Christmas tree statistics

On the one year anniversary of this blog, I take inspiration from one of my favorite books of all time is How to Lie With Statistics, a great little book from 1954 that will teach you how to take all numbers with a grain of salt. For example in the past year, this blog has been accessed 23,698 times.

With that in mind, I thought it poignant to consider Christmas trees, (considering that it is Christmas Eve tonight).1

Those of you with real trees will have spent an average of $34.87 for your tree, while the 9.5 million of you with fake trees, forked out $70.55 for your trees. BUT, 16% of those of you with real trees, actually cut it yourself, which definitely affected the average cost of the trees!

The 80 foot spruce at Rockefeller Center

Of course the trees of the latter group last more than one year, so perhaps they've made a good investment. The weakening economy though shows that people aren't thinking long term as sales of fake trees are down 67% from 2007, when more than 35% of houses had fake trees.

Each real tree takes on average 7 years to grow, which means that there are currently about 350 million evergreen trees growing for the coming years' Christmases.

While all of the real trees come from either the US or Canada, 80% of the fake ones are grown in China.

If you are worried about sustainability, this is from the National Christmas Tree Association:
It is much better environmentally to use a natural agricultural crop and recycle it after the holidays. Real Christmas Trees are a renewable, recyclable, natural product grown on farms throughout North America. Unfortunately many people have the misconception that Christmas Trees are cut down from the forest. Real Christmas Trees are grown as crops, just like corn or wheat, and raised on a farm. Once they are harvested, new seedlings are planted to replace harvested trees. These would NOT have been planted if trees hadn't been harvested the previous year.  Fake Christmas Trees however are a non-renewable, non-biodegradable, plastic and metal product.

Happy Holidays to all!

1 source

An Apple for the New Year

"Why do we need so many kinds of apples? Because there are so many folks. A person has a right to gratify his legitimate taste. If he wants twenty or forty kinds of apples for his personal use…he should be accorded the privilege. There is merit in variety itself. It provides more contact with life, and leads away from uniformity and monotony." -- Liberty Hyde Baily

In the spirit of the Jewish New Year, some apple facts:

• Origins: Khazakistan (Thanks Borat!) and surrounnding regions in Central Asia
• # of genes (in Golden delicious): 57,000 (more than any other plant so far)
• First eaten by: Eve
• # of cultivars: 7,500
• amount grown in 2010: 60 million tonnes
• Largest grower: China
• Largest grower in US: Washington

And lastly, for those going to a Rosh Hashana meal, here is the proper way to dip an apple in honey:

Reblog: Why a Tomato Has Stronger Survival Instincts Than a Human

The war in Syria and Global Food Security

Wild barley cultivars grown in ICARDA

Of all the implications of the civil war in Syria, probably very few of us have thought about the effect of the uprising on world agriculture and food security.

While this may strike you as strange, Syria houses one of the world's foremost research institutes - ICARDA, International Center for Agriculture in Dry Areas. Among other activities, ICARDA holds seeds from over 100,000 accessions of wild and cultivated crops in its gene bank, including 55,000 cereals. As part of Fertile Crescent, Syria contains  As reported in The Independent :

"As the birthplace of agriculture – the Euphrates is only 70 miles to the east – Aleppo is also the headquarters of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind in the world. It increases food production in Asia and Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank – you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating in Aleppo.

Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20 miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles – to use them as "technicals" mounted with machine guns – along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully, Icarda's gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint closer to Icarda's property at Tel Hadya – the Syrian ministry of agriculture was always one of the more progressive offices in Damascus – but what use this will be in the coming days, we shall see."

The uprising in Syria also reflects on a similar research center in Israel - The Institute for Cereal Crop Improvement (ICCI) at Tel Aviv University. The ICCI holds seeds from about 20,000 accessions fo barley, wild wheat and wild wheat relatives. Both Syria and Israel are located within the Fertile Crescent, the center

Resistant and susceptible wheat cultivars
infected with yellow rust

 of origin of a number of wild ancestors of major crops such as wheat, barley, oats, legumes, olive, almond and more. These wild species, still growing in this region, serve as a rich gene pool for crop improvement with tolerance to drought and salinity and with resistance to different diseases. While direct contacts between ICARDA and the ICCI are for political reasons impossible, both institutes are part of the global effort to fight wheat rust disease funded by the Gates Foundation. All efforts must be made to ensure that the collections in both institutes are immune to toe regional conflicts that plague the Middle East.

