A brief summary of edible schoolyards in the US, with useful links. A couple more links that I snagged over at Desertification. A new book on Gardening with Children and an article about how teachers in San Francisco are using gardening, with a video. Desertification has also published a comment on the subject as a full post, which seems like a neat bit of recycling.
Buckwheat musings
Greetings from Nairobi. I’m here for a week’s rest and relaxation, which does not of course preclude blogging! Anyway, what I wanted to write about has nothing to do with Kenya. Or at least I don’t think buckwheat — our subject this evening — is grown here. It all started a week back when I went up to Lucca, near Pisa, for the weekend. That included a lot of eating, of course, and one of the dishes that particularly struck me was a main course composed of a thin tortilla-type thing, folded up, and filled with a nice sauce. I can’t remember the name of the dish, but the tortilla was made of “grano Saraceno,” according to the menu. I hadn’t heard the name, but a little snooping confirmed it to be buckwheat. A rarish crop in Italy, but nevertheless the basis of some interesting traditional recipes. Now, I knew a little about buckwheat, but next to nothing about its nutritious relative, Tartar(y) buckwheat. And I certainly didn’t know that there’s an easily de-hulled variety of this crop called rice-tartary which promises to be a boon to breeders. Nor that you can emasculate the flowers with hot water, which could also be useful if you’re trying to make crosses. I should eat out more.
Examining the entrails
There’s an extremely long and detailed piece in Business Daily Africa about what Kofi Annan really said, what he meant, and what other people think he meant, and what should have said about the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and GMOs. It really does have the whiff of theologists discussing a papal pronouncement. One thing the article does is to draw attention to all the other things — roads, markets, communications — that Africa needs to become more food secure. But just as I’m guilty of treating Africa as a monolith, so the article, and the multitude of experts it cites, are guilty of treating crops and genetic engineering as monoliths. Instead of worrying about the fine nuances of words like “consider” — as in “the Alliance will not shy away from considering the potential of bio-technology in reducing hunger and poverty” — maybe the assembled experts could consider specific crops and specific biotechnologies.
Nutrition news from the Antipodes
What do these fruits have in common: Kakadu plum, Illawarra plum, Burdekin plum, Davidson’s plum, riberry, red and yellow finger limes, Tasmanian pepper, brush cherry, Cedar Bay cherry, muntries and Molucca raspberry? Five points if you said “They’re all native Australian fruits”. Ten points if you said “According to this press release I just read, they’re exceptional sources of antioxidants identified in research published in the journal Innovative Food Science & Emerging Technologies”.
Ten points to me.
Farming butterflies conserves forests
East African farmers are making good money — and conserving their local surroundings — by going after butterflies. The Manila Times picks up a story from Agence France Presse reporting from the villages in Kenya and Tanzania where locals have learned how to trade in butterflies. The article is built on the words of the farmers themselves, and it makes for uplifting reading. A sample:
“I would be foolish to cut trees,†says Suleiman Kachuma, a 42-year-old villager, who earns between 15 and 23 dollars a month from his work with Kipepeo, double what he used to make selling timber.
“Before, people had a few chickens and goats… Now there is a big change. Farmers have more chickens, some even have some cattle. The project really changed our lives,†he says.
I thought I’d seen this somewhere before, and I had.