- Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break.
- Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver found his own, swapping the wheel for seed multiplication and turning five acres into a livelihood, proof that sometimes the missing link in a seed system is just someone willing to do the unglamorous middle bit well.
- Which is, per Farming First, precisely Africa’s problem at scale: only 2.5% of smallholder seed in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from formal seed companies, so a few million more bus-driver-style multipliers wouldn’t hurt.
- Meanwhile in the Balearics, the opposite direction of travel: the local seed bank is expanding to rescue tomatoes, onions and broad beans, and is looking for farmers willing to take them back.
- Indigenous fruit trees in Malawi turn out to fight malnutrition and biodiversity loss at once. Happy coincidence?
- Getting those trees into the ground well needs the same unglamorous groundwork as any good crop seed system: a Mongabay commentary argues that restoration campaigns skipping Indigenous and local seed knowledge are optimising for trees planted, not trees that survive.
- And once you’ve got the saplings in the ground, you might want to monitor how they’re doing: enter Bruno, a pushcart rigged with mobile phones that can collect field data. And not just for breeders.
- Finally, proof that not all genetic-resource hunting needs a genebank: Brussels brewers are getting people to comb the city for wild yeast, because the raw materials for a proper lambic turns is hanging around in urban trees.
Terere, in more ways than one
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Terere (amaranth) is mainly a traditional leafy green vegetable in Kenya of course… |
| …and readily available these days in supermarkets. |
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But it’s interesting to see the grain also used… |
| …in lots of interesting products. |
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Quite the veggie revolution in the last 10 years1, but have we now reached peak terere?
I mean, how much more land is there?
Nibbles: Mango breeding, Cambodian peppers, Cold genes, Geechee cowpea, Navajo genebank
- Blue mangoes.
- Kampot pepper.
- Antarctic flowering plant.
- Sapelo Island red pea.
- Navajo seed data.
Mo’ better veggies
In the latest Eat This Newsletter I shared this item, which may be relevant here too.
There’s no shortage of advice that we should all eat more vegetables. They are undoubtedly good for long-term health, and not eating enough vegetables is one of the top five dietary risk factors for disease. And yet, despite all the exhortations and official guidelines, globally around the world people eat only 60% by weight of the vegetables they should. What to do?
The facts above are just some I lifted from a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: Reversing vegetable biodiversity loss to diversify diets. The authors are a who’s who of agricultural biodiversity and nutrition (many of them familiar to Eat This Podcast). They offer a four-pronged solution, avoiding the whole fruit-vegetable schism with a wise reflection: “Because culinary traditions and nutritional perceptions vary across regions, the specific edible parts and species considered vegetables can differ across cultures”.
Prong 1: Secure vegetable biodiversity for the future. Collect more vegetable diversity and make sure that existing diversity in collections is kept in good working order.
Prong 2: Harness vegetable biodiversity to deliver new varieties. Give farmers, researchers and breeders access to the collected diversity and information about it so that they can improve varieties across the whole range of vegetable species.
Prong 3: Promote vegetable biodiversity to diversify diets. Include more and more different vegetables in meals at school and at home, primarily by linking local growers to school feeding programmes and local markets.
Prong 4: Integrate vegetable biodiversity into policy frameworks for long-term impact. Of course, as night follows day, policy frameworks follow suggestions for action.
The paper is a really interesting read. It emerges from a three-year pilot project in four African countries and summarises a lot of thinking over the years. I’d love to see all countries grasp the four prongs and run with them. But, NGL, and with the greatest respect to the authors, that seems unlikely. Please, prove me wrong.
Frozen amaranth and warm memories
Coming across this new (at least for me) frozen amaranth product in a Nairobi supermarket yesterday…
…reminded me that the Amaranth Institute Symposium 2026 is coming up soon.
It really is amazing the progress in the marketing and consumption of traditional vegetables that Kenyans have made in the 30 years since I made my infinitesimal contribution.