- Let them eat yoghurt. Danone targets the poor. h/t Tom
- Eating Mexico City, one street at a time. Bookmarked.
- It’s The Archers, Jim, but not as we know it. Soaps spread (agro)innovation.
- The Crawford Fund Conference does biodiversity (in Australia)
- New Agriculturist reports on a discussion of development in Africa. Is anybody listening?
- Food markets freed! A little. In one US state.
- Local leafy greens all the rage in Kenya. Yeah, yeah. No but seriously, one of the great changes in the past 10 years, and a major agrobiodiversity success story.
A sweet potato Christmas tree in Beijing
Maybe someone out there can help me out with this. I was walking along a main thoroughfare towards the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing and came across on the grass verge a construction consisting of tubs of what I believe may be sweet potato plants craftily arranged on a metal framework in the general shape of a Christmas tree. Here it is below (click on it to enlarge).
Can somebody explain the point? Is this vegetative cone merely decorative, or do the plants have symbolic value? Are they in fact sweet potatoes?
Pomological watercolours at the NAL
The National Agricultural Library in the US has a Special Collection consisting of watercolours of different fruit varieties. Stunning.
Nibbles: Allium, Desertification and livestock, Striga, Emmer, Hawaii, Almond, Seeds at FAO, Cassava in central Africa, Seed sculpture, Biofortification, Millets, Lunatrick pea
- Botany Photo of the Day is an onion wild relative! Pretty.
- More on that livestock-can-help-reduce-desertification thing, this time from Scientific American.
- Breeding Striga-resistant sorghum. Whatever it takes to protect local beer, boffin-dudes!
- Emmer wheat reviewed to bits.
- No passport data for your barley? Fear not.
- Rachel Laudan ably defends Hawaiian food.
- Origins of almond traced to Iran. Not for the first time.
- Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: A Commons Perspective. Presentation from our friends at FAO.
- Presentation on the untapped potential of cassava in the Great Lakes region of Africa. One of many from CIAT lately. Check out their stuff on beans too.
- The Seed Cathedral of Shanghai. Thanks to those public awareness wizards at Kew.
- Big shindig on biofortification. Be there, or be malnourished.
- Times of India bangs the drum for nutritious millets.
- Yet more loveliness from serious amateur pea breeder Rebsie Fairholm.
Two fried oyster po-boys to go!
Our attempt to gauge the effect of the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on agrobiodiversity was pretty pathetic, really. Not so, predictably, Gary Nabhan’s. In an article in Grist, he announces that “the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance will release a comprehensive checklist of over 240 place-based foods of the Gulf Coast that are now at risk — 138 of them directly affected by the oil spill.” ((Coincidentally (or not?), there’s a new online map out on North America’s marine ecosystems.)) As a companion piece in Grist points out, accompanied by luscious photos, the best way to help these threatened foodways is to keep eating Gulf seafood:
…perceptions to the contrary, not all Gulf fisheries are closed. Plenty of shrimp, shellfish, and other seafood that have been greenlighted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program are still making it to market. The problem is that consumers are afraid to buy them. Well, fear not. Safeguards are in place — including federal oil-sniffers!