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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.

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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.

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Core blimey: BBC does apples

The rip-roaring yarn of Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost Treasure in the Boise Weekly, when posted to Facebook, elicited a reference from Mike Jackson to a BBC Midlands news item about the hundreds of apple varieties in Herefordshire, and the role of Thomas Andrew Knight, president of the RHS from 1811-1838. That sounded really interesting, but the BBC website doesn’t allow me to watch that particular video clip here in Italy. Fortunately, Herefordshire Council has no such compunctions about freeing its content, which allows me to mark the fact that 2011 is Herefordshire’s Year in the Orchard before the end of the year in question, if only just. Having said that, the BBC did have an article back in June on the Great British Apple in connection with another programme, in which “[h]orticulturalist Chris Beardshaw uncovers the British contribution to the history of our most iconic fruit.” And it looks like I’ll be able to watch at least some bits of that.