- Frugivory by carnivores: Black-backed jackals are key dispersers of seeds of the scented !nara melon in the Namib Desert. Jackals pee on wild melon relatives and disperse their seeds, not necessarily in that order.
- Out of the Shadows: Reestablishing the Eastern Fertile Crescent as a Center of Agricultural Origins: Part 1. Go East, young archaeobotanists!
- Extinction risk predictions for the world’s flowering plants to support their conservation. Fancy maths says 45% of angiosperms are potentially threatened. Same for crop wild relatives in the Eastern Fertile Crescent? Black-backed jackals unavailable for comment.
- Global Wild Rice Germplasm Resources Conservation Alliance: WORLD WILD-RICE WIRING. Scientists get together to conserve global wild rice germplasm resources, understand the ecology of wild rice environments, identify and address threats, define effective ways to use wild species in rice improvement, and provide data for decision-making. Not a minute too soon, given the above.
- Morphometric analysis of wild potato leaves. Who needs genotyping anyway.
- Large-scale gene expression alterations introduced by structural variation drive morphotype diversification in Brassica oleracea. Brassica scientists need genotyping, apparently, that’s who.
- Exploring the nutritional potentials of wild Vigna legume species for neo-domestication prospects. Not much potential if they go extinct though. Quick, photograph their leaves!