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Gold lost and found

As an astute researcher, the doctor grew curious about the Carolina Gold he’d read so much about. And he soon discovered that seed for the original plant was still being banked at the USDA’s Rice Research Institute in Texas. After Schulze made an inquiry with the USDA, an agronomist named Richard Bollock, who shared his curiosity regarding the plant, propagated the seed for him, sending him 14 pounds of the stuff, and he planted it. The following spring, the doctor harvested 64 pounds; by 1988, it was 10,000 pounds. Instead of selling the rice commercially, Schulze donated it to the Savannah Association for the Blind, which sold it to support operations.

We knew that, but nice to get an update.

Oh, and incidentally, the legendary Carolina Gold turns out to also be the source of a nifty new mechanism of resistance to a serious bacterial disease (h/t Lindsay Triplett).

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Sustainable food security on the Cam

CCF’s ever-popular Summer Symposium series continues with an event co-organised with the Global Food Security Initiative, Cambridge Conservation Initiative, UCCRI and Centre of Development Studies. The day will explore solutions to ensuring the supply and distribution of enough food for all whilst conserving ecosystems and biodiversity in the face of population growth, economic growth and changing climate.

CCF is the Cambridge Conservation Forum, and whether their summer symposia are indeed “ever-popular” or not, this year’s edition, on Food Security, Sustainability and Conservation, does look pretty inviting. It’s on 24 June and you can book now. Worth a punt. 1

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With our own award

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You remember this book, right? We enthused about it over a year ago when it first came out.

An old friend, Frederik van Oudenhoven, and his friend and colleague Jamila Haider, are deep in the proofs of what looks to be a wonderful book. With Our Own Hands “tells, for the first time, the cultural and agricultural history of the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs, one of the world’s least known and most isolated civilisations”. Should be a great read, with stunning photographs to accompany the local recipes, essays, stories and poetry. Better yet, generous donors are allowing 1800 copies to travel back to the Pamirs to be given to communities, schools, cooks and libraries.

Well, Fred and Jamila have now won the 2016 Gourmand World Cookbook Award, the Oscars of the cookbook world. You can see photos on the book’s Facebook page. And all without mentioning superfoods. Congratulations!

And by the way, you can listen to Fred talk about the book with Jeremy on Eat This Podcast.

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Not so superfoods

Nice to see what I hope is the beginning of a “superfoods” backlash, spearheaded by Sense About Science and their Ask For Evidence campaign, together with the British Dietetic Association:

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Bioversity’s DG Ann Tutwiler gave the compellingly titled presentation On NOT finding the world’s next superfood at the Kew shindig a couple of weeks back, but, annoyingly, undermined her own message on the importance of agrobiodiversity for diverse diets by repeatedly using the term she was supposedly debunking. 2

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The BDA message is much more straightforward.

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Celebrating maize biodiversity

Sorry for not pointing it out at the time, but the CIMMYT genebank really went all out for the International Day of Biodiversity last week, with this nifty video on Facebook…

…and something I believe is called a slate. Whatever will they think of next? Before you know it, genebanks will be doing customer follow-up surveys or something. No, wait…