Posts under ‘Link Posts’

When plant lovers/growers can explain chromosomes more clearly than some professors I could name, we all win! (This is a compliment to the plant lovers, not a insult to the professors, not most of them anyway.) Click through for a great example.

Nostalgia for the food of the past isn’t something new. Of course the past is a moving target. Links to James McWilliams at the nytimes, and Michael Roberts at Greed, Green, and Grains

From the post in question:
… natural selection is unlikely to have missed simple, tradeoff-free improvements. So I’m always skeptical when someone speculates that we could double crop yield just by increasing the expression of some newly discovered “drought-resistance gene.” My rationale is that mutants with greater expression of any given gene are simple enough to [...]

Bill Gates has an interesting new post up on the risks of of buying into the false choice between sustainability and productivity:
The global movement to help small farmers is increasingly divided into two camps. On one side is a technological approach focused on improving productivity. On the other side is an environmental approach that promotes [...]

So apparently Paul Voosen wrote a five part series on genetically engineered crops? I’ve only read parts four and five which focus on Ed Buckler and the authors of Tomorrow’s Table respectively, but it seems like it might be worth tracking down the remainder of the series.
Congratulations to Ed, Pamela, and Raoul!

By Jorge Cham, author of PhD comics who really does capture grad student life.
By way of The Daily Scan who in turn picked it up from The Intersection’s Sheril Kirshenbaum.