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September 12, 2007September 12, 2007

More Malus mayhem

I guess it’s the season. More apples today, again from both sides of the Atlantic. From Britain, an invitation to Apple Days at East Malling, a celebration which will feature the (troubled?) National Fruit Collection. And from the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, more news of American apple breeding, featuring David Bedford of the University of …

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September 11, 2007September 12, 2007

A tale of two apple collections

I’ve already nibbled today’s piece in the Guardian about the UK’s National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, a “typical British story of managerial confusion and government ineptitude,” but I couldn’t resist pointing out the contrast with the US apple collection at Geneva in New York, about which I also blogged recently. It does seem like they …

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Fresh Nibbles

Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from the university’s cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cocoa’s traditional growing belt.
And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.

Published on August 16, 2026