Terra Madre 2010 is deep into its third day. I know some of our readers are there. That’s you I’m pointing at, Danny. Anyone want to give us an update?
Hey, Michelle, how about planting some of Obama’s heritage?
An article on an NBC website explains that Michelle Obama’s White House Garden contains lots of varieties from Thomas Jefferson’s gardens at Monticello, in nearby Virginia. Jefferson’s memory has accreted a whole lot of factoids, but it is undeniable that he was keenly interested in agricultural biodiversity and tried all sorts of things out at Monticello, many of them new to the new country. He also most famously said:
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its [agri]culture.”
Michelle’s example is surely inspiring different behaviour to do with gardening and eating, not to mention edible diversity. So just think what a message it would send if she grew some of the local traditional vegetables of hubby Barack’s native Kenya? These crops were long neglected by rural and urban dwellers alike because they were perceived as backward? They are slowly making a comeback, thanks in part to celebrity endorsements. An endorsement by the Obamas would top them all.
Call us! We can help.
Shades of blue, Tokyo style
The Human Flower Project reports on a DIY indigo-dyeing shop in the heart of Tokyo. A fine idea, for all sorts of reasons. It puts people in touch with a natural, plant-based dye and offers us a chance to talk about agricultural biodiversity and even plant biochemistry.
The Human Flower Project’s page shows a photograph of the source of indigo labelled Polygonum tinctorium, also known as Chinese indigo. I fondly remember visiting an indigo demonstration dyer near Toulouse, in France, that sourced the dye from woad, Isatis tinctoria. And then there’s the Asian (or true, sic) indigo, Indigofera tinctoria. Native American tribes apparently used other legumes closely related to true indigo for their blue dyes.
What they all have in common is the process to get the colour. Young leaves are mashed with water and then encouraged to ferment. That results in a greenish sludge. The fabric is immersed in the sludge and then hung up to dry. As the pigments oxidize, they turn blue, and expert dyers can control the shade of blue by adjusting the duration of the oxidizing step, and other factors. (Loads more information here.)
It struck me that indigo would make a marvellous central topic for one of those the-entire-history-of-the-universe-as-seen-through-a-single-neglected-thing books. There’s revolt and revolution, trade wars, the origins of modern organic chemistry, mercantile colonialism, slavery and rice, and pretty colours. Kew contibuted its model of an indigo factory to the BBC’s history of the world in 100 objects, but the model does not seem to have been the subject of one of those wonderful broadcasts. A pal of mine did a book on madder, another brilliant dye; I couldn’t find anything similar for indigo (although there is plenty of woo). Publishers! I am available.
Evaluating the Millennium Villages
We’ve shown our skepticism about the Millennium Villages here before, in particular their apparent disregard for the importance of agrobiodiversity. If I am honest, I would say that that on balance they are probably a good thing. They are certainly well-intentioned. And little else seems to have worked. But no matter how many evaluation reports I read, I suspect it is this snippet that will stay with me, quoted in a New Republic review of Peter Gill’s recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. Gill visits a…
…village called Koraro, chosen to be one of Sachs’s so-called Millennium Villages, which were meant as demonstration projects to prove that foreign aid can really work. He asks a local man whether he has ever met Sachs, to which the man replies, “I have met the owner twice”…
Following crop development in real time
The Global Agriculture Monitoring Project (GLAM), a joint NASA, USDA, UMD and SDSU initiative, has built a global agricultural monitoring system that provides the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) with timely, easily accessible, scientifically-validated remotely-sensed data and derived products as well as data analysis tools, for crop-condition monitoring and production assessment.
Great for deciding on the timing of germplasm collecting expeditions too, I would imagine.