Anastasia has started an interesting discussion over at Biofortified about the food served at the Obamas’ first state dinner, a reception for the visiting Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh.* The dinner was quite light on meat** and included both traditional American and Indian foods. As I said last night on the twitter feed: Anyone [...]
Posts from ‘November, 2009’
What is it about purple plants?
I’m really at a loss here, but there’s just something way cooler about eating a purple colored plant over a more regular color. I’m not sure what it is (I’m not particularly partial to the color purple in other contexts). Consider the case of the cauliflower.
Could we feed ourselves with tomatoes?
Obviously no one is suggesting turning the US into a tomato monoculture, but tomatoes seem like a easy, if not necessarily accurate, proxy for the sort of fresh vegetable passed diets that some people advocate as a solution for the entire nation. If the did the same calculation for lettuce, the numbers would likely be [...]
Food Stamps Usage
Today 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children is on food stamps. We have some of the most productive agriculture in the world, which translates into some of the lowest food prices. Any change that decreases our productivity is going to have to include some way to protect those who already don’t have [...]
Bt Rice in China
Reuters has a story up, based on anonymous sources, that China has just approved a government developed strain of bt rice*. Bt crops express a protein isolated from Bacillus thuringiensis a bacteria used by organic farmers to control insects. The introduction of bt crops (primarily corn and cotton) has lead to substantial reductions in the [...]
The Cost of the Turkey Genome
Just to give you a sense of how fast technology is advancing: Sequencing the maize genome took four years and 30 million dollars. Today Virginia Tech announced the University of Minnesota and themselves had received a $908,000 grant to sequence the Turkey genome in two years. I don’t know how big or complex the turkey [...]
Happy Thanksgiving!
In recognitions of the huge feasts many of us are or soon will be sitting down to, let us take a moment to think about the very fact that vast range of different foods human beings can eat might be the very reason we out competed other hominids (specifically neaderthals) with more specialized diets. Our [...]
Rainbow of Carrots!
Carrots ranging from yellow to almost black: Still missing dark red lycopene containing carrots, but it’s a wonderful range of colors. And there’s something different about the purple and black carrots. Check it out: Notice how the purple carrots are still white in the centers? I want to know more about why!
Traveling
So I’m about to depart on what promises to be a 14 plus hour journey back to the land of corn (maize), porkburgers, and possibly snow. This couldn’t be coming at a worse time in the submission process for the paper my lab is trying to get out the door. Never before have I so [...]
Summary of the Coverage of the Maize Genome here at J+TGC
Summarizing a couple of Virginia Walbot’s ten reasons you should care about the maize genome Hear one of the lead authors of the maize genome paper explain how and why it was done in under four minutes. Reviewing the quality of the genome sequence itself. We can already see research made possible by the maize [...]