- First of all, I need a cup of coffee.
- Stop Press: Britain’s orchards neglected. Prince Charles to be called in to help?
- Eating the wild, in San Francisco and San Diego.
- IFAD on what African farmers need: infrastructure, insurance, investment. Apparently.
- Harvesting sesame in Greece: The video.
- Filipinos make wine from Hawaiian traditional food. Strange the Hawaiians hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps they did.
- And while we’re on the subject of booze…
- Destroying the Pantanal and Cerrado in a sustainable manner.
- Hey, it’s Hemp History Week! And you know how to celebrate that, don’t you.
Greek cereal iconography through the ages
Another foray into the wonderful world of agrobiodiversity iconography today, if you don’t mind. These musings started in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens when I saw this detail from a 500 BC marble grave stela from Velanideza in Attica.
Originally, this would have been painted, and the museum helpfully provides a reconstruction (sorry about the reflection).
This is part of what the caption says (eccentric spelling etc. in the original):
Depicted is the dead Lyseas in the guise of Dyonisos’ worshiper. He bears a vine wreath on his head, chiton and himation. He holds a kantharos (wine cup) in his right hand and a laurel branch (?) in his left… According to the inscription carved on the base, the stele was erected by Semon on the grave of his son, Lyseas.
Now, about that question mark. I guess it could be laurel, but aren’t depictions of that plant usually in the form of wreaths? Might they not be cereal spikes that Lyseas is holding? Ok, cereal spikes which have lost their awns, but the paint has faded a lot. Cereal spikes like these, admittedly much more naturalistic ones, on a Theran pot. ((The pot on the left apparently shows vetch.))
Cereal spikes a bit like these advertizing a modern bakery a short walk from the museum.
Or like these modernistic renditions, also lacking awns, by the entrance of a branch of a local bank with a focus on agriculture.
Well, maybe not. It probably was laurel after all. But that question mark…
Nibbles: Plectranthus, Roads, Fast food, Dog food, Hybrid rice, Mapping climate change, Turf, Cassava, iPhone app, Zizania, Rice
- Livingstone potato (Plectranthus) on the menu in Burundi. Yeah but what does it taste like?
- The world’s roads mapped. About time too.
- The world’s convenience food made better. Maybe.
- Dog cooking pot from ancient China. Woof. Via.
- Hybrid rice backfires. Via.
- Mapping the impacts of climate change. Only country level though.
- Native lawns better. But are they greener?
- JSTOR does a cassava roundup despite hating tapioca.
- Biodiversity monitoring? There’s an app for that.
- Wild rice (not a wild relative of rice, mind, but sacred to the local Native Americans) vs the copper-nickel mining industry.
- Slideshow on rice (the real thing) in Vietnam.
Nuts
I’ve been kinda quiet lately due to illness last week and then going on vacation to Athens for a few days earlier this week. Here’s a taster of the holiday snaps. More later, on an agrobiodiversity theme, of course.
Oh, and happy Earth Day!
China’s Germplasm Bank of Wild Species gets a visit
GoKunming, which seems to be a semi-official English-language site about the capital and largest city of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, has a feature today on the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (中国西南野生生物种质资源库) at the Kunming Institute of Botany. It’s a nice write-up, although we would take issue with parts of the following statement:
Why is cooperation between the world’s seedbanks important? Staff at Kunming’s seedbank told us that during the recent social upheaval in Egypt, the country’s seedbank suffered looting (for the jars, not the seeds), which led to the destruction of many valuable specimens. Luckily, the seedbank had sent backup specimens to its partners abroad.
Though there has been extensive damage to equipment, I don’t think any evidence has been presented of the looting of jars from the Egyptian Deserts Genebank, if that is indeed the one referred to, or of the destruction of specimens, valuable or otherwise. And of course, although some accessions stored in that genebank were in fact duplicated, in particular at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, not all were. But it is nice to see the point about cooperation among genebanks made so clearly.
Just for completeness, the national crop, as opposed to wild species, genebank of China is in Beijing (left). China has not yet ratified the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.