Caught this on a recent trip to Venice. It’s embedded in an outside wall of St Mark’s Basilica. Agrobiodiversity was more crucial to iconography back in the Middle Ages, I guess.
Nibbles: Food photos, Phenology, Breadfruit, Medicinal plant gardens, Animal quiz, Soil agrobiodiversity, Cloning
- World Bank food snaps.
- Looks like there is phenotypic selection on flowering time.
- Workshop on revitalizing breadfruit in Hawaii. If you go, let us know.
- Sacred Seeds gardens around the world.
- How much do you know about animal production and health? FAO wants to know.
- CIAT now looking at soil biodiversity.
- Boffins can now clone plants as seeds. Clever, but is it good?
Food on a pedestal
Inspired by Jeremy’s posts on corn statues and tomato experiments in Davis, California, I offer you the “Portrait of a plump tomato”, by Gerald Heffernon. It stands in front of a Davis shop that sells heirloom tomatoes and other agricultural biodiversity (20 rice varieties!).
I wonder if the tomato is celebrated here for the many (industrial use) tomato fields in the Davis area. Gerald Heffernon is somewhat of a fruit specialist: he also made apricot, pear, plum and cherry statues, but food statues are rare in the USA and elsewhere.
As far as I know, and do correct me if I am wrong, the Philippines is the only country where food gets due respect, and the statues that come with that.
I believe the highest density to be in a small area, roughly forming a triangle with 10 km edges, in Laguna province. San Pablo — with its many lakes — has a big tilapia. Victoria, known for its sweet pinya, a fierce pineapple.
Laguna de Bay, the place to eat ducklings-in-the-egg known as balut (not for the faint of heart) has duck statues (here is another good one).
There are plenty of (golden and other) cow statues, in Asian temples, and elsewhere. Do you know of other statues that honor the the organisms that feed us?
Nibbles: Dog, Beer, Human Planet, Entomophagy, Food Atlas, Pepper, Barley
- When dog was on the menu.
- Going far, and far back, for beer. And indeed yeast. Always worth the effort.
- BBC launches Human Planet, focusing on “man’s remarkable relationship with the natural world.” Which apparently doesn’t include agriculture.
- Mexicans eat many moth species, and not just the larvae.
- Amazing interactive food atlas for the US. wish I had a use for it, but someone surely does.
- Breeding a “better” Jalapeño pepper — to hold more cheese, natcho.
- Food as politics; the tsampa-eaters of the TAR. h/t GOOD.
Greening fish and chips
What’s happening to the Great British Fish and Chips Meal? On a recent trip to Whitby on the Yorkshire coast I found that not only is the fish sustainable now.
But the whole thing is also GMO-free.
It didn’t use to be this way. What next? Organic heirloom potatoes? Acid-free paper to eat them from? Hardly bears thinking about.