The Slow Food movement is evolving, its founder says: “People who sniff a cheese and talk about how it has the most wonderful aroma of horse sweat. Think how incredibly boring we would be if we were still just a gastronomic society.”
New journal on Food Security
The new journal “Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food” has two aims: (1) to define the constraints that prevent around one billion of the world’s population from accessing an appropriate diet i.e. one that is sufficiently nutritious to allow full development of physical and mental potential and (2) to address the means by which these constraints may be overcome. Food Security will cover the following topics: global food needs, the mismatch between population and the ability to provide adequate nutrition, global food potential, natural constraints to satisfying global food needs, nutrition, food quality and food safety as well as socio-political factors that impinge on the ability to satisfy global food needs. The journal will contain a mixture of original refereed papers, review articles, case studies, commentaries and letters to the editor. The editor-in-chief is Dr. Richard Strange of Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
Overexploiting crop wild relatives?
One of the seven plants studied in a recent IUCN report on overexploitation of wild medicinal plants in India is in a genus (Dioscorea) with a number of cultivated species. How many wild medicinal plants worldwide could also be classed as crop wild relatives?
Ancient wheats brought up to date in Hungary
Quite by coincidence, while Luigi was digesting cereal diversity and nutrition, I was reading about an effort to bring ancient wheats up to date, also centred in Hungary. Geza Kovács of the Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has overseen a project that looked at 250 einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and 130 emmer (T. dicoccum) samples from various genebanks and screened them to see how well they performed and what kind of grain they produced. The best 20 were selected for further breeding, with a particular eye on their performance in organic systems and how well they met the needs of end users such as bakers and consumers. 1
Two particularly promising new einkorn varieties emerged, with “acceptable” yield compared to a bread wheat and significantly higher protein content. Other varieties have undetectable levels of gluten, which might make them suitable for people with gluten allergies. Some are also high in fat-soluble anti-oxidants. Some of the new emmers also show great promise, with protein levels higher than standard bread wheat and a high level of carotenoids.
Kovács also speculates that some of the new varieties may be a good source to resurrect the production of ancient foods such as frikeh. This is made from wheat, harvested at a critical point when the seeds are plump but still green and not yet mature. The seeds are dried and then burned. Frikeh is delicious — I tried some in Aleppo once — and could be an excellent snack for health-conscious consumers, and those who just want to eat something good that preserves diversity.
Interacting vitamins
How can we ever expect to be healthy when we’re shunning the foods our bodies are built for?
Modern Forager gets on a soapbox.