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Vegetables, joy and justice

A long(ish) Edible Manhattan piece by Rachel Nuwer on the movement to breed crops for flavour, rather than only productivity or shelf-life, very nice in its own right, also gives me the excuse to link to Jeremy’s interview on Eat This Podcast with Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network. Here’s Nuwer’s sign-off as an amuse-bouche. She first points out that production of the much un-loved kale has seen quite a jump lately in the US. Why not the Habanada pepper, the honeynut squash, or “a subtly flavored cucumber with a white rind”?

A similar renaissance could happen for these new ingredients, too — if only we demand it through our dining habits and grocery store purchases. As Swegarden points out, “Everything that happens upstream in the food system is dictated by the consumer.” Should a flavor-forward movement take hold, it has the possibility of changing the food system, including potentially creating more jobs for farmers and strengthening the shift toward local, seasonal and minimally-processed and -doused ingredients. Selman also anticipates that greater availability of delicious, affordable produce would translate into greater consumption of fruits, veggies and grains—and thus hopefully to a healthier general public. “I don’t do this because I want to hang out with high-end chefs,” she says. “It’s about joy and justice.”

Indeed it is.

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Assyria in Gatersleben

I’m not sure if I said here that I visited IPK, the German national genebank, a few weeks ago. I did on Instagram.

Complementary #conservation #genebank #agrobiodiversity #germany

A post shared by Luigi Guarino (@ggguarino) on

Great facilities, great people, great work: but, though bigger and better resourced than average, in most ways like many other genebanks around the world. Except, that is, for the Assyrian relief in the entrance hall.

Well, the plaster cast of the Assyrian relief anyway. Nobody seemed to know where the original was, but there was general agreement that the copy was there because it depicted plant breeding. Of course, I took that as a challenge, and after a few minutes playing around with Google’s image search feature, I ran it to earth at the Met.

Each register of imagery shows a pair of supernatural figures flanking a stylized “sacred tree.” Further sacred trees can be seen to the left, and similar imagery continued around the room from which this slab came. The tree is thought to represent the prosperity and agricultural abundance of Assyria, and perhaps on one level the state itself. The supernatural figures are protective, and similar to those shown at larger scale throughout the palace. The gesture performed by the bird-headed figures with bucket and cone has been much discussed. One suggestion is that it symbolizes the fertilization of the land through the imagery of artificial date-palm fertilization, in which male date-spathes are used to fertilize female plants. The Assyrian term for the cone, however, seems to be “purifier,” and it is therefore likely that the symbolism has as much or more to do with magical protection.

So, maybe plant breeding, maybe not, but well worth having in the entrance lobby to a plant breeding institute containing a genebank.

But in locating the stela I ran across an article on Mesopotamian agriculture from the Oriental Institute that mentioned something called the Philadelphia Onion Archive.

No way to let that go either, naturally. It turns out that the Philadelphia Onion Archive really does consist of an archive of material on onions, kept in Philadelphia in the unwieldy shape of numerous clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform in the Akkadian language. Fortunately, there’s a translation online. Which means we know how many types of onions were grown during the reign of King Shar-Kali-Sharri, over 4,000 years ago.

And for how many places around the world can we say that even now?

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Golden Genes: The Movie

The frozen, bodiless genes of millions of plants, animals and humans are stored in biobanks around the world. They rekindle dreams of old: re-creating extinct species, ending world hunger, human life without illness or disease. But biobanks do more than that. They pose a fundamental question to our contemporary beliefs: What does it mean to be part of nature in the age of the genome?

Goldene Gene Trailer from Wolfgang Konrad on Vimeo.

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Foraging not scavenging

I have to say that I was a bit annoyed by this tweet from Bread for the World.

It’s not the promotion of gardening, of course. I’m all for gardening. It’s that word “scavenging,” with its negative connotations of rummaging through garbage. What’s so wrong about collecting edible plants from wild or semi-wild habitats? California’s native peoples used to do it, albeit as part of a very complex strategy of natural resources use and management.

Europeans viewed California Indians as having no concept of property, but they did recognize ownership based on usufruct of some resources, while setting others aside for communal purposes. Perhaps most important, as ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and Native Californians themselves remind us, they shaped the landscapes in which they lived through their extensive environmental knowledge, equivalent to our botany, ecology, ornithology, entomology, and more.

Chinese villagers in the Upper Yangtze still do it, and are saving the panda at the same time because of it.

“Wild harvesters are often some of the poorest people, because they don’t have access to land to farm,” says Natsya Timoshyna, the medicinal plants program leader at TRAFFIC, an anti-wildlife-trafficking organization that helped create FairWild.

Instead, these gatherers, like the villagers in China’s Upper Yangtze, are quietly responsible for maintaining the world’s supply of wild plants, a supply that provides medicine — as well as food — for up to 80 percent of the developing world.

And that’s just what has come through my feeds this week. Why not just use the term “foraging“? Am I missing something? Is support for wild-collected food seen as retrograde or imperialist or patriarchal?