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UG99 in the internet mainstream

It was Lord Beaverbrook, I think, who said that if something had not been reported in his once-mighty Daily Express, then it hadn’t happened. 1 For netizens of the modern age, much the same could be said of MetaFilter; if it isn’t there, it’s nowhere. And so it came to pass that UG99, recently covered by Wired magazine and Nibbled here, is officially a threat; it says so on MetaFilter.

I’m not actually a member, nor do I care to be. 2 But if I were, I’d be responding to some of those comments, oh yes. And thanks to those comments, I’ve learned that the Wired piece’s author keeps a blog, which contains stuff that had to be left out. Cool.

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Junk food of the Gods

Ah, the intersection of medicine, nutrition, archaeology and other stuff. Recently published studies from a team at Manchester University have revealed that priests in ancient Egypt suffered heart disease as a result of scoffing the sacred food offered to the gods. But it’ll take more than a pinch of salt to persuade me. OK, so Egyptian toffs ate loads of fatty goose. Clearly they didn’t drink enough wine. Either that, or perhaps they weren’t susceptible to the Gascon Paradox. Probably they just didn’t get enough exercise.

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BBC Radio investigates the seed trade

BBC Radio 4 dedicated The Food Programme earlier in February to an investigation of seed exchanges and plant breeding. Here’s what the programme has to say:

Since the earliest times humans have selected particular seeds to resow next season, noticing mutations that they liked and in so doing have shaped the nature of food. This shaping has never been greater than today, when technology makes our ability to shape our future food enormous, but who is to control what qualities we want in our peas or tomatoes?

Sheila Dillon traces the history of plant breeding from neolithic times to today’s GM era with Noel Kingsbury, author of Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding. Early examples of tasteless strawberries well suited to the railroad, and fights between farmers and millers over which wheat variety to grow, inform today’s battles for control.

Much of it will be familiar to readers here, and experts will doubtless find nits to pick, but overall well worth spending 25 minutes to listen.

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Welcome, Carnival goers

If you’ve just arrived here from Scientia Pro Publica, welcome. We’re never quite sure where we fit in the overall “science” matrix. Agronomy is science, sure, and so is plant breeding, mostly, and GMOs well, obviously. But stuff like making better use of agrobiodiversity often sits uncomfortably with people who want simple solutions to problems that they see as simple too. Not enough water? Irrigate! Saline soil? Breed saline tolerance! Missing vitamin A? Engineer it into a staple!

So it was interesting to find Eric Michael Johnson’s analysis of policy options for Haiti at the latest Scientia Pro Publica. The main thrust seems to be that rewarding Haitian farmers for good behaviour rather than punishing them for bad is more likely to have the beneficial impacts sought as Haiti struggles back from disaster. Trouble is, the policy analysts seems to think that using high-tech seeds and more fertilizer are the best good behaviours to incentivize; there are other options, you know. And as Johnson points out, the government of Haiti is not allowed to subsidize its farmers, not even for seeds and fertilizer. This is nuts. So is Mauka to Maui’s wonderful story of The ant and the toad, in a good way. 3