Nibbles: Black sheep, Salty rice, Spanish melons, Olive diversity, Food sculpture, Seed art, Navajo peaches, Grain amaranth, PNG yams, Avocado recipes, Abbasid cooking

  1. Just back from a nice holiday, and greeted by Jeremy’s latest newsletter, which includes, among many delights, a post from Old European Culture on black sheep in the Balkans.
  2. Traditional salt-tolerant rice varieties making a comeback in India.
  3. Traditional melon varieties exhibited by genebank in Spain.
  4. Trying to make the most of traditional olive varieties.
  5. Traditional foods are depicted in stone on Seville’s cathedral.
  6. And more recent attempts to celebrate biodiversity in art.
  7. I guess one could call traditional these old peaches that used to be grown by the Navajo. Have blogged about them before, check it out.
  8. No doubt that amaranth is a traditional crop in Central America. I doubt that it will “feed the world,” but it can certainly feed a whole bunch more people. Thanks to people like Roxanne Swentzell.
  9. There’s nothing more traditional than yams in Papua New Guinea. For 50,000 years.
  10. How to remix a traditional food like stuffed avocado.
  11. How many of the traditional recipes in these Abbasid and later Arab cookbooks have been remixed, I wonder?

Nibbles: ISSS, SeedWorld, Farmers Pride, GRIN-U, Indian rematriation, NZ potatoes, European farming

  1. 13th Triennial Meeting of the International Society for Seed Science: Note in particular Dr Chris Ojiewo of ICRISAT on “Seed systems supporting legume crop improvement.”
  2. Latest SeedWorld: Note in particular the article on QPM (quality protein maize) from CIMMYT (go to p 53).
  3. NordGen’s Write-up of the Farmers’ Pride conference “Ensuring Diversity for Food and Agriculture”: Note in particular Dr Maria Bönisch on the first official network for crop wild relatives in Europe.
  4. GRIN-U — Training resources for plant genetic resources conservation: Note in particular the genebank tours.
  5. The John Innes Centre genebank sends some wheat back to India. The Benin Bronzes next?
  6. Taewa, the Maori potato, gets a nice write-up. No word on returning it to somewhere in South America.
  7. Young researchers helping European farmers diversify. How about by using Indian wheat and Maori potatoes?