(Thanks to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog for leading me to The Independent article)

Fun with Gat

Catha edulis (gat)

Catha edulis, better known as gat or khat, is native to Yemen and the Horn of Africa.  Locals chew on the leaves, which releases small concentrations of a neuroactive alkaloid called cathinone.  This stimulates the cental nervous system, and according to gat chewers, increase endurance, gives a feeling of strength and health, suppresses hunger (which is an advantage in areas known for chronic famine) and tiredness (which is an adavantage during hard labor and long walks). Because the leaves contain so little cathinone, large qauntitites of leaves have to be cchewed to get any effect. Consequently, gat-chewing is a social experience with groups of men or women sitting around and chewing and conversing together. In Yemen gat is so popular that 40% of the county's water supply is dedicated to gat agriculture!

Hagigat in Tel Aviv

Of course western culture doesn't have time for hours of leaf chewing (or the stomachs to see people spitting out the leaves and juice, though this to me seems no different than chewing tobacco). An Israeli biochemistry student working for some shady characters isolated cathinone from gat, who then marketed it in a concentrated pill called hagigat, which loosely translates to "party gat". While initially legal, hagigat soon became abused in the local party scene, was connected to several hospitalizations due to damage to the cardiac and central nervous systems, and was added to the list of illegal drugs. 


Gat itself though is still legal in Israel and many other countries. Apparently, its difficult to abuse something that you have to chew for hours. 

ReBlog - The Legumes of War: How Peanuts Fed the Confederacy

I found this on Smithsonian.com.  Rather than summarize, I'm just showing the entire blog post. the original link is http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2012/04/the-legumes-of-war-how-peanuts-fed-the-confederacy. Good thing for the confederacy that peanut allergies are a modern epidemic!

April 19, 2012

The Legumes of War: How Peanuts Fed the Confederacy

Peanuts. Image Courtesy of Flickr user La.blasco.

When it came to fighting the Civil War, the South may have been rich in military leadership, but the North had superior resources, especially when it came to industrial strength. Still a largely agrarian society, the Southern states had to import most of their manufactured products, and with a poor railway system, keeping troops well-stocked was a battle in and of itself, especially when enemy blockades interrupted supply lines. Combined with inflation and scorched-earth military campaigns—such as General Sherman’s march through South Carolina—food shortages were a problem for both military and civilians. But even in those hard times, people could find relief in peanuts.

Before the Civil War, peanuts were not a widely cultivated crop in the United States—Virginia and North Carolina were the principal producers—and were generally viewed as a foodstuff fit for the lowest social classes and for livestock. When they were consumed, they were usually eaten raw, boiled or roasted, although a few cookbooks suggested ways to make dessert items with them. The goober pea’s status in the Southern diet changed during the war as other foods became scarce. An excellent source of protein, peanuts were seen as a means of fighting malnutrition. (And they still are, with products such as Plumpy’nut being used in famine-plagued parts of the world.) In addition to their prewar modes of consumption, people used peanuts as a substitute for items that were no longer readily available, such as grinding them to a paste and blending them with milk and sugar when coffee was scarce. “This appreciation [for peanuts] was real,” Andrew F. Smith wrote inPeanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea. “Southerners continued to drink peanut beverages decades after the war ended.” Peanut oil was used to lubricate locomotives when whale oil could not be obtained—and had the advantage of not gumming up the machinery—while housewives saw it as a sound stand-in for lard and shortening as well as lamp fuel.

Peanuts became ingrained in the culture, going so far as to crop up in music. For Virginian soldiers wanting to take a dig at North Carolina’s peanut crop, there was:

The goobers they are small

Over thar!

The goobers they are small

Over thar!

The goobers they are small,

And they digs them in the fall,

And they eats them, shells and all,

Over thar!

The humorous song “Eatin’ Goober Peas” also surfaced during the war wears. (You can hear the song in full as performed by Burl Ives and Johnny Cash.)

Just before the battle the General hears a row,

He says, “The Yanks are coming, I hear the rifles now,”

He turns around in wonder, and what do you think he sees?

The Georgia militia eating goober peas!

There is also an account of a July 1863 episode where the Confederate Army’s Fifth Company of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans was entrenched in Jackson, Mississippi, and burned down a mansion in order to clear their view of the battlefield—although not before saving a piano. As the Union Army drew nearer, one soldier took to the ivories, encouraging his compatriots to join in song, including a round of “You Shan’t Have Any of My Peanuts”:

The man who has plenty of good peanuts,

And giveth his neighbor none,

He shan’t have any of my peanuts when his peanuts are gone.

While the Fifth Company succeeded in keeping the enemy at bay that day, peanuts just weren’t enough to save the Confederacy in the long haul.

Posted By: Jesse Rhodes — Drinks,Food History,Fruits and Vegetables | Link | Comments (1)

Who's afraid of "superweeds"?

A recent post in The Atlantic decries that appearance of RoundUp-resistant weeds popping up in fields of GM crops, and uses this a call for the abandonment of GM technology.

