Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
How to do interspecific crosses in Ipomoea. Proprietary blend of amaranth, buckwheat, teff, millet, quinoa, sorghum and cassava flour for gluten-free diets. Making food standards work for smallholders. Yeah, right. Rauvolfia vomitoria leaf tea good for diabetes. Bit worried about that epithet though. Mexican sage banned in another state. Pass the peyote then.
The joy of rice marketing in Japan. I wonder if a similar approach might work for quinoa in Bolivia, say.
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 …
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.
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 …