I don't know much about Thai cooking. So when I came across a "furore" (no less) over some new varieties of something called ...

The newsletter of the Community of Practice on Africa Forgotten and Underutilized Food Commodities just recycled a digest of ...

The International Potato Centre (CIP) seems to have a new, AI-powered (of course) interface for requesting material from its genebank. They call it Crops·To·Go. You have to register even if all you ...

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 ...

When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not? The transatlantic movement of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, ...

The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate is an engaging story in Smithsonian Magazine about Ecuador’s ancient, iconic Nacional cacao. It was published three years ago, but I only just came ...

As chance would have it, following my recent speculative foray into the possible connection between language and crop diversity, an essay by the great Andrea Wulf 1 has just appeared that tells the ...

…reminded me that the Amaranth Institute Symposium 2026 is coming up soon. It really is amazing the progress in the marketing and consumption of traditional vegetables that Kenyans have made in the 30 ...

If you run a genebank and are struggling to manage your data, you might want to consider a piece of nifty software called GRIN-Global Community Edition. And not least because there are some great ...

If you listened to my podcast How the chilli pepper conquered China, you may be wondering, if you care about these things as I do, why there is a chilli species called Capsicum chinense. The chilli ...

Two new studies of very different crops – banana and chrysanthemum, of all things – end up telling surprisingly similar, deliciously complicated stories. For these crops, domestication was not once ...

“The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene” by Blasi, Hamilton, Gray & Bowern, published in Science last month, does something I really love. It complicates a standard narrative.