Category: Vegetables

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Sharing a hot plant pinup

The latest Eat This Newsletter is out. Here’s a taster. Do subscribe, well worth it. BTW, Jeremy has form on this topic.

The Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks apparently features the chilli pepper as its plant of the month this month, but as I cannot find a link there, I’m sending you to the version syndicated to JSTOR Daily. It’s a bit of a once-over-lightly, with little new for any reasonably well-informed chilli-head. While I’m carping, although the article says the seeds of wild chillies are spread by birds, it doesn’t mention any potential evolutionary advantage offered by capsaicin, the source of the heat. Clearly birds aren’t put off by it and humans can come to like it, but what is it actually for?

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Brainfood: Indigenous crops, Indian vegetables, Local breeds, Wheat identity, Date names, Food security & heritage, Peruvian cuisine, Food sovereignty, Palestinian seeds, Tea culture, Sacred groves, Food system transformation, Diverse landscapes

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Nibbles: Edible Memory, Tomatomania, British apples, Turgovian pear, Climate & crops, Food systems buzzwords, NTBG jobs, World Food Day 2022

  1. Edible Memory for free, for a month. Heirloom tomatoes and more.
  2. Speaking of heirloom tomatoes… Tomatomania! The podcast. And the website.
  3. The ritual autumn BBC story on heirloom apples. Anyone for applemania?
  4. Would you settle for pearmania? Perrymania actually.
  5. Mania or no, crops have taken a hit this year.
  6. The truth behind some buzzwords in food systems discourse from IPES-Food. Spoiler alert: agroecologymania.
  7. Some cool breadfruit etc. jobs going in Hawaii at the National Tropical Botanical Garden.
  8. Kent Nnadozie has a pretty cool job at the Plant Treaty, here’s an interview with him on the occasion of World Food Day.
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Nibbles: GRIN-U, Canadian seeds, Jordan genebank, Green genebank, Millets everywhere, Saving livestock diversity, Sustainable smallholders, Uli Westphal, Eat This Tomato

  1. Lots of new stuff on GRIN-U. Check out the genebank success stories in particular. How many of the things below will be successes? Lots of luck to all of them…
  2. Showcasing seeds in Canada.
  3. Setting up a new genebank in Jordan.
  4. Let’s hope it will be eco-efficient like CIAT’s. Other GROW webinars here. Yes, they’ve started up again.
  5. Embracing millets in southern Africa and India.
  6. Why livestock should not follow the example of Charles II of Spain.
  7. Supporting traditional sustainable farming in Central America.
  8. More on Uli Westphal‘s cool illustrations of crop diversity.
  9. Which include tomatoes. Don’t forget to subscribe to Jeremy’s pod.
  10. And subscribe to the GRIN-U newsletter too while you’re at it!
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Nibbles: New cassava, Community seedbank double, Rwandan beans, Knotweed et al., Seed systems, Adam Alexander, Uruguay genebank, Kelp biobank

  1. There’s a new cassava in town in Kenya.
  2. I wonder if it will end up in a community “seed” bank.
  3. …because they swear by them in Zimbabwe.
  4. Cassava is not the only American crops that’s important in parts of Africa: the cultural appropriation of beans in Rwanda.
  5. Some American crops didn’t make it very far out of America.
  6. Be it beans, cassava or sump/knotweed, what’s needed is a Quality-Declared Seed (QDS) system. Right?
  7. Well you also need someone to go around collecting the stuff in the first place.
  8. But don’t forget to back everything up in Svalbard, like Uruguay is doing.
  9. Well maybe not everything.