As is customary at this time of year, we’re taking a break. see you on or around 9 January 2012. Meanwhile, here’s a little something to tide you over, which we think admirably expresses our philosophy here at ABD towers.
Farming in Eastern Ethiopia
The Guardian has a slideshow on small-scale farming in Ethiopia, mostly showcasing the Wrold Food Programme’s Meret project. Which is great, if it draws attention to the ways in which the Ethiopian people are working to make themselves more food secure. But (and there’s always a but, because we always want more) can you really trust the information in the picture captions? Slide 6, for example; is that really pigeon pea the women are harvesting? Doesn’t look like it to me. And slide 13? The plants shown are said to include “false banana (it looks like a banana tree, but is actually cassava)”.
The pedant will sneer at banana being described as a tree; we’re OK with that. But what is this false banana cassava, “called kobe in Amharic“? 1 Many more sources seem to think “false banana” is ensete (Ensete ventricosum). That makes sense. and quite a few refer to the fermented starchy corms of the plant, called kocho. But of a link to Manihot esculenta, not a sign.
What’s that you say? “Look who’s a pedant now?” You clearly don’t understand our thirst for true knowledge. Someone, somewhere must know for sure whether someone, somewhere, truly calls enset cassava.
Mercado Jamaica, Mexico City, Again
Mexican dog brainfood
What’s that they say about a little knowledge? I knew the Aztecs ate dogs. I knew they kept a hairless breed of dog. So I naturally assumed they bred the hairless breed for food. So much more convenient not having to deal with all that hair in the kitchen.
Wrong. I’m sure there’s a name for this kind of logical fallacy. Be that as it may, a recent visit to the Dolores Olmedo Patiño Museum, in Xochimilco, Mexico City, where they keep a pack of that hairless breed, which is called Xoloitzcuintle by the way, quickly disabused me. A notice there points out that the name Xoloitzcuintle makes reference to Xolotl, a god associated with death (among other things). Dogs were supposed to accompany the dead on their way to the next world. Not the done thing to eat them, then, surely. It must have been other breeds that were eaten.
Well, maybe. The Wikipedia article on Xolotl says that “the meat of the Xoloitzcuintle was very much part of the diet of some of the ancient peoples of the region.” There’s no reference for that, though. What seems clear is that there were, indeed, other dog breeds. Many of the representations of dogs don’t really look like the Xoloitzcuintle at all. Squatter and fatter. Dare I say it? Jucier. There are many of them, mainly in pottery, at the museum, though I was not allowed to photograph the ones indoors.
Diego Rivera seems to have had a thing about Aztec dogs, by the way. He painted them a number of times. Here’s an example from the Palacio Nacional mural. Interestingly, though, they look a lot more like the pottery pieces than the actual Xoloitzcuintle specimens roaming around the gardens of his friend Dolores’ house.
Brainfood: Cassava in Colombia, Tubers in Peru, Breadfruit diversity, Hominins and elephants, Evolution, Domestication, Mongolian sheep, Roads, Econutrition, South Asia food composition
- Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
- Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
- Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
- Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
- Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
- Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
- Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
- Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
- Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
- Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.