World Food Day deconstructed

Lately we’ve done a fair bit of pointing you to other blog posts that have something worthwhile to say on topics of interest here. You may call this laziness. We call it content curation. And in that spirit I offer you one person’s take on World Food Day, which unfolded yesterday here in Rome and which continues all week with a diversity of talking shops. I’m not going to comment on the commentator, except raise a question about his description of FAO as

[T]he single entity that we rely on the most to inform us about the state of cultivators, what they’re growing in our world, and who isn’t getting enough of those crops as food.

Is it? Really? I’m too deep in to know whether this is a genuine reflection of how people see FAO, and would welcome enlightenment.

The pomegranate in Armenia

The pomegranate is everywhere in Armenia. And I don’t mean just in the markets. A famous film is named after the fruit. Tea and wine are made from it. And its image features on everything from church walls to tourist souvenirs. I suppose it goes back to pre-Christian mythology, in which it was a symbol of fertility and abundance — something to do with the belief that each fruit contained exactly 365 seeds, perhaps. Anyway, here’s a compendium of pomegranate iconography from my recent trip. Couldn’t get much information on diversity, I’m afraid, how much there is of it and to what extent it is endangered. Something for the next time.

Featured: Nutritional data

Robin Hide says nutritional data on PNG crops is pretty readily available:

The ready availability of such information to villagers is a problem, but at least this information is no longer buried in inaccessible journals.

And she has the references to prove it. But what about those villagers?

Brainfood: Ectomycorrhiza, Synthetic peanuts, Ancient Greek amphorae, European bison, Pea breeding, Animal domestication

Don’t forget the open Mendeley group for the papers we link to here.