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It is possible that I was trying too hard to weave connections among today’s offerings.

An old staple: Cassava

Cassava, aka yuca and many other names, is one of those foods that tempts me to believe that aliens came down and taught people how to make it edible. The problem is that, unprocessed, it produces lethal amounts of cyanide. Botany One offers a quick guide to cassava that gives some background to the crop, its domestication, and global spread.

The article mentions efforts to breed varieties that are lower in the toxic cyanogenic glucosides. It also explains that “[t]he cyanide is released when plant tissue is damaged, such as by herbivores who take an interest.” But it doesn’t join the dots. If the toxin protects the plant from herbivores, many of which are going to be insects, and you remove the toxin, how do the people growing it now protect their crop?

As for how the crop was discovered, in the absence of aliens one theory I’ve heard is that indigenous people in the Amazon would chew the roots and spit the resulting mass into pools and streams, where the cyanide would obligingly kill the fish. Having discovered how to do that without killing themselves too often, somehow they also discovered that the chewed cassava, retrieved from the water, was (less) toxic, because the cyanide had all been rinsed away, so they were able to eat it. To me, that’s almost harder to believe than aliens.

A new old staple: Chestnut

Tomato Tomato magazine asks an important question: Can Chestnuts Save the World?. Its answer is “Maybe,” this once giving the lie to Betteridge’s law. You could stop there, but if you do you will miss an intricate story about the value of tree crops and the ways in which pioneers in the US northeast are doing their best to promote agroforestry based on nut trees, especially chestnuts.

You maybe know that the American chestnut was destroyed by a blight that arrived with a Chinese chestnut in 1904. You may also know that various laboratories have been trying to engineer a blight-resistant American chestnut. These pioneers are having none of it, preferring to cross various Asian species, which are at least tolerant, and rely on genetic diversity and selection to give them a crop worth gathering. That’s slow work, decades, but it might be more sustainable over the very long run.

I’m partial to chestnuts myself, and was fascinated by the article’s discussion of mainstreaming them as a food, with the transformative goal of everyone in the USA eating about 125 gm each year. That’s truly piddling, but having prepared more than that by hand more than once, I’m sad to report that there’s no discussion of the machinery that must underpin making more use of chestnuts.

An old new staple: Rice

Climate change is making the extraordinary commonplace. Who would have thought, for example, that Dutch farmers would be harvesting rice?

It’s only a small pilot project — 0.6 hectares to yield about 3 tonnes — and New York beat them to it, but the experiment opens all sorts of possibilities. Among them, the hope that by growing it on sodden peaty soils, rice will offer an alternative to draining the peat to grow grass, because as the peat dries out it releases huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. Dried peat also shrinks, and some fields are already more than two metres below sea level. Of course, growing rice also produces greenhouse gasses, so part of the pilot project is to see whether the net impact is positive. But it will be strange if climate change enables a new crop that mitigates climate change.

Staples by any other name

And speaking of rice, Flavor Lines is a mind-boggling project that maps the words used for various dishes to where those words are used. The names come from restaurant signs that contain the name of the dish “in any language and any form (dozens of transliterations and scripts)”. Each point on the map represents one restaurant sign, and if you hover over the land it will show the distance to the nearest sign. The colours on the map represent the different cuisines while the borders show where one name transitions to another.

Aside from being great fun, the project also identifies which names and cuisines have become truly global; ramen is twice as common as pasta, but Japanese and Italian are pretty much equal. The Story explains the whole thing better than I have.

Pears will never be staples

Thanks to my chum Luigi for discovering an article about Jean-Baptiste Van Mons: The Scientist Who Gave Us Better Pears.

Van Mons died before Gregor Mendel started his work on heredity, and yet is credited with developing more than 40 varieties of pear, some of them still popular today. The article doesn’t really explain that Van Mons believed that fruit trees had a natural tendency to improve, which he could make use of by sowing successive generations as rapidly as possible. His technique owed everything to observation, as meticulous records enabled him to select the best parents from which to save seeds. It wasn’t based on genetics, but it was very definitely scientific, selecting the best progeny of random crossing. The article offers little biographical notes on some of van Mons’ varieties, not all of which were deliberately selected.

Take care