Gary Nabhan was recently given the honor of presenting the biennial Vavilov Memorial Lecture in Moscow and offering a similar lecture in Saint Petersburg, and was further honored with the gift of the Vavilov Medal. These are his reflections after years of retracing Vavilov through the centers of food diversity, while writing the book Where [...]
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I feel a familiarity, even a universality, whenever I enter a spice market in any part of the world: an Arabian souq, a Mexican mercado, a Turkish carsisi. It is not just my familiarity with the spices themselves that makes me feel this way. Many of them have traveled thousands of miles across land by [...]
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Last spring I was invited to join forces with a Turkish documentary TV and film maker named Ardan Zenturk in a retrospective on Hadji Ali, the first Arab of the Islamic faith to become a naturalized citizen on the invitation of the U.S. government. I had already written about his time in Arizona in the [...]
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When one travels, it bis hard not to be struck by just how much of the world’s food biodiversity has found new homes and adapted to new places over the centuries. Visiting markets in Turkey for the first time in my life, I am amazed at how many Old Friends from the New World show [...]
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While the Chinese will be celebrating 2010 as the Year of the Tiger, we in America have historically had no tigers except those in zoos and circuses. But what we once have had many of—heirloom apples—are now in danger of becoming as rare as tigers are in Asia. Of some 15,000 to 16,000 apples varieties [...]
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