The world is waking up to the fact that competition for an eroding natural resources base is at least a contributing factors to the tensions of Darfur, whose tragic results then further exacerbate the problem in vicious positive feedback. But Jonathan Robinson said so some years back (via ADE). What took so long?
Book: Artisanal cheeses in the US
Carlo Petrini of Slow Food waxes lyrical over the growth in American artisanal cheeses.
To celebrate these cheeses, I’d like to quote the great Italian writer Italo Calvino who, in his book Palomar, poetically described the value of the diversity of artisan cheeses:
Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries.
From now on we can ideally add to these images the vast expanses of America with their “different greens and different skies”.
Petrini wrote the foreword to “Atlas of American Artisan Cheese”.
Eat weeds
A weed is just a plant in the wrong place. Round here, alas, three of my favourite weeds — purslane (Portulaca oleracea), amaranth (Amaranthus sp.) and fat hen (Chenopodium album) — are very much in the wrong places; on the streets and by the tips where they are the object of far too many dogs’ attention. If they weren’t, I’d hurry over to Vindu’s blog to print out her recipe for Thotakura pappu, dal with amaranth leaves.
Come rainy season, our backyard used to be so full of these plants almost like weeds that the only dishes on the table would be thotakura stir fry or thotakura pappu (actually it still is like that back home)
Perfection, really. Eat the weeds and do yourself some dietary good at the same time. But it does raise the whole thorny question of what to call those species. Neglected? Underutilized? Only by scientists and the mainstream. For local people who depend on diversity, they’re neither.
Peru’s potato celebration encircles the world
An Associated Press report on a potato harvest in the high Andes of Peru has been picked up by scores of newspapers around the world. That’s salutary, because I often forget that what is old news for those of us in the business, as it were, is fresh and interesting for hordes of other people. There’s often very good mileage to be had from simply showing others the diversity you may be quite familiar with.
Root crops news
Root and tuber staples get a bit of a raw deal in agricultural biodiversity circles. They’re incredibly important to many cultures and in many agricultural systems around the world, but difficult to conserve and difficult to breed. So the discourse does tend to be dominated by seed crops. Which is why it’s so great to read — in the mainstream media — of a sweet potato enthusiast in Japan and of a fascinating traditional yam ceremony in Papua New Guinea.