Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

My latest from the work blog:

There seems to be a bit of an issue over at the Olympics with fast food marketing, but if athletes in Rio, or indeed spectators, want a simple, cheap meal that’s also healthy, and hopefully sourced more sustainably, they could do a lot worse than tucking into the Brazilian staple of rice and beans (but don’t forget the vegetables and the tropical fruit juice). This is such an established part of Brazilian life that EMBRAPA, the country’s agricultural research organization, has a whole research unit called Arroz e Feijão – Rice & Beans.

Unfortunately, the level of attention beans get in Brazil is not typical around the world, even in other places that eat a lot of them, and the situation is even worse for other pulses – the general term often used to refer to the dry seeds of members of the plant family Leguminosae (technically, it’s now called the Fabaceae, but life is too short as it is), crops like chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, cowpeas and a host of others. That, at least, is the contention of a paper just published in Nature Plants ((Christine H. Foyer et al. (2016). Neglecting legumes has compromised human health and sustainable food production. Nature Plants, 2 (16112) : 10.1038/nplants.2016.112)), which also sets out to show that this relative neglect has been bad for global food and nutritional security.

Table 1 from the paper, which I discuss in the post, is also available as a website listing various resources for each pulse species.