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Exploring global diets

You may remember the paper Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security, which we blogged about a couple of times when it first came out in 2014. National Geographic did a pretty good job of visualizing some of the data online, but CIAT have blown them out of the water now with a fabulous interactive website.

You can listen to Colin Khoury, the brains behind the whole thing, on Jeremy’s latest Eat This Podcast. And you can read about the most surprising results on CIAT’s blog. Spoiler alert:

1. Almost everybody eats a lot more food than their grandparents did. And it’s more diverse.
2. African, Asian, and small island countries have the world’s most diverse food supplies. Also the least.
3. Crop immigrants are the key to dietary diversity.
4. The world’s average diet means eating like people do in Cape Verde, Colombia, and Peru.
5. Political unrest can lead to greater diversity in people’s diets, or less.

There’s also a companion piece by Colin on the Global Plant Council website. And this is what Colin says on his Facebook page:

We built a big data website! When we published our findings of increasing homogeneity in global food supplies, we hadn’t yet found a good way to make the underlying national-level data readily visible to interested readers. This is why I’m tremendously excited to announce the publication of our new Changing Global Diet website, which provides interactive visuals for 152 countries over 50 years of change. We that hope you will enjoy your own investigations of dietary change over time. Perhaps you can tell us where you think the changing global diet is headed.

If you do play around with the website, you can share any interesting stuff you find using the hashtag #changingglobaldiet on Twitter. Me, I’m going to have a bandeja paisa and feel like a proud citizen of nowhere.

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Brainfood: Tomato chemicals, Photoperiod, Grain phenotyping, Hawaiian ag, Domestication primer, Symbionts, Turkish wheat, Yam bean diversity, Crop health, Walnut diversity, Agrobiodiversity theorising, Sea pigs, NERICA impacts, Nutrient production

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Brainfood: Insurance value, Forages/invasives, Chenopod crops, Non-descript goats, Holy grapes, Black maize, Wild rice diversity, Cassava seedlings, Knotweed domestication syndrome, Wild potato use, Farmers/researchers, Winged yam diversity, Genes to ecosystems, Wild carrots

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Mapping wheat diversity in Turkey

ResearchBlogging.orgNo sooner did I blog about a paper which mapped diversity in a crop in Mexico across time, that I came across one mapping diversity in another crop in Turkey. ((Morgounov, A., Keser, M., Kan, M., Küçükçongar, M., Özdemir, F., Gummadov, N., Muminjanov, H., Zuev, E., & Qualset, C. (2016). Wheat Landraces Currently Grown in Turkey: Distribution, Diversity, and Use Crop Science, 56 (6) DOI: 10.2135/cropsci2016.03.0192))

The authors — a truly international bunch from the Bahri Dagdas International Agricultural Research Institute, the Vavilov Institute, CIMMYT, ICARDA, FAO, and UC Davis — describe a huge effort to collect and describe wheat from all over the country during 2009-2014. They then compare the resulting socioeconomic and geographic patterns of diversity with a previous survey done by the Vavilov Institute in the 1920s, the results of which were published in 1935-9 by Mirza Gökgöl, a Turkish scientist who accompanied that expedition. ((Gökgöl, M. 1935. Turkish wheats, Vol. I. Ministry of Agriculture, Yesilkoy Seed Breeding Institute Publications No. 7, Devlet Press, Istanbul, Turkey (In Turkish).
Gökgöl, M. 1939. Turkish wheats, Vol. II. Ministry of Agriculture, Yesilkoy Seed Breeding Institute Publications No. 14, Tan Press, Istanbul, Turkey (In Turkish).))

As in the Mexican maize study, diversity in the crop was measured in terms of distinct morphological types, and was unevenly distributed around the country, but unlike in that work, diversity was calculated for each administrative province, rather than in each square in a grid. As provinces vary widely in size, and in the extent to which wheat is grown in them, this approach is not ideal.

Nevertheless, it was possible to make direct comparisons between the two study periods for about 17 provinces. Discounting some very rare and very minor morphological variants, it seems fairly safe to say that for these provinces, the number of distinct wheat types went down about 59% overall, though with large differences among provinces. There is no map showing this in the paper, but, thanks to my colleague Nora Castañeda, I can help you with that. Red is down, green is up.

Data from Morgounov et al. (2016) Table 4. Wheat landrace diversity for selected provinces in Turkey found in the 1920s compared with the current results (2000s).

What explains wheat landraces still thriving in some places, and not in others?

Socioeconomic data indicated that landrace farmers are found mostly in remote mountainous subsistence communities with very little grain trade, small areas planted to wheat, and relatively simple production technologies. The key reasons famers continue to grow landraces are their grain qualities and adaptation to abiotic stresses.