Category: Vegetables

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Sardonic grin greets paper on sardonic grin

Damn you, agrobiodiversity. Every day something new. For example, did you know that a plant is behind the phrase “sardonic grin”? Well, apparently, the roots of the word “sardonic” go back to Homer, who adapted the ancient word for the Sardinians “because of the belief that the Punic people who settled Sardinia gave condemned men a potion that made them smile before dying”? That’s from an ANSA press release which goes on to describe some recent research which purports to nail down the active ingredient of the potion.

It turns out to be polyacetylenes from Oenanthe fistulosa, an umbel. They “cause facial muscles to contract and produce a grimace or rictus.” This species is not cultivated, I don’t think, but a congeneric is: O. javanica is used as a vegetable in parts of Asia. So O. fistulosa is a crop wild relative, sort of. Anyway, the ANSA release doesn’t give details of the paper, but I believe it might be a February article in Journal of Natural Products by a group of Italian and Polish researchers.

One of the authors, Mauro Ballero from the botany department of the Universita di Cagliari, which is in Sardinia, had this to say about the significance of the research, no doubt with a sardonic grin on his face:

The good news is that the molecule in this plant may be retooled by pharmaceutical companies to have the opposite effect.

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Visualizing agrobiodiversity in markets

I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.

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Nibbles: Adam Forbes, Squash, Native Americans, Gardens, Buffalo, Pastoralism, Primula, IPR

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The giant pumpkin story

Jules Janick, professor of horticulture at Purdue, wrote a wonderfully informative and entertaining brief history of giant pumpkins in last September’s Chronica Horticulturae (it starts on page 16). Regular competitions have been going on in the US since 1900, arising from state agricultural fairs.

The giant round orange phenotypes of C. maxima appear to be in a narrow gene pool out of “Atlantic Giant” (oblong phenotypes are called “Dill’s Atlantic Giant” developed by William Dill, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, Canada)… “Atlantic Giant” and related huge show pumpkins trace their origin to the cultivar “Mammoth,” recorded in the seed trade as far back as 1834…

Despite this narrow genepool, the genetic gains have been phenomenal (although of course cultural practices play a part too), as this graph of world records of pumpkin fruit weight from 1857 to 2007 shows:

pumpkin

The current mark stands at almost 800 kg. Seed of top specimens changes hands at huge prices (up to $850 for a single seed). Prof. Janick suggests that horticultural science has ignored this record of success.

Someone has accused academics in the agricultural arena of merely proving that the practices achieved by the best growers are correct. I suggest the academic and scientific community cooperate on this engaging problem for the delight of the public everywhere.