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Selling touselle

In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.

That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. 1

Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare 2 region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.

Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.

It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. 3 This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.

Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.

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The Glass Orchard

Driving from Ames to Des Moines last week, my friend Tom told me about Harvard’s Glass Flowers — more officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants. It’s a fascinating story. They…

…are a set of approximately 3,000 life-size models of plants made out of glass, with occasional bits of wire, paint, and glue. The collection is owed by Harvard University, where the models are on display in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, commissioned the models in 1886 from Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son team of glassmakers based in Hosterwitz, near Dresden. The Blaschkas produced the models over 50 years, Leopold until his death in 1895 and Rudolph until his retirement at age 79 in 1936.

They’re not just beautiful, they’re supposed to be useful too, aids to the study of tropical botany in particular.

There are many fruits and fibers in the collection, Rossi-Wilcox explained, 4 as well as other “useful” plants. “The Botanical Museum’s whole mission is ‘economic botany.’ Cotton, silk, the food we eat … We’re this odd little sister of taxonomy. The point of making this collection was to make people understand plants that were common in their lives.”

Some of the latest — and the best — of the Blaschka models are the series Rudolf made on the diseases of fruit trees. The “rotten fruit” series, Rossi-Wilcox affectionately called them. “They are the most spectacular models he made,” she said. “They’re animated, realistic. The cut sections don’t have the mealiness of real disease, but as fruit, he’s got it — all the little weirdnesses of the colors. Anyone who has fruit trees has seen these things.

I can’t find a full list of the “164 plant families, totaling 847 species and plant varieties” represented by the models. But I have found photographs of Musa paradisiaca, Prunus armeniaca and Gossypium herbaceum. And there is also an Emperor Alexander Apple “affected by apple scab disease”. So agrobiodiversity seems to be well represented.

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Snorkel rice

ResearchBlogging.orgYoko Hattori and colleagues report in Nature 5 that they have identified two genes involved in the awesome elongation of deep water rice; the type of rice that can grow in several meters deep water. The genes, baptized SNORKEL1 and SNORKEL2, can now be identified with molecular markers and crossed into popular rice varieties. The BBC has a nice video comparing — I assume — genetically otherwise nearly identical rice varieties with and without the genes.

The avid reader will remember the runner-up entry in The Competion about the sub-1 gene 6, that is used by IRRI to make rice flood-proof. Some of these new sub-1 varieties, such as Swarna-sub1 are already grown by farmers in India and Bangladesh.

Interestingly, sub-1 does the very opposite of SNORKEL. Sub-1 shuts the plant off to stop elongation, so that it saves its energy, and can recover later. This works great with flash floods if the water recedes after a week or two. But if the water stays for longer than that, the crop dies. With stagnant deep water, a variety with the SNORKEL gene could be a better bet.

If farmers know beforehand that the water is going to be very deep (because it happens most years), they probably already plant deep water varieties (or plant later or do some other smart thing). Deep water rice is somewhat in decline, because of low yield, but it is grown on a very large area, probably about 3.5 million ha worldwide, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia.

However, if flooding is rare it could be more profitable, though risky, to plant other than deep-water varieties. For their earliness, yield, quality, or what not. Adding either the sub-1 or the SNORKEL gene 7 to those varieties would be an insurance policy for flood years. But which gene to choose? And in what variety? And where to grow it? Not an easy question, but we have been trying to answer it.

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Pulses and the Renaissance

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of an intriguing, vaguely familiar assertion about legumes made by Tom Jaine in his recent Guardian review of a clutch of food books:

the 12th-century renaissance that gave us Heloise and Abelard was due mainly to better agriculture and more protein-rich legumes rather than heightened sensibility or appreciation of the classics — for Abelard, not so much cherchez la femme as cherchez le pain.

Intriguing, but ambiguous. Legumes which were more protein-rich? Or more legumes? More yield of legumes, or more species of legumes? I remembered having read similar things in the past — medieval agricultural innovation and all that — but I had never looked into the subject in any detail.

I suppose the easiest way to find out more would have been to read the source of the statement, Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity. This is about how foods have influenced history, which sounds pretty interesting. And hopefully one day I will get to it. But until then, there is the internet. 8

The most accessible elucidation I’ve been able to find online of the assertion that pulses drove the 12th century mini-Renaissance is an article by Umberto Eco. He points out that the population of Europe began to increase again at the turn of the second millennium after a long period of stagnation, perhaps tripling in the next 500 years. Why? Eco suggests that agricultural innovation was behind this explosion of population, and of physical and intellectual energy. There was a new(ish) three-field rotation, iron horseshoes, a new collar and ploughing methods. But there were also beans, peas, vetch and lentils.

All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). …[T]his poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields.

So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.

I tried to find out a bit more online about the dynamics of the spread of these crops through Europe, presumably from their Mediterranean heartland, but was not all that successful. There’s a little something in a book on medieval population growth.

And also a bit in a book on medieval agriculture. But nothing on exactly how pulses were adopted across the continent. Best I can figure is that they were already known to some extent, and perhaps cultivated on a small scale in gardens, and were gradually incorporated into the field system, replacing bare fallows, as suitable agricultural land ran out and intensification became necessary. 9 Anyway, surely the process is fairly well understood by historians and I’m just showing my ignorance here. Who will instruct me?