Tasteful breeding

A couple of days ago the Evil Fruit Lord complained — a little bit — about an article in a Ugandan newspaper which extolled the virtues of traditional crops and varieties over new-fangled hybrids. While not doubting the many attractive qualities of landraces and heirloom varieties, he quite rightly pointed out that there’s nothing to stop modern varieties and hybrids tasting just as good:

I get really sick of the tendency to talk about plant breeding as a process which makes crops into finicky, crappy tasting garbage in exchange for yield. You absolutely can create varieties which taste as good (or better) than traditional varieties, produce more, and resist pests. In fact, plant breeding is the only way to get to that.

Now there’s an article by Arthur Allen in Smithsonian magazine which basically says — not very surprisingly, I suppose — that both those things have happened in the tomato:

Flavor … has not been a goal of most breeding programs. While importing traits like disease resistance, smaller locules, firmness and thicker fruit into the tomato genome, breeders undoubtedly removed genes influencing taste. In the past, many leading tomato breeders were indifferent to this fact. Today, things are different. Many farmers, responding to consumer demand, are delving into the tomato’s preindustrial past to find the flavors of yesteryear.

Allen has a good word to say for the wild relatives:

The architect of the modern commercial tomato was Charles Rick, a University of California geneticist. In the early 1940s, Rick, studying the tomato’s 12 chromosomes, made it a model for plant genetics. He also reached back into the fruit’s past, making more than a dozen bioprospecting trips to Latin America to recover living wild relatives. There is scarcely a commercially produced tomato that didn’t benefit from Rick’s discoveries. The gene that makes such tomatoes easily fall off the vine, for instance, came from Solanum cheesmaniae, a species that Rick brought back from the Galapagos Islands. Resistances to worms, wilts and viruses were also found in Rick’s menagerie of wild tomatoes.

And he also plugs genebanks:

…we can take comfort in the tomato’s continuing, explosive diversity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a library of 5,000 seed varieties, and heirloom and hybrid seed producers promote thousands more varieties in their catalogs.

Not quite sure where he got that number, as the C.M. Rick Tomato Genetic Resources Center seems to have about 3,500 accessions, but anyway.

Improved varieties in West Africa

This just in from FAO’s Seed and Plant Genetic Resources Service (AGPS).

Please find below links to the West African Catalogue of Plant Species and Varieties (COAFEV). This document was prepared in the framework of the West African Seed Regulation Harmonization, which was supported by AGP. This process involved 17 West and Central African countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) and has led to the adoption of a harmonized seed regulatory framework by the ECOWAS Council of Ministers on 18 May 2008 in Abuja.

This framework provides for the establishment of the COAFEV, which is the list of varieties whose seeds can be produced and commercialized in the member states without restriction. The objective of such a system is to facilitate West African farmers’ access to a greater diversity of varieties and to foster cross-border seed trade.

English version.

French version.

Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures

Fennel prices on the go

We have blogged a number of times about the use of mobile telephony to lubricate markets. But the examples have usually been from developing countries. Now here’s one from Italy. And no, I don’t want to get into a discussion about the development status of il Bel Paese. If you register with SMS Consumatori, you can send them a text message containing the name of a product and they’ll send you one back in seconds with the average prices of that product in different parts of the country.

I tried it, and it works. Today the retail cost of 1 kg of finocchio (fennel) was € 1.85 in the north and € 1.30 in the south, for example. If someone is selling something at what you think are inflated prices, you can report them online. The website has a graph of prices for each product over the past few days. And each product also has a sort of descriptive fiche, which even lists the main varieties for some fruits and vegetables, though the price is not disaggregated by variety, alas. Here’s the information on fennel varieties:

… il Bianco Perfezione (varietà precoce, la raccolta avviene in luglio e agosto), il Gigante di Napoli, il finocchio di Sicilia e il finocchio di Parma (varietà invernale, raccolta da settembre a dicembre). Ricordiamo inoltre il Bianco dolce di Firenze, il Finocchio di fracchia, e il Tondo romano. I venditori usano distinguere i finocchi in maschi e femmine: non c’è nulla di scientifico in questo, fanno semplicemente riferimento alla forma che, nel caso del maschio è tondeggiante, nella femmina più allungata.

Ok, I’ll translate:

… White Perfection (an early variety, harvested in July and August), Neapolitan Giant, Sicilian Fennel and Parma Fennel (a winter variety, harvested from September to December). Let us also remember Florentine Sweet White, Fracchia’s Fennel, and Roman Round. Sellers distinguish between male and female types, but there is nothing scientific about this, it simply refers to the shape, which is rounder in the male and more elongated in the female.