Nibbles: Ethiopian gardens, Potato history, Early tobacco, Byzantine wine, American grapevines, Farmers & conservation

  1. Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
  2. Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
  3. (Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
  4. Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
  5. Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
  6. Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.

Brainfood: Predicting society, Andean Neolithic, Ancient watermelon, Iberian silos, Scythian lifeways, Rabbit domestication, British cockerels, Azeri buffaloes, E African caprines, Persian fruit miniatures

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?