Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Penny has an intriguing idea about black rice:
“Dr Xu says he’d like to see Louisiana farmers growing black rice.”
Or, we could just buy it from the countries where it is indigenous to. That way, the farmers who actually developed it would benefit from producing it.
She has reasons, too, good ones.
Very sad to hear (belatedly) that Professor Emeritus Charles B. Heiser Jr. of Indiana University passed away on June 11, 2010. He was an extremely influential ethnobotanist, training many distinguished graduate students as well as having many wonderfully informative and entertaining popular books to his name.
An intriguing press release from the American Chemical Society says that in some respects black rice is better than blueberries:
“Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants,” said Zhimin Xu, Associate Professor at the Department of Food Science at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge, La. … “If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical material to increase consumption of health promoting antioxidants.”
I like black rice, and I like blueberries, but berries have made all the running lately, what with Pavlovsk and everything, so I thought I would descend into genebank database hell in search of black rice. IRRI would be the obvious first stop in such a search, but I came up empty handed. 1 Next stop, the new kid on the block, Genesys. Fun!
IRRI has not yet supplied Genesys with data on hull colour, but the USDA has, and there were more than 300 mapped varieties of black or purple rice. (Click the pic to embiggen.)
Dr Xu says he’d like to see Louisiana farmers growing black rice, and people in the US embrace its use. Well, as a service to them, either go to Genesys to find the variety information, or play with the Google Earth file directly.
I guess I always assumed that Sicily’s famous Pachino tomato, valued component of the Mediterranean diet, with its coveted EU-sanctioned protection, was grown exclusively by wizened, cantankerous old men bent rheumatically over the stony soil of parched ancestral smallholdings. Alas, thanks to my friend Amanda, who spent Ferragosto touring the area, apparently the southernmost point in Europe, and provided these photos, I now know better.
