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Potato foundation story

You may remember a post a few weeks back on the origins of potato late blight. Now comes news of a DNA study which looked at the origin of the European potato itself.

The spud was introduced into Europe via the Canary Islands in the mid-16th century. The authors of the study compared landraces currently grown in the Canaries, which are thought to be the descendents of those early introductions, with material from Chile and the Andes. There has long been controversy about whether European varieties trace their origins to one or the other of these places.

It turns out the answer is probably both: there were

“multiple early introductions of both Andean and Chilean germplasm to the Canary Islands and to Europe,” said Dr. David Spooner, co-author of the Crop Science study.

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Stop the mudness

Stop the mudness is the slogan of the Great Lakes Commission sediment-reduction campaign aimed squarely at farmers in North America. It’s the centre of an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun pointing out the many pitfalls associated with farms that grow monocultures of annuals and leave the soil bare most of the year. What’s pleasing is that efforts to reduce soil run-off will always also increase agricultural biodiversity.

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Make more jam

Possibly in response to the previous post about ecological entrepreneurs, a reader recommends The Jamlady Cookbook, by Beverly Ellen Schoonmaker Alfeld. ((That’s not a typo; there’s no space in the title, which is why I am giving full details of the author’s name.)) I haven’t seen it, but it contains advice and recipes for using every conceivable type of fruit. Maybe it will inspire others to become micro-entrepreneurs, although my understanding is that in Europe at any rate, if you propose to prepare food for sale, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to do so legally.

One thing that has struck me on recent jaunts through the Italian countryside had been the profusion of fluffy white flowers on the elder (Sambucus nigra) bushes. Of course, the Italians make Sambuca from elder, though I can detect almost no elderflower or elderberry flavour in there, only the anise note of licorice, its other main ingredient (beside alcohol). But they do not seem to know about either elderflower champagne or elderflower cordial. I must put them to rights. Maybe they do know elderflower fritters; I’ve been unable to find out. Here’s just the book to help: The Elder in history, myth and cookery, from the ever-wonderful Prospect Books.

While we’re on the subject of books for this sort of thing, I have two stand-bys, admittedly unused for the past few years as I have not had anywhere to use them. One is Putting Food By, by Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughan and Janet Greene. If it isn’t in there, it isn’t worth doing. The other is an astonishing book from Britain’s old Agriculture and Food Research Council (when such things mattered). Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables contains a good amount of sensible advice and practical recipes.

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Eco-entrepreneurs

The Independent newspaper has a great story about people in Britain who are trying to make a buck (or rather a pound, I suppose) from nature’s bounty. There are five examples, ranging from a guy making sloe gin to another who sells a chopped up, boiled seaweed called purple laver (Porphyra umbilicalis). That’s apparently the basis of an intriguing traditional Welsh treat called laverbread. How do these products reach consumers? A separate article – this one in The Times – on country markets provides one answer.

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Slash and burn

Is “slash and burn” – swidden agriculture – a good or a bad thing? That’s when farmers cut down an area of forest (though often leaving the larger trees standing), burn the cut vegetation, and plant their crops, often roots and tubers, in the resulting ashy soil for a few years. When the soil is exhausted, they move on to another patch of forest, leaving the first one to grow back, ideally for perhaps 20 years or more, before being used again. A recent article from a local newspaper in the Philippines makes this sound like something to be guarded against at all costs, but can a practice with a track record of sustainable management of agricultural biodiversity and other natural resources in various parts of the world stretching back thousands of years really be all that bad? Although there is always room for improvement, surely the problem does not rest with slash and burn itself so much as with what happens when the system goes wrong because of over-intensification and excessive shortening of fallows. That should have been explained in the article. I hope it was explained to the people who, according to the article, were forcibly prevented from carrying out their traditional agriculture. When forest conservation and farming livelihoods come into conflict in this heavy-handed way there can be no winners.