Manga rice
The joy of rice marketing in Japan. I wonder if a similar approach might work for quinoa in Bolivia, say.
Arctic seed monkeys in publicity storm
Some people have all the fun. Reporter Louise Roug, of the Los Angeles Times, has clearly had a blast writing a major feature on the Global Crop Diversity Trust’s “doomsday vault” on Svalbard, above the Arctic Circle. She has it all: glaciers and frozen wilderness; airlocks, steel-reinforced doors and a video-monitoring system; more aggressive farming …
Sorghum is good for coeliacs
What I neglected to say in my earlier post about wheat, gluten and coeliac disease is of course that sufferers have a whole lot of other grains they can turn to, including some underused and neglected ones, like teff and quinoa.
Backyard domestication
There’s a “dump heap” hypothesis of agricultural origins which suggests that people first got interested in actively managing and manipulating plants for food or other products when they saw them sprouting out of piles of garbage in and about settlements. There they could observe them daily and experiment with them. A slight variation on this …
Making grains relevant
The low-carb craze of a few years back has spoiled the nutritional reputation of cereal grains, and it is up to the industry to get people eating them again. So said Francesco Pantò of the pasta giant Barilla yesterday at the first European congress of the American Association of Cereal Chemists International (AACCI), in Montpellier. …