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Discourse for dinner

This is not just any blog. It is a local blog. Or at least you could pretend I live in your street, and shop in your mall. Does that makes this post more palatable?

It seems to work that way with food. At least where I come from, a dish that is “from our own garden” is supposed to be of high quality, not a sign of poverty. Chad Nilep, in an elegant post on the Linguistic Anthropology blog reflects on the Japanese preference for “naichimai”, Japanese grown rice 1:

Thus (I thought to myself this afternoon), while consuming naichimai, Japanese consumers enjoy not only the material element of the rice itself, but also the melancholic discourses of national nostalgia, imagined though they may be.

But you could also imagine that I live in a far and exotic place where we produce and eat food that you can only envy. Europe is full of that tradition: ham and cheese from Parma, bubbly wine from Champagne. You name it.

Ask for the main discourse the next time you are eating out.

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Crop maps of Russia and its neighbors

I have often looked for detailed crop distribution maps for the countries of the former Soviet Union and found these hard to come by. Not any more! There is a fabulous on-line atlas of agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries.

It has descriptions and maps for a 100 crops, including potato and wheat of course, but also lesser known niceties as the Snowball Tree, Sea Bucktorn and Winter Squash. The maps are pretty, here is an example for Siberian Wild Rye (you know, Siberian Black-eyed Susan; Clinelymus sibiricus (L.) Nevski). Better still, they will be available for dowload in GIS format next year.

Distribution of Siberian wild rye

There are also entries for 540 wild crop relatives and other agriculturally relevant plants, and for pests, diseases and weeds.

Awesome.

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Ah, the yoof of today!

On one side of the internet, a World Bank livestock specialist asks about projects dealing with young people in agriculture and rural development. And way over on the other side, an expert on security and geopolitical issues discusses the wider ramifications of a “story about wind turbines on school ground that provide most of school’s need but also a lesson on the local generation of energy to impressionable kids.” School gardens, anyone?

A key advantage for emerging economies: young demographic profiles. That means the turnover on conventional wisdom is relatively fast—as in, a good 15 years later and the bulk of the population can’t remember the old and bad ways and think only in terms of the new paradigm.

Sure, but as another article out at the weekend showed, there’s a long way to go.