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Corn-fed is grass-fed

See if you can spot the problems with this line of reasoning:

  1. Grass-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.
  2. Corn (maize, and barley, and wheat) is a grass.
  3. Corn-fed beef is grass-fed beef.
  4. Corn-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.

Over at Muck and Mystery Gary does a fine job of unpacking all that logic. Sample:

[T]his would make some sense if they fed the whole corn plant to their cattle rather than just the seeds, and did so while the plant was still alive and vegetative, so that then cattle would get some green with all of that yellow. Better still, grow corn varieties bred for grazing (they exist) that produced more leaf, more nutritious stalks, and less seeds.

There’s more too, on how exaggerated claims from one end of a spectrum call forth exaggerated claims from the other, rather than the nuanced interpretation they really need. Gary talks about backlash. I suspect anyone trying to make sense of the arguments, in beef as in just about anything, would suffer whiplash instead.

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Research on healthier food systems

Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities is a special edition of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition. Scads of research papers and articles, all free to download, at least some of which almost certainly will have a bearing on one of our main interests, the use of agricultural biodiversity to feed into dietary diversity, with all the benefits that can bring.

So many papers, so little time …

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Featured: Origins of Agriculture

Cary waxes lyrical on the origins of agriculture:

We who love diversity and love agricultural history should revel in the complexity of the subject. Smith’s profound and insightful work adds so much. I only wish more of us appreciated it. If more did, imagine how differently we in the genetic resources community might see the world. It would, actually, change the world.

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Madeira genebank seems OK

While our sympathy goes out to the residents and tourists on Madeira, who have had to cope with the worst storms since 1993, we are pleased to have had some goodish news from our friend Eliseu Bettencourt. He managed to speak to colleagues at the CEM-UMa (Centre for Macaronesian Studies – University of Madeira) and was assured that colleagues and the ISOPlexis Genebank were OK, despite the terrible floods on Saturday 20 February. “The only thing that happened to the Genebank was a power cut for a few hours,” and that had no effect on the normal functioning of the cold rooms.

That is good news for the genebank and its staff. I wonder, though: is there a safety duplicate of the ISOPlexis collection at Svalbard, or anywhere else?

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How did farming start?

No answers: we just don’t know. But Bruce Smith, whose book on The Emergence of Agriculture remains one of the best, recently told an audience at Harvard University that although most people see domestication as “a before-and-after kind of event, with hunter-gatherers before and farmers afterward. The reality … was likely far more complex.”

Hard to argue with that, especially in light of increasing evidence that people were both altering the environment to favour wild food sources and cultivating plants without domesticating them. Smith talked a bit about which plants were domesticated — “early-succession species that did well in disturbed environments that humans could create for them” — but not, at least according to the reports, about whether there’s any scope for additional domestications. We’ve asked before: are there any species that people should be cultivating, and possibly domesticating, now that they have so far ignored? My own contenders would be perennial grains. The plants are there; they just need a few thousands year’s work.

Smith’s lecture was part of a series called Food for Thought. 1 We missed one by my old mucker Richard Wrangham, of How Cooking Made Us Human, but tomorrow, 23 February, Samuel Myers will “discuss troubling trends, including climate change and increased threats from pests and pathogens that may constrain the world’s resources, requiring new approaches to sustainable agriculture.” I wonder whether agricultural biodiversity will feature. Someone go, and tell us.