And no that doesn’t mean corn pornography*. Corn smut, or Ustilago maydis, is a fungus that infects corn plants. It’s an old acquantance from my days working in the field. We always used to tell the new hires that corn smut was a rare delicacy in some countries (as we’d been told ourselves), but this [...]
Posts under ‘food’
The Color of Corn and Cultural Values
Last week posts and The Scientist Gardener and The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog discussed the African preference for white over yellow corn and some of the reasons behind it. Would orange corn, packed full of even more of the healthy vitamin A precursors that give yellow corn its color, be rejected for the same reasons?
Not Genetically Engineered: The EverMild Onion
Seminis launches a new variety of sweet onion that can be grown during the winter in Northwest United States year round, displacing imported sweet onions during that season. Because Seminis was bought out by Monsanto several years ago, random people on the internet have decided these onions must be genetically modified.
“New” Cruciferous Vegetables
A remarkable number of vegetables are actually produced by a handful of brassica species (called cruciferous vegetables), as covered by Greg over at Pie-ence. The wonderful thing about having so many different kinds of vegetables within a single, inter-fertile species is that the Brassicas are a constant source of “new” vegetables. Highlights of this post include: The CAL gene and its role in differentiating cauliflower from broccoli, reminiscing about broccoflower, and the “flower sprout” the newest breed of cruciferous vegetable.
School Lunches
In yet another article on the evils of corn syrup, I came across a weird quote:
Because SFUSD has focused on reducing fat and empty calories in cafeteria items, the meals are now very close to the USDA minimums, and are based on a meal which includes either 1-percent white milk or skim chocolate milk. “Replacing [...]
Pumpernickel and Rye and Vavilovian Mimicry
Pumpernickel bread originally comes from a way of preparing rye bread with long cooking times (up to 24 hours) at low temperatures. What a wonderful opportunity to talk about rye, a crop whose domestication was likely a consequence of vavilovian mimicry (weeds adapting to look and grow more like crop plants).
Not Genetically Engineered: Square Watermelons
Square watermelons and pears in bottles. Weird plant things that can be accomplished without any genetics (no breeding, no genetic engineering, no mutagenesis, nothing)
Support Sugar Beet Farmers
I don’t know why people prefer cane sugar to beet sugar (given they’re chemically identical), but the latest label I saw at the grocery store seems especially uncalled for when beet farmers have already had such a hard year.
The Water Chestnut
Where did water chestnuts come from? Why do they always taste crunchy regardless of how long they’re cooked? Why are they always finding their away into frozen vegetable mixes?
State Dinners
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 who [...]