Tourism

July 13, 2015July 18, 2015

Edible Papal altar

Nice idea.

July 11, 2015

Nibbles: Seed access, Funding genebanks, Vote for me dammit, Quality AND yield, Floating gardens, Chocography, Wine heritage double, Uzbeki bread

African Seed Access Index comes out for Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
New way to fund crop diversity conservation to be unveiled at FFD3 in Addis Ababa next week.
“When you looked for ‘Ethiopia’ in a dictionary, it would also always mention ‘famine’. Now that time is over.”
Vote for me!!!! I so want to win this damn Bioversity photo competition.
Yes, you can have your long-grain rice and yield too!
Everybody loves floating gardens.
Mapping chocolate.
“Why Is there Wine on the UNESCO World Heritage List?” Why the hell not?
Lost grapes in Shangri-La. UNESCO beckons?
Flatbreads rule.

June 30, 2015June 29, 2015

Nibbles: Organic research, Plant models, Tabasco peppers, Andean shepherds, Weird pigs, Wild rice harvesting, Heritage ducks, Nutrient content

An investment in organic research. At last.
Plant models go online. Not those kinds of models.
Where the peppers for Tabasco sauce come from.
Apparently, “[w]hite alpacas have been overbred.” But not that kind of breeding, I think.
Pigs are weird.
Learn how to make poles. Yes, those kinds of poles.
Even ducks can be heritage.
Higher carbon dioxide bad for nutrition.

June 28, 2015

Crop wild relative in the mainstream

Isn’t it amazing that the internet is going crazy over the blooming of a crop wild relative?

June 26, 2015June 26, 2015

Nibbles: AVRDC genebank, Grits, Sikhs & parmesan, Congolese gouda, New rice, Poisonous plants, Bush tucker, Co-evolution, Amazonian medicinals, Native American usufruct

World Vegetable Centre looking for a genebank manager.
What’s a grit?
Who did you say saved parmesan? Who did you say is making gouda?
Philippines gets some new rice varieties. No, but these are climate-resilient.
A poisonous plants gardens fits perfectly with my mood today.
Involve native people in the development of a native foods industry. Well, duh.
Blame butterflies for broccoli.
There are a lot of medicinal plants in the Amazon.
Wild rice (wild but not rice) vs pipeline.

Fresh Nibbles

Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.

Published on August 16, 2026