The case for the prosecution: Kenyans are losing their food culture. The case for the defence: traditional foods are being revived and this is attracting the attentions of multinational. I suspect the truth, as ever, is somewhere in between. How so very boring.
PHIV in Rwanda feed themselves better
There’s a heart-warming story in The Atlantic Channel about a young woman, Emma Clippinger, who started an organization called Gardens for Health International, that helps people with HIV in Rwanda to grow the food that they need to ensure they respond well to anti-retroviral drugs.
That sounds awfully complicated, but apparently it wasn’t.
Many of the country’s HIV patients did not have access to ample food. HIV/AIDS drugs work most effectively when patients are eating a sound diet. They work poorly when patients are malnourished. … Healthy Rwandans were taking charge of their food supply. But AIDS/HIV victims were excluded from these governmental programs because they were deemed physically incapable of participating.
The effort is spreading, and what is really nice is that it makes full use of agrobiodiversity to deliver better nutrition and health:
“Crops are chosen mostly on the basis of their nutritional value.” They include papaya, avocados, amaranth, spiderplant, cowpea, soy beans, beets, swiss chard, collards, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, chili pepper, tephrosia and … “some sunflowers (for their seed, for their aesthetic value!)”. Growers have been especially enthusiastic about indigenous greens called dodo and isogi, which have a higher iron and vitamin A concentration than spinach. Provisional ingenuity prevails: pesticides include neem, garlic, and chili peppers; multivitamins come in the form of leaves from the moringa tree; old tires serve as planters; no kitchen gray water is wasted.
Staples too. What we need to know is: what are dodo and isogi?
Nibbles: Chocolate, Bloggers, Tokyo rice, Breeding, Nutrition
- Yesterday was National Chocolate Day. ((In the US, the only nation that counts, right?)) Who knew? Not even the experts.
- Oxford 2009; report of the veg bloggers and breeders get-together.
- Ginza rice farm. What happened?
- How do we fund plant breeding? You will let us know, won’t you.
- More Food May Not Mean Less Hunger. Say it isn’t so.
Nibbles: New York, Kenya, London
- Restoring grasslands on Long Island. I know, not very agrobiodiversity, but it brought back memories.
- “Children long for Coca-Cola, though, far more than they do mursik, and for them food means maize and potatoes, not millet or sorghum.” This brought back memories too, and is about agrobiodiversity to boot.
- Urban winemaking in London. And yes, memories here too.
Nibbles: Markets, Easter Island, Honey, Coffee, Cowpea, Morocco, Urban Ag, Kenya
- I love pictures of agrobiodiversity in markets.
- Humans did for trees on Rapa Nui after all, not rats.
- Like refining chocolate, extracting honey is a fragrant, messy process. Bring it on.
- Fair Trade coffee unfair to farmers, CIAT says.
- Another day, another genome. This time it’s cowpea.
- 2000 year old food forest in Morocco. Honestly! And guess what? It’s not thriving.
- Another video (long). Education of an Urban Farmer.
- Education of an ex-pastoralist farmer, Karamojong, Kenya