Who knew crop wild relatives could be so beautiful?
Agricultural biodiversity in the Linear B tablets
It was a great thrill during a recent visit to Athens to check out selected Linear B tablets on display at the National Archaeological Museum. I hadn’t seen these things outside books since I was about 12 I think. It was an even greater thrill to realize — or remember — that some deal with agrobiodiversity. Here’s one (Ge 610) that “records quantities of raw materials for perfume manufacture.” It comes from the House of the Sphinxes at Mycenae, which may have belonged to a herbalist.
Unfortunately, I was not able to find any further information online about Ge 610, but I had better luck with Ge 603, one of a set “recording aromatic herbs (cumin, coriander, fennel, sesame, saffron) associated with male (workers) names).”
You can read all about that one in Writing Without Letters:
And it also gets a footnote in another book. Oh what fun one could have with this!
Brainfood: Diet, Olives, Beef, Shade trees, Tree regeneration, Poverty, Weeds, Birds
- Farming for balanced nutrition: an agricultural approach to addressing micronutrient deficiency among the vulnerable poor in Africa. Dietary diversity is a good idea for many reasons.
- Cultivar characterization of Aegean olive oils with respect to their volatile compounds. Only two varieties, and they do differ.
- Beef Authentication and Retrospective Dietary Verification Using Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis of Bovine Muscle and Tail Hair. Back40 has an explanation of why this is more important than all the certification schemes in the world.
- Promoting native trees in shade coffee plantations of southern India: comparison of growth rates with the exotic Grevillea robusta. Some native species might be able to compete, more research needed.
- Regeneration of Vitellaria paradoxa and Parkia biglobosa in a parkland in Southern Burkina Faso. Vitellaria doing better, possibly because farmers are overharvesting Parkia seeds.
- Defining the poor by the rural communities of Burkina Faso: implications for the development of sustainable parkland management. It’s complicated.
- Does soil biota benefit from organic farming in complex vs. simple landscapes? Organic farming increases weed diversity. No word on what it does for birds, but…
- Species richness and composition of bird communities in various field margins of Poland. Some types of field margins are better than others. No word on what they do for weeds.
In the coca region
Wonder what this hillside looks like now…
Featured: Jowar
Rahul Goswami offers a big comment on a little Nibble, worth sharing more widely here:
Hullo, hullo? The Times of India has deigned to notice jowar? More significant in spades than the people it quotes is that this newspaper of upper middle class urban India is talking about what used to be stolid farmers’ fare. Yes, once in while when travelling through rural parts we ate the enormous ‘rotis’ made from jowar. Those, with some spicy mango pickle and a fresh-cut red onion and a dry cooked vegetable, was the staple lunchtime favourite, to be enjoyed in quiet contemplation under a neem or ‘jambul’ tree, while bold goats eyed your tiffin. Now, in the mall-lined main streets or urban Mumbai or Delhi, twee bakeries with cookie-cutter yuppies for clients display their ‘creations’ ‘enriched’ with jowar. Humble pickle? Robust allium cepa (the red onion)? Rural India? We don’t do rural, they say, and slide into their new BMWs, pleased with their new-organic-quaint discovery of jowar.