Amaranthus hybridus

The only problem in his thinking is that "superweeds" started popping up way before the advent of GM technology and the deployment of RoundUp-resistant crops. For example, atrazine was one of the most widely used herbicides in eradicating plant growth on road shoulders, and is still widely used in agriculture. Weeds resistant to atrazine started to be noticed in the 1970s. My Ph.D. adviser Joseph Hirschberg isolated the first gene for herbicide resistance in 1983 from an atrazine-resistant Amarnthus hybridus that had been isolated from the side of a highway. This was way before any GM crops had been developed.

So as long as herbicides will be used in modern agriculture, there will always be the problem of spontaneous resistance, just as as long as we use antibiotics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria will also crop up.  GM technology is not the cause of the resistance. The challenge is in designing the best use of herbicides to ensure the best agricultural yields for the farmers, while protecting our environment as best as possible.But that's the subject of another blog.

The danger in monoculture spuds

Solanum tuberosum (potato)

Potatoes were first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago in the Peruvian Andes. The Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the 15th century, and by 1845, 1/3 of the fields in Ireland were planted with a single strain of potatoes. That same year the crops were devastated by potato blight, a disease caused by a pathogenic fungus. By 1855, Ireland's population shrunk by 25% with 2,000,000 people dying of hunger or emigrating.

This disaster highlighted the danger of using only a very small number of different crop varieties (monoculture). Blight never devastated South America where hundreds of potato varieties are grown, with each variety being both resistant to (and sensitive to) different strains of pathogens.

Reliance on single strains of crops is a danger in modern times also. Educated uses of genes from wild strains is essential for ensuring food security. For example, research funded by the Gates Foundation is looking to utilize genes from wild wheat to combat rust, a fungal disease that's devastating cultivated wheat crops in Africa.

"I'll take 15 instant coffee trees please"

Berries from Coffea canephora (Robusta coffee)

If you drink two cups of coffee a day, then somewhere in the world there are 15 coffee trees growing just to supply your annual fix! Ok, so that you learned last month in my blog about the Arabica coffee tree. Coffee from the the Robusta coffee tree  is often considered lower quality than coffee from other species and so is used primarily in cheaper blends and in instant coffee. The upside of robusta coffee is that it has twice the caffeine of Arabica used in higher quality coffee! So you get more pop for the buck!

The grain of civilization

Triticum dicoccoides (wild emmer wheat) growing in an Israeli field

Emmer wheat was first cultivated at least 10,000 years ago in the area of the Fertile Crescent, and enabled the establishment of the first agricultural communities. While emmer grains have been found in numerous archaeological sites, it was discovered still growing in the wild in Israel in 1906. Subsequent studies have shown that this wild wheat is the progenitor of modern cultivated wheat, and is thus a great resource for breeding heartier strains.

Poppies

Papaver someniferum (Opium poppy)

What would life be like without the opium poppy? No poppy seed bagels. No beautiful poppy flowers. No Dorothy falling asleep in the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. No morphine or codeine. The use of poppy as a pain killer is probably it's claim to fame and, when misused as in heroin, to infamy. The medicinal uses of opium poppy have been known for thousands of years. Turkey, India and surprisingly Australia, provide most of the worlds legal opium poppy. I once saw some opium poppy growing in a road divider on the way to Hadassah Hospital. Obviously it was planted for convenient use in the hospital, and not for any illicit uses.

"I'll take 15 coffee trees please."

Coffea arabica trees in bloom

If you drink two cups of coffee a day, then somewhere in the world there are 15 coffee trees growing just to supply your annual fix! The Arabica coffee tree originated in Ethiopia, but was spread throughout east Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Its now cultivated all over the world as Arabian coffee is often considered higher quality than coffee from other species of the tree. An old Ethiopian legend has it that coffee was discovered after the locals noticed that goats tended to mount each other rather vigorously after eating the leaves and fruits of the coffee tree!

Marijuana's tough cousin (or, A Very Strong Weed)

Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa (hemp)

Hemp (Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa) has been cultivated for thousands of years. Its stalks yield high quality fibers which are used in ropes, clothing, paper, and sails. The word "canvas" is derived from the Latin name cannabis. Of course many of us are more familiar with hemp's very close cousin, Cannabis sativa L. subsp. indica, better known as marijuana. Hemp and marijuana are essentially the same plant, with the former having been bred for strong fibers, while the latter was bred for high THC content. Marijuana yields low quality fibers, while you'd have to smoke kilograms of hemp to get a high.

Champagne from black grapes?

Vitis vinifera (Pinot Noir grapes)

Much of the champagne drunk tonight will have been made not from white grapes, but actually from black grapes of the Pinot Noir and Pinot Mernier varieties, grapes usually associated with deep red wines. Black grapes like Pinot Noir have a white flesh, which under the correct harvest and production conditions yield a light colored juice. This juice is fermented in the bottle to produce the bubble drink many of us will consume tonight. Happy New Year!