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In other pomegranate news…

My recent post about the wild pomegranate of Socotra (Punica protopunica) elicited a comment from the publisher of an interesting-sounding book called Pomegranate Roads, by Dr Gregory Levin ((Regular readers will know that this fruit has been much on my mind recently.)):

For more than forty years, Dr Gregory Levin trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates. His home was a remote Soviet station in the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from Iran. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he found himself exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates. Gregory Levin has written a fascinating memoir of his life with pomegranates. He illuminates the botany, the history and myths, the astonishing range of tastes, and the health benefits – from folklore to pharmaceuticals – that make it the wonder fruit of our time.

I hope to read the book soon, and review it here, but I wonder what Dr Levin would make of news from Kashmir that the local pomegranate variety — called “Dane” — is threatened by an insect pest. Is this variety conserved ex situ? If so, I hope it is found in a genebank other than the one in Jharkhand that was reported late last year to be threatened with annihilation. We haven’t heard anything on that lately, by the way, and a quick search on Google News revealed nothing. Does anyone know what’s going on?

P.S. Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity International worked with Dr Levin on the pomegranate collection. There’s a video of him talking about it on YouTube.

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Active ingredients: who needs ’em?

A comment from Karl of Inoculated Mind, on the great Organic Tomato Debate, gives me an opportunity to sound off again on something I feel quite strongly about. That’s because, although a superficial reading of his comments and mine might suggest we disagree, at base, we don’t. Karl’s bottom line reads:

Bottom line: just eat your veggies!

And with that I totally and wholeheartedly agree.

At issue is the nutritional value of organic versus conventional tomatoes and, by extension, other veggies. The thing is, that comes after a discussion in which I say that more than flavonoids is likely to differ between organic and conventional. Karl points out that some compounds that plants produce in response to attack might be harmful, rather than beneficial, to humans. I moan on about the importance of dose.

Karl comes back with a link to a study of a genetically modified carrot that shows that “if you eat a serving of the modified carrot, you’d absorb 41 percent more calcium than from a regular carrot.” But the same report says that the daily requirement for calcium is 1000 milligrams, and that a 100 gram serving of the modified carrots offers only 60 milligrams, of which only about 24 milligrams is actually absorbed.

In other words, you could not possibly eat enough of the carrots to get your calcium without suffering beta-carotene poisoning, which just goes to reinforce my point about dose being important. ((I am certain I remember the case of a bloke in England who actually killed himself with excess carrot juice, but I cannot find it on the tubes: too much botulism and other nonsense clouding the results.))

The bigger point is that there is an obsession with active ingredients. Increasing the amount of this, that or the other is held to produce this, that or the other beneficial effect. And yes, maybe it does. And maybe it doesn’t, and maybe you can go too far. But people don’t eat active ingredients, unless they are rather far gone already. They eat food, and meals. And the interactions among foods and within meals mean that as far as the details of nutrition, especially micronutrition, go, all bets are off.

A far, far simpler way to boost nutrition and health is simply to eat different things, and lots of them, and forget about active ingredients, and high-lutein tomatoes, and super-calcium carrots, and golden rice, and flax oil, and all the other things that are touted because they contain more of some good thing.

Just eat your veggies. And your meat and fish. And your dairy. And your fruits and nuts. And everything else. Dietary diversity is the answer. ((And lest I am accused of ignoring poor people who cannot afford to buy anything, let alone organic tomatoes, it is probably more important to them than to the rest of the world that they maintain and expand the diversity of things they eat. But that’s another story for another time.))

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Party Poopers: GRAIN on Svalbard

However, this “ultimate safety net” for the biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant — indeed, only — approach to crop diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers’ fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.

Now tell me, honestly, how on Earth could anyone have seen that coming. From GRAIN, of all people.