Remember that story I linked to a while back about how Sikh immigrants to northern Italy are keeping alive the art of making parmigiano? Remember how it was in German? Ok, well, now you can read two versions of it in English. But it’s still pretty cool.
Featured: Soybean processing
wew had this to say in reply to a query from Jeremy three years back in connection with a very popular post (41 comments!) on the release of a new soybean variety in Uganda:
In Uganda, soybean is consumed by mixing the flour with millet or maize flour and preparing a porridge from this mixture. This is consumed by children and adults alike as a protein supplement (there are few cheap protein sources in Uganda). This method uses the greatest amount of soybean in Uganda but the most common method of consuming soybean in Uganda is by eating the roasted grain as a snack, often sold by hawkers or street vendors. Small amounts are also consumed as soymilk (locally prepared using a mortar, pestle and strainer) and as paste (mixed with local vegetables).
Now Matt Cognetti wants into the discussion:
I’m part of a Ugandan health team interested in making more efficient grinders to prepare soybeans. Can you please email me back with the method of preparing soybeans, ie. do they use hand mortar and pestle, etc.
We live to make such connections.
AfricaRice’s African rice collection
Nice video. Note the reference, towards the end, to the systematic characterization of AfricaRice‘s collection of 2,500 Oryza glaberrima accessions. Interestingly, Genesys says the Centre has 3,796 accessions. I wonder what’s happened to the rest. Here’s a map of the 863 accessions from 129 sites with georeferences.
LATER: Compare with the map of African rice cultivation in Diana Buja’s post.
Another VIP visits the IRRI genebank
This time it’s the president of Vietnam. There are 2797 accessions from Vietnam in the IRRI genebank.
Technofix vs agroecology
It is easy to mock the various conferences, emergency meetings and seemingly endless policy documents that have tried to mitigate the threat but so far have achieved little. In fairness, though, responding effectively will be extraordinarily difficult. Despite what some conspiracy-minded critics have alleged, the crisis has a number of drivers, each one of which would be challenging enough on its own, but which taken together seem to call for a radical restructuring that is hard to imagine in the current political climate.
These drivers include the diversion of grains in North America and Western Europe to biofuel production; higher energy costs, which translate into more expensive chemical fertilizers; and since 2000, financial speculation over staple crops, which causes price fluctuations.
From an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune by David Rieff, who is writing a book about the global food crisis. Well worth reading in its entirety, and although he doesn’t judge between the competing metanarratives — technofix vs agroecology — he is optimistic that there will indeed be a solution. On that, I’m not so sure.