It’s a great pleasure to help Jeremy’s latest newsletter amplify the work of the Culinary Breeding Network. There’s other interesting stuff in there, so check it out. A very different approach to ...

A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological ...

You know a crop has arrived when The Economist does a piece on it. Ube (Dioscorea alata), the purple yam long cherished in the Philippines, is indeed suddenly everywhere, and the newspaper for the ...

The COUSIN project aims to conserve (trans situ, no less) and use crop wild relatives in Europe. That "use" part can be tough. But that doesn't stop the fine people at Aardaia. At least where aardaker ...

A LinkedIn post by CGIAR stalwart Dr Carlo Fadda convinced me I should give a bit more exposure to a recent paper than the brief Brainfood entry I wrote about it a few weeks ago. The paper is ...

The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) awarded Dr. Diane Ragone, founder and director emerita of NTBG’s Breadfruit Institute 1, the 2024 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. Dr. Ragone ...

I’m sure you enjoyed Jeremy’s fascinating conversation with Jordan Rosenblum on how the pig and the eagle diverged as the history of Jewish dietary law and custom played out. Which means you’d ...

It's a great pleasure to help Jeremy's latest newsletter amplify the work of the Culinary Breeding Network. There's other interesting stuff in there, so check it out. A very different approach to ...

Sad to report that two giants of our field have passed on. Dr Melaku Worede helped establish the national genebank of Ethiopia in 1976 and led it for 14 years. He was a champion for the equal ...

I spent all last week at the 20th Session of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources in Rome: “[t]he Commission is the only permanent intergovernmental body that specifically addresses all components ...

Many thanks to long-time friend-of-the-blog Dr Colin Khoury for this latest contribution. A big question at the time (and still to this day) was how well these methods reflected true distributions and ...

Usually, if plant breeders do anything at all with wild species, they use them to try to improve the domesticated relative in some way. But in Bajra–Napier Hybrids (BNH), it’s actually the crop that ...